The Vienna-Bratislava Region has no sole institution responsible for the coordination of the metropolitan area but there are two associations taking care of the Vienna Metropolitan Area (SUM) and the Bratislava one (BAUM).
The Vienna-Bratislava Region has been recognised as a functional entity by the European Union and also studies from the OECD have been available for various years (Schremmer, 2003).
Now the two cities create a functional metropolitan region with 3.5 million inhabitants that, as both Austria and Slovakia are part of the European Union, is connected by labour market, housing and transport corridors. Although the cross-border collaborations are growing in number there still is no institution responsible for the coordination of the metropolitan region.
The challenge is that although the area works as a metropolitan region, the governance structures are not still too fragmented to coordinate actions easily.
The Region is characterised by different Länder on the Austrian side, each one having a different Urban Planning Law (Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland) and Bratislava following the Slovak Urban Planning Law.
Many super-national initiatives are active on the territory yet none of them have binding decisional power. Among the most relevant are:
- the Centrope Initiative : which brings together eight federal provinces, regions and counties that make up the Central European Region, with 6,5 million inhabitants.
- the PGÖ (Planungsgemeinschaft Ost) : is an organization for the administration of Burgenland, Lower Austria and Vienna to coordinate the preparation of regional planning issues, also in cross-border activities and regional networks.
- the Danube Strategy : interests 14 countries in the river basin area relating to topics from transport and environment to society and culture, without financial support.
Although these are all very important initiatives, they do not directly intervene in the decision making of the land uses destined for the metropolitan region.
Very relevant initiatives in the coordination of actions in the metropolitan region are the Stadt Umland Management (SUM), an association of Municipalities of the Vienna Metropolitan Area, and the Bratislava Umland Management (BAUM), recently developed on the blueprint of the SUM, which is financed by a European cross-border program (Creating the Future), including Bratislava and the Austrian municipalities close to the border.
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Image 1: SUM and BAUM on the Vienna-Bratislava Metropolitan Region
Source: image made by the author
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Both SUM and BAUM are associations of the municipalities of the region that also include other relevant actors on their boards. They do not have budgets to enable the funding of projects in the Region nor do they have binding instruments that can enforce decisions, but rather they are responsible for the moderation and communication amongst institutions, mainly concerning projects such as transport infrastructures, water management and ecological corridors.
SUM (Stadt Umland Management)
Austria is a federation of States (Länder) of which Vienna is one of them and is surrounded by the Land of Lower Austria, each having a different Urban Planning Law. The city of Vienna, therefore, has the dual status of being a city and a State at the same time, but the functional area of the city goes beyond the administrative borders and covers parts of Lower Austria, especially in the southern part.
In Austria municipalities have to manage their planning activities, therefore each one of the approximately 100 municipalities surrounding the city of Vienna is responsible for their own plan.
Vienna and the municipalities of Lower Austria do not have a common inter-municipal planning body due to political reasons, economic prosperity and rivalry between the city and the suburban area. Regional planning and planning between the city of Vienna and the municipalities of Lower Austria is mainly based on single projects.
In 2006 an association was founded between the City and Land of Vienna and the Land of Lower Austria, whose jurisdiction would involve ensuring communication and coordination among the various institutions.
One may assume that this would end up being a large bureaucratic machine, but this is not the case, as SUM is formed by two people, one in charge of the northern part and one of the southern one.
SUM has no decision power as such, as funding coming equally from Vienna and Lower Austria covers maintenance expenses, but influences the process because of its communication facilitator’s role in priorities recognised by involved partners, mainly being transport and environmental issues.
There are no planning tools for the SUM as it is an association, a network that is based on the skills of those people involved.
As SUM is initiated by Länder it can support planning issues that are under their competence, and not on land use for example, which is under municipalities.
BAUM (Bratislava Umland Management)
The Bratislava Umland Management is an EU funded project that involves the city of Bratislava, the Regional Management of Lower Austria and the Regional Management of Burgenland, which over a period of two years (2011-2013) aims at developing a Multilateral Expert Platform that will prepare an Urban and Regional Planning Concept.
The project is the current result of a need for cooperation and coordination among municipalities across the border that has developed since the fall of the Iron Curtain and first took shape in the Jordes+ project between 2002 and 2004, then the KoBra project from 2003 to 2007 and now the BAUM project.
What is interesting about the evolution of these projects is that the city of Bratislava became more and more involved in them up until today where it is the Project’s Lead Partner.
In fact, the Jordes+ project included a very vast area which is more or less the one of the Centrope initiative, whilst the KoBra project, which stands for Cooperation Bratislava, was a project that included various Austrian municipalities along the border but strangely enough only involved the City of Bratislava in a very limited way (Schaffer, 2008).
The project KoBra was started as a form of institutional cooperation among Austrian municipalities from different Länder but did not manage to really communicate nor establish a cross-border collaboration as the current project BAUM is doing.
Although the BAUM project is still not completed it is already possible to see some strategies being implemented.
The Multilateral Expert Forum, composed by representatives of the regions from Austria and Slovakia, has already had a series of meetings that have up to now focused on the development of the Urban Planning Study and will be assessed in the closing phase of the project (BAUM, 2011).
This study includes comprehensive aims and targets agreed upon by both sides for issues concerning transport, water management, landscape protection and cultural heritage.
The value of BAUM lies in the fact that it is bringing round the same table institutions for the metropolitan region of Bratislava but its durability is only granted until the end of the EU financing unless the actors decide to build a more permanent structure at their own expense.
Both SUM and BAUM communicate with one another as they have representatives on one another’s boards, but there is no official collaboration agreement among them nor is the coordination of the whole area one of their aims.
Considerations
All these projects and initiatives show that the need for Territorial Cohesion has been recognised by institutions in the cross-border region, but how can Territorial Cohesion be ensured in the long run, in order to overcome fragmentation by having actors working together on the implementation of projects?
There is a recognised need for governance models that are flexible enough to accommodate the changes in our cities (DG Regio, 2011) and this is currently seen with collaborative models that allow actors to build each time new alliances according to the interests at stake, allowing therefore the complexity of the planning processes to be handled (Innes, 2010). What is interesting is that sol called ‘collaborative rationality’ gives much value to the interaction among individuals, and the more these are linked by various networks, the more they will be able to combine various interests.
What can be noted is that both SUM and BAUM are based on a collaborative model, where although formal institutions provide norms and constraints on the various actors’ initiatives, these find ways to gradually change the mechanisms (Giddens, 1984).
The Vienna-Bratislava Region lives two paradoxes: one is that the peri-urban landscape that runs along the border is periphery for both cities but central within the metropolitan area; the other that the territory is functionally one metropolitan region but its governance is fragmented.
As for the first point, this landscape has the possibility of experimenting innovative forms of environmental protection where other uses can be combined with the agricultural functions, where many ecosystem services coexist in a multi-functional landscape (Taylor Lovell, 2009).
This same paradox could be a possible solution to further overcome the second one: SUM and BAUM creating a governance model where the cooperation for the new bio-corridor allows the involvement of various actors in building up a new landscape.
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