Beyond Lockdown: how Covid Repoliticizes, and Captures Urban Public Space - the case of Vienna's Elections

With covid enforcing a retreat to privacy accompanied by appeals to social solidarity based in physical distance, the state appears to be taking back control of public life. Indeed the new regulatory and social practices open a contentious field of claims making which connects the specific physical places of everyday interactions with the political sphere of public governance. But instead of a new state authoritarianism limiting public space, this repoliticization of the city as issue, arena and actor of public politics may contribute to negotiating democratic legitimacies in face of complex uncertainties. For example, in advance of Vienna‘s municipal elections on 11 Oct 2020, the covid crisis has facilitated an unprecedented politicization of otherwise local urban matters in national politics. Questioning how Covid transforms the governance of urban public spaces, this case study uses interpretative policy analysis to trace the electoral contentions of covid to highlight the multifacetted functions of public space for democratic crisis management through diverse discursive interpretations of the ‚right to the city‘. The case of Vienna showed that otherwise local matters of urban planning gained importance for national politics, thus increasing public awareness of the democratic functions of urban space. But as leading political representatives appropriated urban claims for party-political conflicts, such discursive capturing of the right to the city remained rather detached from actual problems of rising social inequalities as well as the diverse spectrum of citizens' creative coping practices evolving on the ground. In order to counter conflictive escalations spreading from party politics toward wider societal distrust, this study aims to highlighting the current political moment as crucial for critical experts to contribute toward democratic deliberation of the rights to the city.