Tag Archives: cities

Redesigning urban living at scale: the case of “Red Vienna” in the 1920s

Leave a reply

I just saw a very inspiring exhibition called Das Rote Wien, (“Red Vienna”) at the Wien Museum. I want to make a quick note of what I saw, since it relates to our reflection around The Reef.

Background: Vienna is, even today, unique. A large percentage (about 20%) of all apartments for rent in the city are owned by the municipality (Gemeinde Wien). Additionally, they are not concentrated in one or few low income areas, but are scattered all across the city. There are no ghettos in Vienna.

The foundations for this state of affairs were laid in a short period, from 1919 to 1933, called “Red Vienna”. Here is how I understand the situation:

  • The Austrian Empire loses World War 1 and much of its territory. It morphs into a federal republic and turns to socialism. Socialist ideas spread: about the dignity of man, the centrality of urban workers in society, and the role of the state in bringing about a new kind of society. The Socialist party wins a majority in the federal parliament.
  • In 1919, it loses control of the federal government, but maintains a high consensus in Vienna (about 50% of votes throughout the period preceding Austria’s assimilation into Nazi Germany). Socialists refocus on Vienna as the cradle of their utopia.
  • Meanwhile, post-war hyperinflation has swept away public debt.
  • Rent controls are established in 1917. This ends real estate speculation and leads to falling real estate prices.
  • In 1922 Vienna is separated from the rest of Lower Austria, and becomes its own state (Land). It can now levy its own taxes. This enables a radical, and very successful, fiscal policy:

These taxes were imposed on luxury: on riding-horses, large private cars, servants in private households, and hotel rooms. (To demonstrate the practical effect of these new taxes, the municipality published a list of social institutions that could be financed by the servants tax the Vienna branch of the Rothschild family had to pay.)

Another new tax, the Wohnbausteuer (Housing Construction Tax), was also structured as a progressive tax, i.e. levied in rising percentages. The income from this tax was used to finance the municipality’s extensive housing programme. Therefore, many Gemeindebauten today still bear the inscription: “Erbaut aus den Mitteln der Wohnbausteuer” (built from the proceeds of the Housing Construction Tax). (Wikipedia)

  • Red Vienna deploys substantial intellectual firepower. Socialists mobilize Freud, Adler, Popper, Gödel, Loos, Neurath and others, and offer them seats on boards of research- and policy institutions. The exhibition has an impressive visualization of the Netzwerk Intelligenz, showing how these intellectuals worked with one another in various organizations contributing to the city’s governance.

  • Red Vienna works across the policy spectrum to implement the socialist vision: education reform, social services, health care, green areas. Housing is a central concern. In fact, Viennese citizens had not been waiting around for socialist leaders to make up their minds, and had taken that matter into their own hands.

Following the war, thousands of “wild” settlers occupy land on the periphery of Vienna, where they erect simple dwellings and grow gardens for their food. Emerging from this is the cooperative-oriented Viennese settler movement. Architects and intellectuals, such as Adolf Loos, Margarete Lihotzky, and Otto Neurath see a new democratic way of living in the simplicity and functionality of settlement houses.

  • In a very creative move, the city government decides to support, rather than repress, this movement:
  • In order to guide the settlement activity and certainly also to control it politically, the municipality provides the settlers financial and technical support beginning in 1920. By 1933, roughly 8,000 settlement houses had been built in Vienna.
  • In 1923 Red Vienna moves beyond surfing the wave of the settlements movement, and rolls out a full-fledged strategy. It consists of the already mentioned Wohnbausteuer, earmarked to finance the city’s affordable, high-quality housing strategy, and of a construction plan. The latter is another innovation:

“New Vienna” is not developed as residential estates in the periphery, as is the favored practice internationally, but unstead, is integrated into the existing city in the form of several-story “people’s apartment buildings”. […] All of the rooms are furnished with windows, and all of the apartment have running water and toilets. Their rather moderate dimensions are extended by communal spaces, such as laundry rooms and baths. Until 1933 approximately 380 council housing buildings are constructed, with more than 60,000 apartments able to house 200,000 people.

So, in less than 15 years, Vienna built 60,000 apartments, plus 80,000 settlement houses. Assuming an average of 4 inhabitants per house, this means lodging 200,000 people with the New Vienna program + 320,000 people with the bottom-up settlements. This runs up to 520,000 people… in a city of 1,700,000 inhabitants!

These buildings brought about a huge increase in the quality of urban life, and in that of Vienna’s landscape. This increase was permanent: almost all lodgings are still in use today, 100 years after Red Vienna, and Vienna is always topping the charts of the most livable cities in the world. This, despite the Nazis ending Red Vienna in civil war and ultimately annexation in 1933.

It appears we have

There are so many valuable lessons in here that I do not even know where to start. Maybe it is even more interesting to consider the interplay of the various factors: preconditions like Vienna’s debtlessness  and the “plasticity” of the Austrian constitutional architecture, and therefore the city’s power to levy taxes (courtesy of losing a major war); intellectual resources (mostly inherited by imperial times); bold policy; and an impressive ability to “sniff the wind” and channel and support emergent phenomena like the informal settlements, rather than fight them back.

It would be worth looking deeper into the matter. Unfortunately many sources are available only in German. Does anyone have any insights to offer?

(Reposted from Edgeryders)

Italian Wikicrats: the civil society to the rescue of open government

4 Replies


The time has come for open government in Italy. As so many phenomena here, it is not immediately apparent because it starts from the fringes and spreads unevenly, rather than being set in motion by a strategic decision of the State, as happened in the USA and in the UK. In this phase, it seems, the movers and shakers are city administrations: just look at ePart in Udine, Karaliscrazia in Cagliari, Wikicrazia in San Benedetto del Tronto. The newly elected administration in Milano is expected to make a move soon: meanwhile, the mayor Giuliano Pisapia and, even more so, the alderman Stefano Boeri (very active on Facebook) entertain a rich social media conversation with their fellow citizens.

Digging deeper, though, it becomes clear that the real protagonist in this phase of Italy’s transition to an open government is the civil society. The San Benedetto initiative was kickstarted by a group of citizens and a local paper; in Cagliari the initiatives are two (Karaliscrazia and Ideario per Cagliari), and both spawned from the civil society; as for Milano, the openings towards Internet-enabled collaborative governance are championed by an association called GreenGeek, that proved itself able to ferry the connected citizenry from campaigning to get Pisapia elected over to collaborating with his administration. Local administrations are being more reactive than proactive (the exception is Udine, where the ePart project was initiated by the mayor). The Italian way to open government, then, is characterized by a double anomaly: it is local rather than central, and the civil society is blazing its trail in a way that it does not in other countries.

More cities are to follow. These days, with each passing week more individuals, citizens’ groups and administrations are getting in touch with me to let me know they are thinking of launching yet more initiatives of collaboration between citizens and administrations: they want to discuss withme, or invite me to public events. I feel honored and proud that many of them are using my book Wikicrazia as a user’s manual for collaborative governance: a tool not just for learning about the wiki government, but for actually going out and making it happen.

Such a wealth of participation is a great asset, but it involves a risk: that of administrations feeling cornered, and perceiving as contrived a collaboration that should be completely natural. My first advice to people that ask me “how should we do this?” is always the same: you need to get the mayor or someone in the administration to sign up to your project, so be prepared to tailor it in a way such that they are comfortable with it even if this means giving up on some of your ideas. Sure, citizens have every right to make proposals in any way they want: but making proposals is not open government. Open government requires an explicit collaboration between citizens and administrations: the latter hold the democratic legitimacy to make and implement decisions that, by definition, are going to affect all citizens, including those that do not participate in the collaboration.

In the coming months I intend to blog about the many stories of local collaborative governance cooking up or already out there in Italy and elsewhere. I would like to X-ray them, not to criticize but to distill the best ideas and practices from all this civic energy. If you know any, I would be grateful if you dropped me a line: you can find me on this blog, the main social media and by email at alberto[at]cottica[dot]net.