Unexpected Challenges for Transformative City Planning Social and Ecological Side-Effects in the Wildgarten Project

City planners pursuing the goal of a sustainability transformation are faced with two unexpected forms of social change: First, groups within the post-materialist milieus, rather than being pioneers of a transformation of society at large, are retreating into life-style niches and secluded localities, often maintaining above-average environmental footprints and communicating primarily in ecologically correct echo chambers. Second, the rise of right-wing populism signals, inter alia, that major sectors of society experience demands for a socio-ecological transformation as burdensome and elitist, and as a threat to their own aspirations for a good life. For the City of Vienna, with its reputation as the city with the highest life-satisfaction in the world (Mercer 2017) and its commitment towards environmental sustainability and social inclusion, these unexpected changes are particularly pertinent: The city is attractive to social groups which may be categorised as post-materialist in the above sense; and it is the capital of a country currently led by a coalition government with a right-wing populist party as the junior partner. Against this backdrop, a better understanding of how the withdrawal of the environmentally aware and the scepticism of the environmentally uninterested play out in empirical reality and may affect city-planning should be a priority concern.
The proposed research project explores to what extent Wildgarten, a sustainable housing project in the making, provides evidence of both unsustainable eco-echo chambers and populist eco-scepticism. It investigates how the different stakeholders perceive and handle these risks in neighbourhoodplanning.

Jubilee Fund of the City of Vienna for the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration