Abstract (eng)
In recent years, the Vienna region has become one of the most dynamically developing urban regions in Europe. Mobility, housing, labor, the economy, and leisure are urgent needs of around three million people that need to be addressed. As a so called Stadtregion+, Vienna extends across the federal states of Vienna, Lower Austria, and the Burgenland. The currently existing informal cooperation among the federal states and the municipalities involved poses a challenge as they make binding and strategic planning of the Vienna region rather difficult. The core interest of this thesis is to investigate the framework conditions and the setting of priorities and options for action by political actors in the spatial planning context. To be more precise, the goal is to explore the actions of political actors which are ascribed to be more powerful within contextually and institutionally weak cooperation settings. Data for this research were gathered through qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews which have been analyzed according to the principles of qualitative content analysis.
The results show that in spite of the setting described above, there are many interconnections in the Vienna region. The existing cross-border cooperations are based on (a) well-functioning platforms with a good scientific base-work supply, such as the Planungsgemeinschaft Ost (PGO) and the Stadt-Umland Management (SUM), as well as on (b) committed actors in politics and administration. A key finding of this thesis, however, suggests that cross-border cooperation projects are usually a diligent task for politicians with an often-uncertain policy-output, -outcome and -impact. A binding, formalized, forward-looking and proactive cooperation in the Vienna region, which is independent of political and administrative actors as well as based on legal and planning certainty, seems to remain a utopia for the time being. This is largely because of historical-legal predispositions, political-ideological differences, and little necessity for change. Only external factors such as the effects of the economic, climate, or corona crisis could have a decisive influence on the prevailing structures in the future.