Universitätsbibliothek
Weimar Open Access

Städten kam bei demokratischen Innovationsprozessen immer eine zentrale Rolle zu. Die öffentlichen Verwaltungen der großen Städte stellten Regeln für die Einführung und Ausweitung der bürgerschaftlichen Partizipation auf und reagierten damit auf Erfahrungen und Forderungen, die von der schöpferischen politischen Kraft der sozialen und urbanen Bewegungen getragen wurden. Die Geschichte Barcelonas ist dafür ein typisches Beispiel. Dank dieser sozialen Errungenschaften können wir von einer Reihe von Gütern und Dienstleistungen profitieren, die lokale Wohlfahrtssysteme ausmachen. Die Stadtverwal-tungen übernehmen die Aufgabe, Ressourcen und Dienstleistungen bereitzustellen, die nicht nur mit Wohlfahrt und Gesundheit in Verbindung stehen, sondern auch mit der Sorge um Umfeld und Umwelt, mit der Förderung von Maßnahmen in Bereichen wie Bildung, Kultur, Kunst oder Sport sowie mit der Dynamisierung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Ob zuständig oder nicht, die Kommunen müssen auf die Forderungen der Bürger*innen reagieren, sind sie doch die Verwaltungen, die den alltäglichen Problemen und Bedürfnissen am nächsten stehen. Daher liegt es weniger im Belieben der Stadtverwaltungen, ob sie notwendige Innova¬tionen anstoßen, sondern diese sind vielmehr Teil ihres Aufgabenbereichs. Um den Bedürfnissen der Bürger*innen seitens der öffentlichen Verwaltung gerecht zu werden, kam in den meisten Fällen eine von zwei Methoden zur Anwendung: die direkte Verwaltung durch die Behörden oder die indirekte Verwaltung mit dem privaten Sektor. Mit dem Anbruch einer neuen Zeit, in der alternative Methoden an Bedeutung gewonnen haben, wächst das Interesse an Modellen öffentlich-zivilgesellschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit. Hauptziel dieser Modelle ist es, Verwaltungen und Bürgerschaft eine Zusammenarbeit im gemeinsamen und allgemeinen Interesse zu ermöglichen, indem Projekte unterstützt werden, die Zugang, Nähe und Partizipation in sich vereinen. Vor diesem Hintergrund bietet die Verwaltung öffent¬licher Ressourcen Möglichkeiten zur Entwicklung neuer Formen kollektiver Intelligenz, mit ge¬meinsamer Verantwortung und Synergie zwischen Institution und Bürgerschaft, sodass die Städte zu wahrhaft kooperativen Plattformen für öffentliche Innovationen werden.

In the field of urban climate policy, heat production and demand are key sectors for achieving a sustainable city. Heat production has to shift from fossil to renewable energies, and the heat demand of most buildings has to be reduced significantly via building retrofits. However, analyses of heat transition still lack its contextualization within entangled urban politico-economic processes and materialities and require critical socio-theoretical examination. Asking about the embeddedness of heat transition within social relations and its implications for social justice issues, this article discusses the challenges and opportunities of heat transition, taking Berlin as an example. It uses an urban political ecology perspective to analyze the materialities of Berlin’s heating-housing nexus, its politico-economic context, implications for relations of inequality and power, and its contested strategies. The empirical analysis identifies major disputes about the future trajectory of heat production and about the distribution of retrofit costs. Using our conceptual approach, we discuss these empirical findings against the idea of a more just heat transition. For this purpose, we discuss three policy proposals regarding cost distribution, urban heat planning, and remunicipalization of heat utilities. We argue that this conceptual approach provides huge benefits for debates around heat transition and, more generally, energy justice and just transitions.

Dieser Handlungsleitfaden möchte die Zusammenarbeit zwischen zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteuren und öffentlichen Verwaltungen erleichtern. Er enthält allerdings kein Patentrezept, mit dem eine solche Zusammenarbeit gebacken werden kann, sondern vor allem Anstöße, was es dabei alles zu bedenken gilt. Denn Ko-Produktionsprozesse, bei denen zivilgesellschaftliche Gruppen und Verwaltungen gemeinsam an der Umsetzung von Dienstleistungen und Infrastrukturen der Daseinsvorsorge arbeiten, sind komplexe und noch recht unerprobte Prozesse.

The goal of architecture is changing in response to the expanding role of cities, rapid urbanization, and transformation under changing economic, environmental, social, and demographic factors. As cities increased in the early modern era, overcrowding, urbanization, and pollution conditions led reformers to consider the future shape of the cities. One of the most critical topics in contemporary architecture is the subject of the future concepts of living. In most cases, domed cities, as a future concept of living, are rarely considered, and they are used chiefly as “utopian” visions in the discourse of future ways of living. This paper highlights the reviews of domed cities to deepen the understanding of the idea in practice, like its approach in terms of architecture. The main aim of this paper is to provide a broad overview for domed cities in the face of pollution as one of the main concerns in many European cities. As a result, the significance of the reviews of the existing projects is focused on their conceptual quality. This review will pave the way for further studies in terms of future developments in the realm of domed cities. In this paper, the city of Celje, one of the most polluted cities in Slovenia, is taken as a case study for considering the concept of Dome incorporated due to the lack of accessible literature on the topic. This review’s primary contribution is to allow architects to explore a broad spectrum of innovation by comparing today’s achievable statuses against the possibilities generated by domed cities. As a result of this study, the concept of living under the Dome remains to be developed in theory and practice. The current challenging climatic situation will accelerate the evolution of these concepts, resulting in the formation of new typologies, which are a requirement for humanity.

The Gated Community (GC) phenomenon in Latin American cities has become an inherent element of their urban development, despite academical debate, their approach thrives within the housing market; not surprisingly, as some of the premises on which GCs are based, namely safety, control and supervision intersperse seamlessly with the insecure conditions of the contexts from which they arise. The current security crisis in Mexico, triggered in 2006 by the so-called war on drugs, has reached its peak with the highest insecurity rates in decades, representing a unique chance to study these interactions. Although the leading term of this research, Urban Agoraphobia, implies a causal dichotomy between the rise in the sense of fear amongst citizens and housing confinement as lineal consequence, I acknowledge that GCs represent a complex phenomenon, a hub of diverse factors and multidimensional processes held on four fundamental levels: global, social, individual and state-related. The focus of this dissertation is set on the individual plane and contributes, from the analysis of the GC’s resident’s perspective, experiences and perceptions, to a debate that has usually been limited to the scrutiny of other drivers, disregarding the role of dweller’s underlying fears, motivations and concerns. Assuming that the current ruling security model in Mexico tends to empower its commodification rather than its collective quality, this research draws upon the use of a methodological triangulation, along conceptual and contextual analyses, to test the hypothesis that insecurity plays an increasingly major role, leading citizens into the belief that acquiring a household in a controlled and surveilled community represents a counterweight against the feared environment of the open city. The focus of the analysis lies on the internal hatch of community ties as potential palliative for the provision of a sense of security, aiming to transcend the unidimensional discourse of GCs as defined mainly by their defensive apparatus. Residents’ perspectives acquired through ethnographical analyses may provide the chance to gain an essential view into a phenomenon that further consolidates without a critical study of its actual implications, not only for Mexican cities, but also for the Latin American and global contexts.