Experiments in practice

Selected Cases

BROT – Pressbaum

BROT-Pressbaum is a cooperative housing project with 35 apartments, a community house and other shared facilities as well as open spaces. It was completed in 2018 after a four-year planning and construction phase.

siamese.project.tuwien.ac.at

Genossenschaftsladen UmsEgg

UmsEgg is a regional and mostly organic grocery shop with a cooperative ownership structure and hybrid opening hours.

siamese.project.tuwien.ac.at

Grätzlmarie & Grätzlbeirat

The WieNeu+ Budget for Ideas, the “Grätzlmarie”, supports the initiative of residents, local initiatives and associations who want to make their Grätzl fit for the future and the climate.

siamese.project.tuwien.ac.at

Paris Vorderwald

For four weeks in May 2019, 14 households tried out the extent to which they can now achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement in rural areas.

siamese.project.tuwien.ac.at

Schaltwerk 2030

Parts of the town hall in the Upper Austrian municipality of Kremsmünster are being reactivated to work on and test sustainable strategies.

siamese.project.tuwien.ac.at

Rationale for selecting case studies

Experiments are small-scale, co-creative learning-by-doing initiatives that can be situated in a research, governance or activist context, or at the intersection of the three. Based on this working definition of transformative experiments in the context of climate and sustainability issues – developed by the SIAMESE team (see more details in SIAMESE Working Paper 1) – an online survey was conducted in March and April 2022. In total a number of 116 representatives of selected experiments in Austria participated in the survey. This provided a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of transformative climate experiments.

Based on the results of the survey, five experiments were selected for in-depth analysis. The basic aim was to make the selection of experiments as diverse as possible.

The following principles and criteria were used for selection:

They correspond to an experimental approach as defined by SIAMESE.
The selection should cover a wide thematic range of approaches, sectors and policy areas,
with and without public funding,
in urban and rural contexts
and with different process designs (top-down/bottom-up, research/governance/activist).
The selection should include both completed and ongoing initiatives, but in any case the process should be advanced.

In addition to these principles and criteria, the possible access to specific knowledge (contacts, interest, openness) was essential for the selection.