Cooperation between small and medium-sized towns and their surrounding areas - key players in Austrian city regional policies

Abstract

Theory and practice of city regional policies are classically oriented towards metropolitan areas. The Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK) in cooperation with the Austrian Städtebund (Austrian Association of Cites), however, took on a pioneering role by involving small and medium-sized cities in their urban region strategy as early as the early 2010s. In this context, numerous cooperative initiatives between small and medium-sized towns and their surrounding areas have emerged in Austria over the past decade. Thereby, it gets obvious that these urban-regional cooperation are structured very differently in terms of content and institutional background. This article is based on a comparative research in four case study areas that established urban-rural cooperation in Austrian small- and medium-sized towns with their surroundings, analysing different governance arrangements implemented in the four case study regions. The cases demonstrate that small- and medium-sized towns collaborate with their surrounding areas “on an equal footing”. In this regard, the city regions of small and medium-sized towns can be viewed as key players of Austrian city regional politics.