Search results

Vienna, Austria’s capital, is one of the most liveable cities worldwide and has undertaken various efforts to foster the attractiveness of walking. Although the share of walking in Vienna is already high, the city aims to further increase the level of walking trips, combined with the ambitious goal of 80 per cent of Eco mobility by the year 2025. In recent years walking has been integrated into different strategies and plans (such as Vienna’s smart City Framework Strategy, Urban Development Plan 2025 and Strategy Paper Pedestrian Traffic). In addition, the City of Vienna has instituted the Mobility Agency for Vienna with its own officers for walking and cycling. Infrastructure measures were complemented by strong communication activities. 2015 was declared as the ‘Year of Walking’, with a wide range of events, products and services to promote walking. To supplement these activities, a personalised travel planning campaign was integrated to encourage people to replace short car trips with active travel modes. The ‘Year of Walking’ 2015 campaign increased the awareness about the benefits of walking among citizens and improved Vienna’s image as a city suitable for walking. The latest modal split numbers and monitoring activities show the success of the integrated approach by an increase of walking trips. As walking has positive impacts on people’s health and the development of a healthier and more liveable urban environment, the City of Vienna is on the right path to foster a sustainable urban mobility lifestyle and quality of life for its citizens.

For better understanding the connections between the Viennese circles in which Menger was involved, it is necessary to make some remarks on the Viennese context where they developed. Since the end of the 19th century up to the interwar period, Vienna was a very lively city from a cultural point of view, the birthplace of modernism (Janik & Toulmin, 1973). In the age of the late Habsburg monarchy as well as in the post-First War ‘Red Vienna’, the intellectual, scientific and artistic life of the Austrian capital was so fervent that those years are recalled by historians as the Viennese Enlightenment, the gay apocalypse and the golden autumn: ‘two generations were enough to cover the whole period. The economist Carl Menger (1841–1920) shaped the beginning, and his son, the mathematician Karl Menger (1902–1985), witnessed the end’ (Golland & Sigmund, 2000, p. 34). After the First World War, from an economic point of view, a high inflation overwhelmed the country; while from a political point of view, ‘the new Austria was fragmented and labyrinthine’ (Leonard, 1998, p. 6): the Christian socialists were the conservative part of the society, but one third of citizens supported the new social-democratic party, which had the majority in Vienna.

The landscape of European cities is by no means homogeneous. Nonetheless, the same type of conflict has repeatedly occurred in different places in the last few years: From Seville to Vienna, from Cologne to St. Petersburg, planned high-rise buildings for inner city districts have provoked fervent arguments and debates. Whether and how European cities should integrate more high-rise buildings is a highly controversial question. This chapter focuses on strategies of vertical construction and related debates about the cityscape in both Paris and Vienna. By studying the urban constellations of Paris and Vienna, it can be shown that what may look comparable at first glance is the outcome of highly different strategies and histories.

Although both cities define themselves to a wide degree with reference to historic structures, the image of tall buildings varies drastically in these cities, which correlates with these cities’ diverse histories and hence experiences with high-rise buildings. Path dependencies and the ways individual cities receive international trends are crucial to understanding processes of urbanization. Based on in-depth interviews with various urban actors and other relevant qualitative data, this chapter aims to demonstrate that a city’s high-rise strategy cannot be attributed to any single factor; rather, it is the result of a complex interplay between various aspects and actors, which crucially includes present and past struggles over cityscapes and therefore over urban spaces.

The Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft (Austrian Economic Association, NOeG) provides a prominent example of the Viennese economic circles and associations that more than academic economics dominated scientific discourse in the interwar years. For the first time this chapter gives a thorough account of its history, from its foundation in 1918 until the demise of its long-time president, Hans Mayer, 1955, based on official documents and archival material. The topics treated include its predecessor and rival, the Gesellschaft österreichischer Volkswirte, its foundation in 1918 soon to be followed by years of inactivity, the relaunch by Mayer and Mises, the survival under the NS-regime and the expulsion of its Jewish members and the slow restoration after 1945. In particular, an attempt is made to provide a list of the papers presented to the NOeG, as complete as possible, for the period 1918–1938.

Over the last years, and under the umbrella of the “sharing economy,” various new social practices and novel business models have been established worldwide. Such practices and models are perceived both as opportunity and challenge for existing (urban) public governance regimes. It is in this sense that the sharing economy has become a contested issue and regularly provokes bold governance responses. However, local governing authorities first need to interpret, negotiate, and establish what exactly is “at issue” in order to (re-)act adequately. While such “politics of signification” are well-studied, for instance, in social movements and public media discourse, research on the concerted framing activities of public administrations as well as on the strategic work that sets the stage for public policy-making is relatively sparse – and entirely lacking for the context of the sharing economy. In this chapter, the authors look behind the scenes of the policy-making in the City of Vienna, Austria. The empirical findings unearth six distinct mechanisms –“delimiting,” “negotiating,” “detailing,” “linking,” “justifying,” and “situating” – that are strategically applied to shape the “Viennese way” of governing the sharing economy. This research develops an in-depth understanding of what the authors conceptually dub “strategic issue work”: the manifold efforts that lead to, and underlie, in this case, the policy-making of a local government when it tries to come to terms with the governance challenges of the sharing economy.

The Karmeliterviertel is an inner-city neighborhood in Vienna, which underwent a significant revitalization and renewal. Since the opinions of Viennese urban researchers differ to a large extent whether gentrification occurs in Vienna at all, this chapter examines the question, whether the revitalization of the Karmeliterviertel can be defined as ‘gentrification.’ This question is elaborated in the context of Vienna's overall ‘soft urban renewal’ strategy. Despite the fact that direct displacement of households from the Karmeliterviertel was prevented by the mechanisms of Vienna's strict tenancy law, also the local coordination office played a certain role. As higher-status groups moved in the neighborhood, the infrastructure and the amenities changed and were adjusted to their demands. This cultural redefinition resulted in the replacement of restaurants, cafes, and bars, which served the needs of longtime residents and low-income groups. The revitalization of the Karmeliterviertel thus has to be termed ‘gentrification,’ as their social spaces were displaced and as they are less visible in the neighborhood. This form of displacement develops a similar dynamic as direct displacement, when social relations, bonds, and networks, which provide options, coping strategies, and sources of a place-based identity, are dissolved. As gentrification results in homogeneity, the main challenge for a city is to maintain spaces of different milieus and thus to preserve authentic places, characterized by heterogeneity and urbanity.

This chapter explores how architecture is used as a signifier in the development and promotion of urban megaprojects (UMPs). It argues that these projects rely on architecture to gain visibility. First, UMPs need to be highly visible in order to justify their exceptional status and second, they have to be visibly new and different in order to initiate the desired symbolic transformations with which they are attributed. Drawing on the case studies of HafenCity in Hamburg and Donau City in Vienna the chapter traces the logics of using architecture as a signifier and means of legitimizing the UMP. Data on the planning history of the two case studies, their administrative and institutional frameworks and the overall urban development strategies is combined with a qualitative text and image centered analysis of marketing material, planning documents, and press articles. The discussion shows how visibility is achieved by very different means. The question of how to distinguish the UMP from other projects and of how to make it uniquely identified with the particular city guides the debate in both cases. However, the lines of argument are not predictable or easily comparable from city to city and “global architecture” emerges as a contradictory and relative concept. Based on a succinct review of the related literature the chapter disputes the alleged uniformity of UMPs and argues for a meaning and discourse-oriented approach to the analysis of architecture as vehicle of urban change and political legitimation.

This contribution provides an account of the author’s journey from first receiving notice about the Music & Death conference in Vienna, to his eventual presentation there in December 2017. The lure and impetus for the whole project was an unknown uncle of the author who had studied, performed and died as a musician in Vienna, when the author was an infant. This chapter combines reflections on the author’s first visit to Vienna, with journal writing undertaken at the time.

Contemporary urban change is predominantly driven by migration and capital accumulation, with associated urban (re-)development projects – such as new-build gentrification – typically favouring the middle classes. Low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are often said to be displaced from their homes, either directly or indirectly, or to experience a loss of sense of place induced by the physical and social changes to the area. With the latter in mind, we investigate the perceived opportunities and threats of urban renewal experienced by stay-put communities in the wake of new developments and demonstrate how a loss of sense of place occurs via conflict between neighbours affected by the change. Our focus on transnational spaces comprising co-migrant Kurdish/Turkish communities in the two cities of Istanbul (Turkey) and Vienna (Austria) reveals not only how profoundly the impacts of neighbour conflict are felt as once-close and supportive neighbourly ties are severed but also how well-established neighbourly norms and obligations in transnational spaces accentuate the conflict in the first place. Moral codes that require neighbours to look after one another, along with local power dynamics of support in return for loyalty, set expectations that neighbours will take each other’s side when needed. Our findings reveal that the situatedness of residents to the development projects (in terms of proximity, residential tenure and openness to change) causes neighbours to take opposing sides and that the conflicts generated are accentuated by the perceived failure of neighbours to meet their neighbourly obligations. The result is a loss of sense of place and belonging for all residents – not just those detrimentally impacted by the development – wrought by rising hostility and avoidance among neighbours, and an overall weakening of neighbourly ties.