Speaker
Description
The global climate crisis exacerbates local environmental challenges, such as human losses, negative health impacts, and loss of biodiversity. Cities in particular are highly prone to the negative impacts of a warmer climate. While cities are highly attractive to individuals, they lack of green and blue spaces, and often have high levels of social vulnerability. In response to these challenges, the question lies how we can improve our individual and societal resilience. Nature-based solutions (NbS), such as the construction or preservation of large green spaces, green roofs, tiny forest, ponds etc., are an essential solution for cities. Especially, NbS are very attractive for different actors as they can provide various ecosystem services such as cooling corridors, improved individual well-being, and biodiversity, and are often no-regret solutions, often showing a positive cost-benefit ratio compared to grey solutions such as air conditioning. Yet, increasing urbanization and housing development are putting pressure on large-scale NbS, especially historic greenbelts. At the same time, the global housing affordability crisis continues to make the construction of affordable housing a priority. Under these prevailing economic conditions, planning for affordable housing seems to be limited to peripheral, undeveloped areas where land prices are moderate and in public hand. As a result, land-use conflicts and trade-offs in urban planning are emerging over whether to protect large, biodiverse green areas or build affordable and social housing. This study examines the case of Vienna, analyzing current perceptions, trade-offs and approaches to coordinating the competing goals of green space preservation and the provision of affordable housing. The results are based on a policy analysis of greening, planning and housing policy documents, as well as expert interviews with 20 actors from city politics and administration. Preliminary results indicate that increasing density and further provision of green spaces are perceived as potential solutions. Others, however, see trade-offs between these planning solutions as inevitable and claim they remain a challenge to policy coordination. Currently, the city’s climate adaptation policy prioritizes densely built-up, overheated inner-city areas for implementing small-scale NbS, while simultaneously aiming to preserve large green areas on the outskirts to prevent further soil sealing. Despite these efforts, the city has less capacity to prioritize an affordable densification of the inner-city private housing market. Instead, Vienna’s urban development target areas allocate public land on the outskirts of the city for new social housing. Yet, the majority of actors do not perceive trade-offs between green space preservation and affordable housing because they only practice in one of the two jurisdictions. This case study highlights the importance of coordinating planning policies and their respective trade-offs to address local environmental challenges effectively.
| Keywords | Policy Coordination; Trade-offs; Nature-based Solutions; Affordable Housing; Vienna |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
