Webinar: A social grid for analyzing social innovation in municipal housing in Vienna – from grass roots-movement to social transformation.

Tuesday, 6.10. 2015, 16:00 -18:00 Central European Time, 19:30-21:30 Delhi Time, 12:00 – 14:00 Eastern Standard Time

The municipal housing case in the city of Vienna is an example of 100 years social innovation leading to social transformation. After World War I, a grass-root movement, the settler’s movement, started to construct their own housing and agriculture in order to escape from severe homelessness, poverty and starvation, which were afflicting many people at that time.

With the construction of superblocks in the “Red Vienna” of the inter-war period that initiative was institutionalized in a radically innovative way. The presentation analyzes this transformation with a focus on the social grid of networks, institutions and cognitive frames, and the role of agency in this social process.

The case will be presented by Dr. Susanne Giesecke (AIT Vienna), followed by an initial round of comments by Dr. Ilse Oosterlaken (VU Amsterdam) and Dr. Alex Frediani (UCL) and open discussion with all participants. The webinar is hosted by Dr. Rafael Ziegler (GETIDOS) as a joint event of the HDCA Thematic Group Technology, Innovation and Design and the EU-project CrESSI (Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation) that explores the economic underpinnings of social innovation, drawing inter alia on long-term studies of social innovations such as social housing and freshwater supply. Further information: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/faculty-research/research-projects/cressi.

Dr Susanne Giesecke is a political scientist and joined AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Department of Innovations Systems in 2005 as a Senior Scientist. She leads the research area “Foresight” and is engaged in publicly funded research as well as in consulting projects. For CrESSI she works on social housing and the interplay of social innovation and technological innovation.

Participants must register in advance: To register please send a brief email to getidos@uni-greifswald.de. Once you have registered, you will received further instructions on how to participate in the webinar.