QUESTIONS:
Where did the poorest residents of Modern Vienna live? How did they get there?
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DISCUSSION OF SOURCES, DATA AND ANALYSIS:
At the turn of the century, Vienna was regarded as a cultural capital, a home for “innovative multiculturalism and discussion of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde” (Maderthaner and Musner 27). Economically, the city was growing rapidly as industrialization increased and attracted workers from the rest of the empire, leading to a population peak of over two million residents in 1910 (Suitner 9). Vienna had incorporated its suburbs 50 years prior, but was again becoming overcrowded and segregated by class, with its wealthiest residents occupying the inner city and its poorest relegated to the outskirts. Some industrial workers lived in company housing with a single room including up to ten families. Others slept in halls with 50 to 70 other people sleeping on straw (Maderthaner and Musner 32). For the poor that managed to find private spaces for rent in the city, accommodations were not any more comfortable. Middle-class residents would rent single beds to several different people, called Bettgänger or sub-tenants, and in 1910 25% of households accommodated sub-tenants (Levy-Vroelant and Reinprecht 301).
Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1915, living conditions for the poor and housing-insecure worsened, as Vienna began to experience economic decline due to high inflation, unemployment and a drop in real wages. This economic crisis, combined with wartime dislocations led to an extreme housing crisis. Nearly 10,000 Viennese families unable to find accommodations in apartment buildings lived in substandard conditions in cellar flats, barracks, huts and wagons (Gruber 47). In 1917, a government decree established the Mieterschutz, which froze rents to protect tenants (Sieder 37). The effect was twofold: private contractors no longer had incentive to build new housing projects and tenants no longer needed to rent to subtenants in order to save money. As a result, thousands of people found themselves homeless in a city with practically zero vacant accommodations.
This housing crisis spawned what the literature refers to as a “spontaneous self-help movement” of squatter settlements on vacant land on the city’s outskirts (Altes and Faludi 208; Holland 10). Holland (9) emphasizes the housing crisis as the driving factor for residents to build their own dwellings, but Altes and Faludi (208) also cite the need to raise and shelter crops as motivation for constructing settlements. The settlers self-organized into an association, which eventually became a Vienna chapter of the international garden city movement (Altes and Faludi 208).
Back in 1893, the city government had begun the process of communalizing land within the city as a part of its Bauzonenplan or Building Zone Plan, with a focus on rehabilitating the urban center and transport planning, but the outbreak of the First World War “impeded the plan’s realization” (Suitner 10). Holland (9) specifically notes that squatter communities built their homes on “illegally occupied land.” The city allowed the settlements to remain, because they helped to ameliorate the hunger crisis by growing some of the food that the city could not provide (Altes and Faludi 208). By 1918, 14,000 households occupied 6.5 million square meters of land (Holland 9). By the end of the 1920s, Vienna was able to eradicate homelessness. Historians agree that this change was due in large part to the city’s social housing program of the “Red Vienna” period and time of socialist rule between the end of WWI and the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1934.
Vienna’s first democratic elections were held in 1919, in which the Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party won a controlling majority of the city government. For its first few years in power, the government struggled to revive the city’s struggling economy and raise levels of income. The Party began to discuss redistributive policies to combat this issue, including higher taxes on property and luxury goods, a comprehensive welfare system, improvements in public transit and importantly, a “new communal building program on community land” (Sieder 36). For the settlers and supporters of the garden city movement, the change in government presented an opportunity for the settlers to receive support from the city. In 1920, food provision was still the dominant issue and the city formalized some of the settlements by giving residents long-term leases, potable war and sturdier building materials (Altes and Faludi 211). Now that the settlements were legalized, issues began to rise such as regulating the types of constructions allowed and the impact expansion of the settlements could have on the city’s development.
In 1923, the city announced that the money earned from taxation would be enough to support the purchase of land in the city for the construction of 25,000 public accommodations over a five-year period (Gruber 49). While the government’s intention was to solve the housing crisis and uplift the poorest members of society into the working class, Gruber argues that gradually, officials realized the opportunity they had to create a “total cultural environment” and unify the city under the Party platform and ideology (Gruber 46). With the new housing program in mind, the self-organized settlers and their desires became an obstacle for the city. The Department of Public Works issued a moratorium on any new “informal development” and the city began pouring more resources into the planning of new social housing (Altes and Faludi 212).
The goals of creating both the largest number possible of livable accommodations with improved amenities and later designing a living environment for the “controlled socialization of the working-class family” complicated the planning process early on (Gruber 46). Early contracted architects and advisors had ambitious plans for reimagining city life and reincorporating the squatters on the outskirts of the city. The settlers’ association and its garden city supporters lobbied the government and even argued that expansion of the garden settlements could be an opportunity to revitalize the “arid, treeless streets” of the Ringstrasse (Altes and Faludi 209). In one example, advisor to the city Gustave Scheu developed a plan for official, permanent legitimization of the settlements in which the government would reappropriate the land but allow the settlers to remain and contribute to the costs of their housing by providing labor, including constructing their new homes in vacant areas of the inner city (Holland 9). However, these plans did not come to fruition as the city was constrained by lack of sufficient land, high development costs, and the absence of public transportation infrastructure on the outskirts of the city. Altes and Faludi (221) argue that there was no real alternative to the city’s eventual decision to build housing blocks, because of the restructuring of the city that the garden settlements would require.
Returning to the Party’s goals of housing the most people possible while also fostering a specific kind of socialist culture, the Viennese municipality decided on the concept of the Gemeindebau, a large residential complex with an inner courtyard that could be built within the existing spatial parameters of the city. Blau outlines four site conditions that the city planners had to contend with to build their Gemeindebauten. Where the city owned a complete block of land surrounded on all sides by existing streets, the city built a Randverbauung, a simple perimeter block with spacious courtyards in the interior. Where the city owned land already occupied by existing buildings, the city constructed a Lückenbebauung, or “infill building”, by constructing a new structure atop the old masking firewalls and airshafts of the old building and gutting the interior to make room for the courtyard. In the periphery of the city, where there was more space, the government built Wohnviertel, or entire landscaped residential quarters. The final site condition in which the city owned several adjacent blocks of land within the city yielded the Gemeindebau most emblematic of the success of the period: the Großwohnanlage, or superblock, which offered planners and architects the chance to break free of the usual pattern of development (Blau 251).
The superblocks of Vienna were nicknamed “peoples’ palaces” not only due to their sheer size, but also because they provided a higher standard of living for their residents and connected them to formerly inaccessible aspects of city life. The largest superblock in the city, the Karl-Marx-Hof, was also the largest single building in Vienna at the time of its completion in 1930 (Blau 323). It was 156, 027 square meters in area, over a kilometer long and housed a population of 5,000 residents in 1,400 apartments. Its central square covered an area of 10,480 square meters and its courtyards together encompassed 127, 276 square meters (Blau 323). All superblocks contained communal facilities such as baths, laundries and kindergartens, but Karl-Marx-Hof also boasted dental and maternity clinics, a youth hostel, post office and 25 other commercial premises (Blau 323). Often superblocks also connected different parts of the city that had long been separated by physical barriers and class. One example of this phenomenon is the case of Reumannhof, situated between the working-class district of Margareten and the Ringstrasse, a grand boulevard connected to the city center. The building “did not demarcate a boundary [but] served instead to link together two districts that had been separated by a wall and fosse for more than two centuries” (Blau 258). Though the city favored housing blocks over garden city settlements because they were wary of the restructuring of the city they would generate, Blau argues that the “insertion [of the housing blocks] into the dense urban fabric of Vienna” indeed changed socio-spatial relationships within the inner city as the spaces of New Vienna became intricately interwoven with the Old (Blau 338).
During its socialist period, Vienna was able to house its poorest populations, but Sieder and Gruber argue that this housing was conditional and served a purpose outside of alleviating the housing crisis to create a strong, orderly working class. In comparison to makeshift settlements, these municipal housing projects increased the standard of living for Vienna’s poor and working classes by providing individuals and families with the appropriate amount of space and access to essential services, but use of the public facilities was highly controlled and regulated by authorities (Gruber 63). Sieder interviewed an inaugural resident of the social housing program, who recalled nightmares related to using the strictly managed public washing machines in the presence of a male supervisor who made sure that all of the women finished their washing within their once-a-month allotted time (Sieder 39). City inspectors would also make regular visits to make sure that residents were upholding government standards of cleanliness and tidiness (Sieder 40). The “cultural environment” of working-class living quarters changed from the crowded tenements or haphazard settlements that at times produced friction, but also mutual aid, to a collection of isolated, nuclear family units dependent on the government to meet their needs (Gruber 58).
Today, the legacy of “Red Vienna” housing estates lives on, especially in the sense that public housing is conceived as social contribution to the city. However, the problem of homelessness returned following the recommodification of social housing, which led to another shortage of and competition for affordable housing opportunities for the city’s poor. To qualify for public housing, a potential tenant must have two years of permanent and or regular residency and meet income requirements (Levy-Vroelant and Reinprecht 302). Often, this extra burden falls on low-income newcomers to the city and immigrant workers. A historical perspective suggests that Vienna could once again solve its housing crisis by not only providing social housing but creating an environment in which barriers to entry are broken down for greater social cohesion.
SOURCES:
Altes, Willem Korthals and Faludi, Andreas. “Why the Greening of Red Vienna Did Not Come to Pass: An Unknown Chapter of the Garden City Movement 1919-1934.” European Planning Studies 3, no.2 (1995): 205-225. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654319508720301
Blau, Eve. “Building Blocks of the City.” In The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934, 246-338. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.
Gruber, Helmut. “Municipal Socialism.” In Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934. 45-65. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Holland, Charles. 2016. “Do it Yourself.” In Government and Housing in a Time of Crisis: Policy, Planning, Design and Delivery, Liverpool, September 8-9, 2016, 7-15. AMPS Proceedings. http://architecturemps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/AMPS-Proceedings-8-Government-and-Housing-in-a-Time-of-Crisis.pdf
Levy-Vroelant, Claire and Christoph Reinprecht. “Housing the Poor in Paris and Vienna: The Changing Understanding of the ‘Social’.” In Social Housing in Europe, edited by Melissa Fernandez Arrigoitia, Christine Whitehead and Kathleen Scanlon, 297-313. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Maderthaner, Wolfgang and Lutz Musner. “Outcast Vienna 1900: The Politics of Transgression.” International Labor and Working-Class History 64 (Fall 2003): 25-37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27672881
Sieder, Reinhard. “Housing Policy, Social Welfare, and Family Life in ‘Red Vienna’, 1919-34.” Oral History 13, no.2 (Autumn 1985): 35-48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40178867
Suitner, Johannes. “Vienna’s Planning History: Periodizing Stable Phases of Regulating Urban Development, 1820–2020.” Planning Perspectives 36, no.5 (2021): 881-902. https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2020.1862700
