Tag: municipalities

Municipalities in Austria have been exploring ways to adopt inclusive and sustainable development approaches based on the built environment. It is a fact that the tasks of municipalities are becoming more and more comprehensive, while the resources available are not increasing to the same extent. However, the sustainable provision of municipal public services must remain a key component in strengthening rural areas. One way is to conduct a CommunalAudit. In addition to the identification of optimisation and development options, the CommunalAudit tool serves as a basis for inter-communal cooperation. Moreover, it enables municipalities to look at their finances and entire infrastructure in an objective and systematic way and to compare them with those of others. Between 2008 and 2013, the CommunalAudit was one of the measures within the Rural Development Programme in Austria. This contribution (a) explores the implementation of CommunalAudit in Austria, (b) highlights the benefits and drawbacks for municipalities and citizenry, and (c) looks at the former’s further development.

This paper presents the institutional and spatial determinants for the development of social and technical infrastructure in municipalities (gminas) in Poland. According to the empirical results, there are significant differences between various types of gminas in terms of the level of development of technical and social infrastructure. Similar levels of technical or social infrastructure are associated with a significantly higher level of economic development in urban and urban-rural gminas than in rural gminas. Spatially, the position of gminas in relation to larger settlement centres and communication routes affects the development of technical infrastructure to a greater extent than social infrastructure. The relationship between infrastructure development and selected economic and social characteristics of municipalities is a feedback loop in which the relative wealth of a local administrative unit stimulates the development of the infrastructure while at the same time benefiting from this fact. This means that the present use of European Union Structural Funds for the development of infrastructure does not contribute to closing the gap in development. Sustainable development is largely the result of institutional factors related to infrastructure. It is therefore advisable to move away from a purely redistributive approach in this regard to targeted territorial support of the ...