Urban Waters and the Development of Vienna between 1683 and 1910

Abstract

The development of cities and their rivers is closely intertwined. Urban environmental histories have explored river-city interactions in detail, but none has focused on an entire waterscape and the ways its different hydro-morphological features have influenced river uses and urban development. Our research on Vienna's aquatic environment examined how the nature of rivers co-determined urban residents' utilization of them. We combined an in-depth reconstruction of rivers, streams, and canals with urban development over time. Based on three cases, we studied how natural features and a large metropolis co-evolved between the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Our research shows how the diverse hydro-morphological conditions of the Viennese waters had a bearing on potential uses, and on the kind, of newly built material arrangements and practices. Studying the surface waters and their groundwater aquifers in their entirety makes visible how they were used in complementary ways to satisfy urban demand for a multitude of water services. This article reveals the full spectrum of human-river interactions in Vienna by exploring the various functions that different types of waters had, the means of intervention implemented by a variety of actors in the city's urban industrial transformation, and how these functions and their mix changed over time.