Research

Nature restoration in cities is a crucial aspect of sustainable urban development, especially in terms of contributing to climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation. However, it can involve significant changes at an individual level, which may challenge the traditional relationship between people and nature. The acceptance of restoration projects by urban dwellers depends on whether they establish new relationships between people and nature. Research indicates that there are significant differences in the acceptance of restoration measures, particularly between young and older people. The comparatively low level of acceptance among today's youth and young adults poses a significant challenge for urban nature restoration. Against this background, this research project takes a biographical approach to identify influences on the acceptance of urban nature throughout the life course. By using a biographical approach, we can systematically identify age and generational influences and possible intervention points for educational institutions, urban planning, and greenspace management. Qualitative interviews will be conducted with young people and adults of various ages residing in Vienna, as well as with experts from different fields such as environmental education and urban planning. The project aims to develop an explanatory model of the interactions between age and generation-related influences, different human-nature relationships, and the acceptance of urban restoration. The results will establish a knowledge base for developing intervention strategies and designing further experiments in urban areas to develop new human-nature relationships for restored cities.

The spatial adaptability of brownfields towards reindustrialisation is emerging as a key territorial priority for Danube's regions and municipalities. There are major trends contributing to the rise of industrial manufacturing in Europe: technological advancements make it feasible and affordable, the need for circularity, shorter value chains and closed loops make it necessary, geopolitical reasons and the pandemic showed the need to reduce dependency on global value chains, for more self-sufficiency and resilience. Re-industrialisation needs to take place in the context of a circular and resource-efficient economy and environmental-friendly regional development strategies. Brown is Better than Green BBG principle) Brownfields represent already degraded land. The transformation of heavy industrial sites/polluted wastelands into post-industrial landscape is economically and technically very challenging and costly, while an adaptation for new industrial use is much more feasible. The revitalising existing brownfields for industrial or production-oriented purposes reduces the construction of new production sites in greenfields, avoiding new land use, the sealing of soil and the further loss of biodiversity in the Danube Basin. The reindustrialisation following the Brown is Better than Green principle, represents a complex planning challenge, which requires: - Co-planning and co-creation process in line with the social, environmental and economic priorities of the affected communities, strong involvement of civil society actors - Inter-institutional collaboration on different governance levels solving spatial planning, contaminations or other environment issues, embedding in transport and communication, infrastructure, building and reconstruction (permits), business support, investor management, ... - integration with regional strategies and polycentric development plans - the development of good financing concepts, relying on private-public partnerships The projects will jointly develop solutions and tools based on the Brown is Better than Green principle and integrate them into their local and institutional framework. It aims to come up with a joint strategy and an action plan taken up by organisations.

ENERGY4ALL aims at developing energy configurations as a common pool resource, testing thecommunity dimension in the design and implementation of emergent Positive Energy Districts (PED)and Energy Communities (EC). The project explores an inclusive governance model throughsupportive toolboxes for the design and implementation of participatory energy governance andreplicable pathways for PEDs/ECs.The project operates with an open definition of EC, including both as a set of households producingand consuming energy, as well as users of a common public resource to increase energy efficiency.ENERGY4ALL conceptualises ECs as featuring three constitutive elements in mutual relationship:resource, community and governance. These elements are explored in different cases within the fourpilot cases, Stavanger (Norway), Styria (Austria), Budapest (Hungary) and Rome (Italy), with coverageof various characteristics including urban and industrial sites, territorial scales from household todistrict, and multi-stakeholder involvement of public authorities, private enterprises, researchinstitutions and local citizen groups.