Brown Bag Lunch

25 June 2026

Tourism has become one of the main drivers of urban transformation, yet most research on touristification focuses on major tourism destinations such as Barcelona. This project shifts attention to an “ordinary city”: Palermo, a Southern Italian city that has only recently experienced significant tourism growth.

The research investigates whether Palermo is following the dominant model of touristification characterized by real-estate financialization and growing socio-spatial inequalities, or whether it represents a more marginal and low-intensity form of touristification. In this latter scenario, tourism development is driven less by global investment and more by local middle-class strategies, particularly through the commercialization of second homes.

Using a mixed-methods approach that combines comparative quantitative analysis, policy analysis, and interviews with local stakeholders, the project aims to contribute to a more differentiated understanding of touristification beyond the experience of major tourism capitals.

Andrea Machí is a PhD student from University of Palermo, Department of Political Sciences.

18 June 2026

Social policy is enacted not only through resources or procedures, but also through the spaces in which citizens interact with the state. This presentation examines how the material, spatial and organisational characteristics of social service sites influence the relationship between institutions and communities within local social policy. It provides empirical evidence in support of incorporating selected spatio-material and organisational features of service sites into policy feedback theory and policy designs. The study focuses on in-person social service facilities in the Masovian Voivodeship in Poland. Service providers' assessments of institutional-community relations are analysed across three dimensions: institutional salience, institutional legitimacy, and community engagement in solidarity actions on behalf of service users. The findings suggest that these outcomes are associated with features such as aesthetics, co-location, neighbourhood safety, residential context, networking and the type of social service.

Agnieszka Chmura is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, where she is preparing a doctoral dissertation entitled “Spaces and places of social service provision: the political role through the lens of policy feedback theory”. Supported by the Polish National Science Centre, this mixed-methods project focuses on local social policy and examines how service sites shape people’s experiences of belonging, deservingness, and engagement.

7 May 2026

This presentation investigates the evolutionary dynamics of European metropolitan areas over the period 2000–2019, addressing the central question: how do European urban areas evolve over time? While some metropolitan regions have experienced significant income growth and increasing economic attractiveness, others have faced stagnation or structural decline. The research adopts an integrated analytical framework combining traditional explanations based on agglomeration economies with an evolutionary economic geography perspective, highlighting the role of path dependence, productive structures, institutional arrangements, and national contexts in shaping diverse urban trajectories.

Carmela Chiapperini is a PhD student from University of Bari Aldo Moro, Department of Political Sciences.

30 April 2026

Across Europe, post-industrial transitions are reshaping labour markets, generating new forms of segmentation, precariousness and social vulnerability, while challenging welfare and employment policies at multiple territorial scales. Yet, the territorial dimension of these transformations, and their relationship with welfare context, remains underexplored.

In this talk, Maria Luisa presents an exploratory analysis of European NUTS-2 regions based on subnational indicators across the dimensions of labour market access, employment structure, precariousness, and social investment orientation. The work explores weather European regions exhibit distinct configurations of labour market vulnerabilities, and how these relate to post-industrial restructuring. Further, it examines whether these regional trajectories converge with, or deviate from, traditional welfare regimes classifications. The empirical analysis combines Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis to map distinct regional types, ranging from high-skill, high-employment regions to structurally disadvantaged and precarious territories, as well as intermediate forms of labour market segmentation. Thirty years of sectoral employment shifts are used to trace broader structural patterns across clusters, while national social expenditure indicators are introduced to explore how welfare contexts are associated with regional labour market outcomes.

The discussion aims to contribute to the debates on the territorial dimension of social policies and structural disadvantage by showing that regional clustering profiles cut across national boundaries. This points to the limits of methodological nationalism in comparative social policy research, and to the need for subnational framework to study how post-industrialisation leads to geographically unequal labour market outcomes.  

Maria Luisa Zucchini Solimei is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca and the University of Vienna (Cotutelle de thèse model). Her PhD thesis focuses on the adoption and implementation of social investment policies relevant for migrants in two urban contexts, Milan and Vienna. 

19 March 2026

Barely anyone living in Vienna remains unfamiliar with the narrative that the city affords a comfortable lifestyle. Recreational areas, public transportation and housing affordability are said to contribute to that livable life one allegedly has in Vienna, and international indexes affirm this image by ranking Vienna as the most livable city worldwide. This image builds on the social orientation of local urban planning practices, established in the period of “Red Vienna” and selectively confirmed through more recent policies, such as the policies of so-called “soft urban renewal”.

Raya's research explores how urban planning practices and policies contribute to the image of Vienna as most livable and how they play out for residents of redeveloped areas. So-called “soft urban renewal” policies are the starting point of my investigation. These policies are paradigmatic for the way in which they bring together major cornerstones of the “Viennese way” of urban planning, such as high-quality affordable housing and citizen participation, as well as for how they play into the ongoing interurban competition in which the city excels.

In this talk, Raya traces the historic roots of the curious mix of social democratic and liberal values present throughout the contemporary planning apparatus of the municipality. On the one hand, the city builds on its social democratic legacy from the interwar period during which much of the still available welfare provisioning, e.g. municipal housing, was established. On the other hand, in the 1970s what were possibly the last debates within the municipality about municipalization of land and housing resulted in liberal values such as private property prevailing.

Raya Polishchuk is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Raya completed her BA at the University of Zurich, and her MA at the Graduate Institute Geneva in anthropology and sociology of development. 

11 December 2024

Petr Kodenko Kubala is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. His research draws on Actor-Network Theory and the urban assemblages approach, exploring housing affordability crisis, sustainable housing, and collaborative housing practices. The primary objective of the research is to advance the understanding of the relationship between housing affordability and environmental sustainability. This will be achieved through an empirical examination of the socio-material infrastructures of "new social housing" (and particularly collaborative housing) in Vienna, as well as through theoretical rethinking of the concept of "housing crisis" within the context of the Anthropocene. The talk will outline the framework, aims, methodology and theory of the research project, offering an opportunity to discuss over lunch its potential theoretical and empirical contributions to the field

27 November 2024

There is growing scholarly attention to secondary and intermediary cities as their relevance for global urban development isincreasingly recognised. This talk examines debates on these cities through the notion of overlooked cities to understand how knowledge from such cities is produced and circulated in urban research and practice. Based on her work with the Overlooked Cities Collective, Julia illustrates how different people, places, and practices remain intentionally or unintentionally marginalised, off-the-map and under-theorised in global urban studies, and with what consequences.

Julia Wesely is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Urban Studies Research Group at the Department of Geography. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of environmental (in-)justice, learning and knowledge (co-) production in and across the urban global South and North.

30 October 2024

Nana Iashvili is a praedoc at the University of Vienna in the Social and Cultural Anthropology department and Research Affiliate of the Platform The Challenge of Urban Futures at the University of Vienna

Drawing on her ethnographic fieldwork in Tbilisi, Nana shares her insights on the mechanisms and practices of housing financialization in the post-socialist Georgia. Interested in the broader processes of transformation of housing from a right into a financial asset, Nana’s talk explores the consequences this transformation has on households, by focusing on the loss of homes as well as the resulting contestations as they unfold in the urban space.

6 June 2024

'Infrastructuring Libraries in Transformation’ (ILIT) is a research project funded through the JPI Urban Europe ‘ERA-NET Cofund Urban Transformation Capacities’ call which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

ILIT examines how public libraries in Rotterdam, Malmö and Vienna address systemic challenges in rapidly transforming societies. It unpacks libraries’ transformative capacities through the lens of ‘infrastructuring’ and ‘librarising’, with a keen eye on ways to address conflict between different views and positions productively. In this brown bag lunch the project partners would like to discuss their fresh research material on institutional support that aims at exploring the politics of library networks in each city.

14 May 2024

Paolo Graziano is Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua and Incoming Scholar at Urban Futures.

Over the past years, phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological vs. social disputes in industrial sites (e.g. the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have fueled the debate on ecological and social concerns. They revealed a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, requiring the understanding of their various underlying preferences. The talk addresses the following questions: did the European Union take an 'eco-social' path? If so, how and why? By adopting a post-functionalist approach, it analyses the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda to strengthen legitimation.

23 April 2024

Hannah Sommer is PhD candidate at the Research Platform The Challenges of Urban Futures at the University of Vienna.

The talk will give insights into theoretical and empirical research on the EU’s 2020 New Pact on Migration and Asylum, the reform proposals for the Common European Asylum System. Based on work-in progress the talk will focus on the question what legitimization strategies are used within the New Pact and how they manifest discursively.

23 April 2024

Adam Nemeth is post-doctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and Research Affiliate at Urban Futures.

The integration of newly arrived migrants is crucial for the rapidly diversifying metropolises in Europe. Initiatives tackling social exclusion and intergroup tensions have key importance to ensure a smooth integration process. The project aims at understanding the two-way relationship between social cohesion and subjective well-being in case of the foreign-born populations in Vienna and Budapest. This presentation will provide an overview of the project's conceptual framework and methodology. Finally, European  patterns and the main SWB differences between the native-born and foreign-born population in Austria will be touched upon.

22 February 2024

Jana Brandl is PhD candidate at the Research Platform The Challenges of Urban Futures at the University of Vienna.

The talk will give insights into theoretical and empirical research on the interrelation of ecological and social sustainability, thereby stressing the need for integrated eco-social policies. Based on insights from the broader literature on policy integration, it argues for a processual understanding of eco-social policy integration and proposes an analytical framework to study the scale-specific governance modes and policy mixes applied to formulate and implement such policies, as well as the role policy actors play therein.

22 February 2024

Laura Lotteraner is PhD candidate at the Research Platform The Challenges of Urban Futures at the University of Vienna.

The talk will give insights into research at the intersection of environmental pollution science and data analysis. It presents case studies at different steps of the anthropogenic water system, discusses the collaboration between data scientists and pollution scientists and explores how the use of data can be improved in the field of environmental pollution.

23 January 2024

Arjin Tas is Research Affiliate at Urban Futures and PhD student at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna.

Arjin examines the normalization and generalization of the counterinsurgency strategies in urban policies across the province of Diyarbakir, Southeastern Turkey. Her comparative ethnographic project hypothesizes that urban destruction, displacement, and redevelopment, which were first employed as counterinsurgency strategies in the urban warfare in Sur, are turning into common practices by the Turkish state to subjugate the low-income Kurdish population living in clustered spaces labelled “risky areas” by the state.