Danielle gluns
Project
From Planning to Policy? - Local Housing Governance for the Growing Cities Vienna and Washington, D.C.
The last decades have witnessed a trend of (re-)urbanization, with many cities around the world attracting new residents and companies locating preferably in urban regions.Growing cities are usually perceived as the winners in the interurban competition. At the same time, though, growth can intensify social and spatial inequalities. Reinvestment and population growth can result in rising social polarization and spatial segregation as well as in an increased vulnerability to housing deprivation.
However, cities do not have to endure those down sides of growth passively. Instead, they have many instruments at their disposal to shape population growth and influence the resulting social and spatial changes. In particular, urban development plans define models for the future development of the city, shall guide the behavior of urban actors and ensure positive outcomes for the cities’ inhabitants. In order for the plan to take effect, it needs to be translated into decisions and policies that produce tangible outcomes.Interventions affecting urban development can be devised in a number of different policy fields such as social, education, transportation or employmentpolicy. One of the most crucial fields in the context of population growth is housing policy, since the local housing systems need to ensure additional dwellings for the cities’ new residents.
Urban housing systems comprise a variety of public, private and nonprofit actors. They interact within distinct local contexts of action with institutions guiding the actors’ behavior. The study assumes that these contexts – or urban housing governance structures – are relatively stable. The study thus aims at finding out if policy change is possible within existing governance structures or if and how these structures transform to respond to external changes such as the onset of population growth after a period of decline or stagnation. It thus asks for the enabling or constraining effect of local housing governance structures for the successful translation of the aspired model of urban development into housing policies. This question will be assessed for the two cities Vienna (Austria) and Washington, D.C. (USA). They have traditionally been characterized by widely differing housing systems but are now confronted with a similar challenge of rapid population growth. Ultimately, the dissertation shall contribute to research on urban governance, institutional stability and change, as well as provide insights for effective policy making.