Reading sample: The first concise overview of current knowledge on the entire Hofburg complex, from its thirteenth-century beginnings to the present day.

1 ABSTRACT In recent years, both academic discourse and administrative interventions have focused on public space, overshadowing the potential of semi-public space, that is: the ground floor and street-level environment. Public street-level space is a much coveted good: on one hand, the fight for a re-structuring of transit space seems lost, while on the other hand financially powerful, mostly global actors compete for every inch of sidewalk space, with shops, service facilities, events companies, and advertising agencies colonizing the city’s open space with mobile stalls and stationary kiosks. As a result of these and other trends – both economic (closure of shops, globalization, etc.) and administrative (parking space requirement, misdirected subsidies, etc.) – Vienna’s ground floor spaces are being vacated and homogenized.

The Hague, Geneva and Vienna are three cities that historically grew into global centers, specialized in human rights, nonproliferation, security, and peace and justice related topics. The aim of this paper is to compare the policy of these cities on international organizations (IOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). These cities experience increased competition from other international cities hosting IOs and INGOs due to globalization. Therefore, the need exists to reformulate strategies in attracting and retaining IOs and INGOs. Through an intensive comparative method, this paper seeks to describe the parallels and differences between these three cities, concerning their strategies. Furthermore, it describes the current need to make use of well-coordinated lobbying strategies, policy networks and thematic policy coalitions in order to gain and retain IOs and INGOs in a successful way.

In this contribution, I will address a few of the multiple layers of interconnectedness between environmental issues, village reconstruction, and memory processes settled in the transnational community of people from the province of Dersim/Tunceli. In the last decade, community development projects as realized by the succeeding generation have been part of a common environmental consciousness and reflect how they deal with the fate of their ancestors, untold family histories, and the orally transmitted knowledge of persecution their parents and grandparents had to experience in the eve of WWII. Their way of dealing with the past in relation to or through environmental issues shapes a very specific space. Strasser and Akçınar (2014) elaborated on the level of community building processes in the Dersim transnation as well as the political context in Turkey and showed the multiplexity of remittances and the meaning of 'political remittances' in the Dersim case.

If we agree with Ananya Roy's claim that planning's epistemic roots are grounded in liberalism-which is riddled with inherent ethicopolitical tensions-then it might be worth our while to explore some of the spatial consequences of this grounding. The implementation of Vienna's Ringstrasse serves as an excellent case example for such an exploration. On the one hand, it consists of an array of monumental public buildings that resemble material expressions of freedom and individuality. Yet, for this development to be realized in the first place, some form of intervention was necessary despite liberalism's subscription to noninterventionism. Lessons learned from revisiting the Ringstrasse project might then prove illuminating for our contemporary era of "hyperliberalism."