Making Green Inclusive. Ecosystem Services, Health Impact Assessment and Participative Scenarios

The project investigated cultural difference in urban green relations in the Volkert quarter in Vienna's 2nd district, a neighbourhood characterised by disproportionally high levels of urban heat stress and socio-cultural diversity. It aimed at improving the assessment of cultural ecosystem services. Cultural ecosystem services are important for their restorative value, in particular in urban areas under conditions of accelerating climate change. Urban green infrastructure is at the heart of related current debates on how cities can develop sustainably by synergising multiple dimensions of human and non-human life (e.g., UN Sustainable Development Goal 11). It is a concept that can serve as a policy framework, providing tools to deliver ecological, economic, and social benefits through nature-based solutions to pressing urban challenges. The project took a relational onto-epistemological approach in addressing cultural difference in urban green relations. Three different types of methods were used, differing in the extent to which agency and contingency play a role. (1) A survey-based study among 164 adult inhabitants of the Volkert quarter combining Gunnar Otte's operationalisation of socio-cultural milieus with socio-demographic data, and items measuring relations to urban green. (2) 13 walking interviews involving members of four different Otte milieus with presumably different urban green relations were conducted to triangulate and better understand the results of the survey, to elucidate how the residents produce space and what factors are relevant to understanding the socio-cultural differences in this regard. (3) Urban green imaginaries and respective representations of the Volkertplatz were co-created following a transdisciplinary research design, involving three different Otte milieus, an architect and project researchers in a series of 3x3 workshops. One of the conclusions of this process was that spatial knowledge, including the needs of local residents, cannot be assumed to exist a priori, in a way that a participatory methodology such as the one used in this study can only capture and document. Rather, knowledge and imaginaries are actually co-produced in relation to others, i.e. those who organise and support such a process.