Divided cities?

'There is a politics of space because space is political' – Henri Lefebvre

In increasingly divisive times, political mobilisations in urban public space have once more become an undeniable force in shaping the landscapes of our cities. Power struggles, contestations and negotiations between groups all unfold in public spaces.

It is a sphere in which oppositional thinking manifests. People take to the streets to protest, mark public spaces with graffiti, stickers and symbols, and attach symbolical and political meaning to them. As societies grapple with deep-seated political rifts, multiple crises, and the emergence of extreme ideologies, it is crucial that geographers like us come together with psychologists to analyse cities as inherently political arenas, where public spaces become a political battleground.

While protest movements occupy urban spaces to spread political ideas and narratives, urban spaces cannot be seen as neutral spaces. From urban planning decisions to the distribution of resources, politics shape the spatial and social structures of urban environments. Urban geography plays a pivotal role in understanding the dynamics of how public spaces are used, controlled, and contested, making it a critical field of study for those interested in the intersection of politics and urban life.

The right to the city

In modern societies, the public sphere must be distinguished from the state and the private sphere. It is where political and cultural expressions of opinions and the forming of political will take place. The press, mass media, social media, and last but not least, public spaces all set the stage for the public sphere.

It would be wrong to speak of 'the public' as one homogenous unit – many audiences, communities or groupings must be considered. The public sphere has become increasingly differentiated, with ever-changing ad hoc publics and increasingly diverse and contradictory public opinions. As the physical aspect of the public sphere, urban space is an essential component of a functioning democracy: being a venue for discourse, it can contribute to the strengthening of democracy and social cohesion.

Many city dwellers take public space for granted in their daily lives. Yet it fulfils a variety of functions in the city: it is a place of encounter that enables social interaction, it is a recreational space, a cultural space, a transportation space and – most importantly – a deeply political space. We thus see the public space as an arena that enables city dwellers to form and express their opinions, to discuss and to get politically involved, and to negotiate diverging interests.

The 'right to the city' is a concept in urban theory that aims to capture the power struggles over public spaces. Coined by French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, this right implies not just the access to and the distribution of urban amenities but the agency to shape the city's landscape, design, and realities.

British geographer David Harvey has said: 'The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city'. This underscores the profound significance of the continual process of making and remaking cities, not only to improve living conditions but also to express individual and collective identities within the urban landscape.

Contemporary debates in urban studies point to the need of intersectional analyses, to decipher the gendered and racialised power relations that structure public spaces (see Noxolo, 2023; Rodó-de-Zárate & Baylina, 2018).

In what follows, we illustrate how different individuals and groups occupy, label, and use urban public spaces in political conflicts. Taking the example of Vienna, we focus on an event during which different actors competed for sovereignty of interpretation in the field of migration and immigrant integration, disputing the question of who belonged to the city.

This example will explain how urban public space is used to express oppositional political views that include xenophobic statements as well as counter-narratives. In expressing these claims and protesting in the public, people symbolically appropriate public spaces. The question is: Who expresses him/herself, how and where does this take place, and what does it tell us about public spaces and urban belonging?

Introducing the actors

On its way to being the city of two million that it has recently (again) become, Vienna looks back on a long history of immigration that has transformed it into a super-diverse city. Vienna has always been a melting pot of diverse cultures due to its location in Central Europe, at the interface between 'East and West'.

Today, four out of ten Viennese were born abroad, within or outside of the EU borders. Counting those whose parents were born abroad, every second inhabitant of Vienna has a migration background.

Immigrants do not live evenly distributed throughout the city. Rather, they usually settle in the areas where housing is accessible and affordable. Our incident took place in the district of Favoriten, the largest in Vienna in terms of population, with a particularly high share of migrants, which in some neighbourhoods exceeds 70 per cent.

In politics and the media, the inner part of Favoriten has frequently been politicised. Several political organisations or groups have used the squares and streets located in the central parts of Favoriten for gatherings, political protests, and rallies, some of which have resulted in violent conflicts between left and right-wing activists and actors.

Amidst these polarised perspectives, there are also immigrant groups who have imported conflicts from their countries of origin. This assemblage of opinions reflects the multi-faceted nature of the area and stands as a microcosm of the broader societal debates, creating a complex and dynamic urban fabric that reflects the diversity of urban life.

Having been under Social Democratic Rule since the Second World War, Vienna's cityscape has been profoundly shaped by Social Democratic policies and politics. The city pursues a pronounced integration and diversity approach that values mutual respect and that addresses society as a whole.

It does not speak of 'us' in an exclusionary way, and policies are primarily focused on the individual and less on ethnic collectives. This stance is strongly opposed by the right-wing populist and anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPÖ), which currently accounts for around 30 per cent of the votes in opinion polls at the federal level.

The issue of migration has been at the top of this party's agenda for many decades. In the last regional elections in Vienna, however, the FPÖ scored only 7 per cent, mainly due to internal party scandals that caused the vote to shrink.

'Then Vienna would still be Vienna'

At the end of January 2023, Gottfried Waldhäusl, a FPÖ politician from the federal province of Lower Austria, was among the podium guests on the TV show Pro and Contra on Puls 24, an Austrian private television channel. The show addressed the question of whether the right-wing FPÖ had the better recipe for elections after its recent success in regional elections in Lower Austria, where the party focused once more on the topic of immigration.

Among the audience were pupils from a school in Favoriten. One of them said:

'I wanted to ask you how you are going to manage to close the external borders of the EU and what you would say about the fact that if you carry out your measures or had carried them out years ago, half of this class or actually the whole class would not be in Vienna or would not attend the class, because all of this class or most of the parents have a migration background and therefore, they would not sit here today.'

In response, Waldhäusl said:

'That is relatively easy to answer. Just as other continents manage to actually secure their external borders, we have heard from Australia and others, it is also possible to actually secure the border throughout the EU. One can do that if one wants to. And in answer to the question if it had happened, that many people would not be in this school, yes, if that had happened a long time ago, Vienna would still be Vienna.'

Although Waldhäusl's statement can first of all be classified as provocative and xenophobic, he also addresses potential and actual voters and thus serves the FPÖ's clientele by 'playing to the base' – emphasising issues and rhetoric that resonate strongly with the characteristics and preferences of the most devoted supporters, saying things that please the audience.

Although the attitudes displayed in this statement were by no means new, the incident received much attention because it was expressed during a live show, and with a clear power imbalance between the two persons involved.

Solidarity rally in Favoriten

In immediate response to the statement by Waldhäusl, several political parties and NGOs took the issue to the public space. A few hundred people gathered at Reumannplatz in Favoriten for a 'solidarity rally for diversity and cohesion'. The venue was chosen due to its proximity to the school of the student, and also due to the symbolic value of the square. 

Under the slogan 'Vienna is all of us', a demonstration was organised by the district offices of the Green Party, the Social Democrats, the Communist Party and the Liberal Party NEOS. The most prominent participants included two city councillors from the social-democratic city government, as well as officials from major NGOs.

The rally, however, was also used as a stage by members of the Identitarian Movement, a right-wing extremist group whose symbols have been banned in Austria. Although the group is not large, it has successfully drawn public attention with its disruptive actions.

During the event, two activists climbed on a scaffold, lit beacons and unfurled a poster that read 'Waldhäusl is right'. A few dozen participants of the solidarity demonstration immediately gathered in front of the scaffolding and shouted 'Nazis out'. After the police came onto the scene, the activists turned themselves in and the police removed the banner from the scaffolding, amid cheers and applause.

Continuing to play to their base

Waldhäusl reiterated his statement in response to an inquiry of the Austrian Press Agency. If the FPÖ asylum policy had been implemented 20 to 30 years ago, 'Vienna would be Vienna again'. He also emphasised his fears once again, stating that 'my grandchildren will one day have to defend our homeland Austria with weapons'.

Moreover, the FPÖ continued to discursively link its anti-immigrant statements to an overall criticism of Favoriten and SPÖ policies, with a press release on 19 March 2023 stating: 'Almost no day goes by without outbreaks of violence or public brawls in Favoriten.

This is the result of the mass immigration policy of the Ludwig-SPÖ, which lures criminal immigrants (into the social system) from all over the world to Vienna with its gifts of money. Sufferers are the residents, who no longer dare to go out onto the streets.'

A space for cohesion

Waldhäusl's argument is wrong. Migration – both internal and international – is the indispensable prerequisite for the very existence of cities (Pisarevskaya & Scholten, 2022). Would 'Vienna still be Vienna', as the FPÖ politician puts it? No. It would be a shrinking, aging, and more or less meaningless fringe phenomenon, a medium-sized city without much international significance (Laimer, 2009).

Yet it is clear that the long-standing diversity of the population leads to conflicts that necessitate negotiation processes. The political and societal narratives range from 'us versus them' to 'we are all Vienna', and it is in urban public space where these negotiation processes can and should take place.

Oppositional thinking, and negotiations over belonging, political opinions, and attitudes, happen every day in urban spaces. Oppositional ideologies and symbolical appropriations are inscribed into urban landscapes through political statements that can be found on walls, through historically burdened legacies in the form of monuments and buildings, and last but not least through the daily social interaction that takes place in public.

As political polarisation intensifies, urban spaces become increasingly fragmented along political, social, ethnic, and economic lines, deepening social inequalities and fostering an environment prone to extreme ideas and political radicalisation. Yet public urban spaces can also be a tool for steering social cohesion in the city.

It is in the everyday public life of cities, where people meet face to face, where identities are formed, and political ideologies negotiated and transformed. Urban geography, hopefully in tandem with psychology, can support the critical examination of political divisions and urban fragmentation, and seek to reconnect divided cities.

Dr Ursula Reeger is the Deputy Director of the Institute for Urban and Regional Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and leads the research group 'Migration and Urban Diversity'.

Dr Miriam Haselbacher is working as a post-doc at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is involved in the projects OppAttune and D.Rad.

Key sources

Canter, D.V. (2024). Readings on the psychology of place: Selected works of David Canter. Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53: 23–40.
Noxolo, P. (2023). Geographies of race and ethnicity 2: Black Feminist Geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 1-9.
Laimer, C. (2009). Keine Stadt ohne Einwanderung oder die Normalität der Migration. Derive 37. Wien. 
Pisarevskaya, A. & P. Scholten (2022). Cities of Migration. In: Scholten, P. (ed.) Introduction to Migration Studies. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham.
Rodó-de-Zárate, M. & Baylina, M. (2018). Intersectionality in feminist geographies. Gender, Place & Culture, 25(4), 547–553. 
Valentine, G. (2008). Living with difference: Reflections on geographies of encounter. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (3): 323–337.