Network

CURB: The COVID-19 pandemic as disruptive force for urbanization

In the long run, the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting the development of urban regions though changing societal preferences of housing. Platform Co-PI Alois Humer and his work group of Spatial Research & Spatial Planning will follow this thesis on the case of the metropolitan region of Vienna in a multiannual FWF Project under the SARS-CoV-2 Urgent Funding.

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Talking Charts - WWTF

Visualisations are ubiquitous tools for communicating data, both within science and the popular media. Urgent messages with immediate effects on public life, i.e. the exponential growth of COVID-19, are often communicated via charts or diagrams. It is not clear whether public interpretations of these visualizations match the messages their creators aim to convey. The same is true for data visualizations in science; it is not a given that experts will interpret them the way they are intended. How do visualization producers create, and consumers understand, the messages carried in visualizations? How do consumers come to trust or to distrust, to act on or to ignore them?

Talking charts is a three-year mixed-methods project exploring how people encode, understand and engage with the messages (and implicit assumptions) communicated by data visualizations, particularly those focusing on COVID-19 and climate change. The project team, with expertise in computer science and science & technology studies, will study and work with members of two case studies: 1) journalists and their readership and 2) researchers in the natural sciences, to develop and co-create tools and guidelines facilitating visual data understanding. We therefore take actual practices of visualization production and sensemaking as a starting point to inform and intervene into design, while also seeking to foster dialogue between visualization producers and consumers.

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Municipalist Neighborhood Experiments / MUNEX

How do local urban democracies work in practice? MUNEX examines democratic policy experiments at a neighborhood level in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Vienna. Its primary goal is to deliver insights on the success factors of local urban democratic initiatives, test new instruments for inclusive governance, and strengthen transitional networks of policy learning. It further aims to co-create three prototype initiatives that are shared between neighborhoods in three cities, which are sustainable, livable, and inclusive to all.

For this, MUNEX builds on existing local and international networks in three cities to connect key stakeholders across different governance levels, offering opportunities to scale up local experiments in municipalism. In each case-study area, the project partners will set up urban living labs to facilitate municipalist experiments, namely 1) citizen participation in developing a master plan in Amsterdam Noord, 2) public-communitarian partnerships in managing public spaces in Barcelona, and 3) participatory budgeting for climate change adaptation in Vienna.

On the one hand, its strategic approach will increase knowledge of how neighborhoods function as innovation ecosystems for municipal experiments, which can be scaled up transnationally. On the other hand, its applied approach will facilitate capacity building by strengthening networks and co-creating policy resources both at a neighborhood- and international level.

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