“Dear ambassadors of a better world”: this was how Austria’s First Lady Doris Schmidauer welcomed the 220 participants of the 7th International Mayors’ Conference NOW, which took place in Vienna from 17 to 18 February 2020. Participants from 30 countries, from the Middle East to northern Europe, including mayors, young citizens from all walks of life, community workers, innovative NGOs, well-known researchers and practitioners, social entrepreneurs and urban planners gathered in Vienna for two days ….

Polls have shown that the majority of people in European countries and in the USA believe that polarisation is decisively shaping our societies (Gentzkow, 2016; Gagné, NOW 7). This leads people to assume that there are more factors that divide than unite us. Are our achievements like peace, democracy, the minimum standards of morality, the freedom of speech and information, equality, and so on in danger …

“Phenomena such as social media filter bubbles and hate speech are causing insecurity about what we should believe and what we shouldn’t,” says Regina Arant from the Jacobs University Bremen in Germany. Furthermore, populists, disparity and globalization, as well as cultural, religious and ethnic diversity are endangering our feelings of social cohesion (Bertelsmann-Stiftung, 2017) …

Prejudice is “thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant”, as Allport put it. In most cases, prejudices are a mixture of a few memories associated with people from a certain group, combined with hearsay and a final over-generalisation. The facts about other groups that people pretend to know are mostly “scanty and strained” (Allport, 1954, 6). So far, we have learned that positive contact between different groups is only possible if various factors play a part in the encounter …

The Robert Bosch Stiftung’s 2019 Diversity Barometer, which examines acceptance of diversity and its impact on the degree of social cohesion, found that people are more likely to accept diverse groups (e.g. migrants, homosexuals, or welfare recipients, etc.) in their neighbourhood than in their own family. In other words, people who generally have a rather disapproving and hostile attitude towards certain groups actually react less negatively if representatives of these groups live in their own neighbourhood (Robert Bosch Stiftung, 2019, 84–88) …

Prior to the conference, Act.Now facilitated a two-day workshop for all 60 young people (aged 15-24) participating in the conference. Even though they came from very different backgrounds, they shared a similar vision of what social cohesion in our communities means, showing that the idea of living together peacefully is universal. Along with politicians, regional and municipal civil servants, and an international network of experts, the Act.Now programme of The Innovation in Politics Institute is addressing the young generations with all of its activities …

• Act.Now (2020). Promising Practices: www.now-conference.org/vienna2020/promising-practices/. Accessed: 8 April 2020.
• Arant, R./ Dragolov, G., et al. (2019): Zusammenhalt in Vielfalt. Das Vielfaltsbarometer 2019 der Robert Bosch Stiftung. Jacobs University Bremen.
• Bochmann, C./ Döring, H., eds. (2020). Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt gestalten. Wiesbaden: Springer.
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