Hauer, F., & Krammer, A. (2022, August 31). Like a Ragged Girdle: Informal Settlements, Inequality and Urban Reform in 20th Century Vienna [Conference Presentation]. 15th Conference of the European Association for Urban History, Antwerpen, Belgium.
E260-01 - Forschungsbereich Städtebau und Entwerfen
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Date (published):
31-Aug-2022
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Event name:
15th Conference of the European Association for Urban History
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Event date:
31-Aug-2022 - 3-Sep-2022
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Event place:
Antwerpen, Belgium
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Keywords:
Informal Urbanization; Urban Reform; Vienna
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Abstract:
In 1918, after the end of WWI, a large part of Vienna’s 2 million inhabitants was struck by severe famine, cold, disease and desperate housing conditions. In this precarious situation, more than 100 thousand urbanites resorted to self-empowerment. Illegal forest clearings, vegetable gardens and squats with primitive houses and sheds were expanding in the Danube floodplain and the alpine foothills, in the fields and wastelands on the fringes of the city.
As a 1922 report in the National Geographic Magazine curiously noted, makeshift garden homes “surround the city like a ragged girdle and are the result of the housing famine that has driven thousands of families to live here in huts, […] where they add to the city’s food supply by raising vegetables about the front door.” (Solano 1923, p.79)
Albeit reduced in scale, this type of informal colonization would reoccur during the world economic crisis of the Thirties and in the instable, precarious years after WWII (Hauer & Krammer 2018). While some major spots were cleared by the authorities, from the 1950s to the late 1990s most former illegal settlements were upgraded, connected to public water-, power- and traffic infrastructure and legalized in terms of zoning and construction law. As a consequence, former “slums” began to transform into high-value residential areas, dominated by posh single-family-houses in recent years – contributing to the current overheating of the city’s real estate market.
The paper will elaborate on this largely unknown history of Vienna, today seemingly one of the world’s most formalized agglomerations. Covering the period from 1918 to present, it will discuss new findings of the ongoing research project “Wien informell”, especially:
the spatial reconstruction and quantification of informal settlements by a GIS the post-WWII-debate about inequality, its causes, its urban form and its possible reform the processes of social and physical upgrading.
References:
Solano, S. (1923): Vienna – A Capital Without a Nation. National Geographic Magazine 1923/1, p. 77–102
Hauer, F., Krammer, A. (2018): Das wilde Wien. Rückblick auf ein Jahrhundert informeller Stadtentwicklung. dérive. Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung 71, p. 8–19.