Alternatives to Housing Crisis: Case Study Vienna

The worldwide crisis of a dramatic lack of affordable housing — even in affluent cities such as Vancouver and Vienna — is part of a larger urban crisis that is based on speculation of urban land, the re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, and on the collectivization of losses and the privatization of gains characteristic of neoliberalism.

Therefore, a politics aiming at the right to affordable housing for all is necessary in this moment. And housing, of course, is always more than itself — for we are housed in cities and thus also in infrastructural networks, power relations, public spaces, all of which are under pressure from market appropriation. In this talk, Gabu Heindl, architect and urban planner from Vienna, Austria, proposes equality, justice and the enabling of political dissensus as parameters for city planning.

Using Vienna as a case study, this lecture explores the relationship of affordable housing to urban planning politics and discusses historic and current housing policies, not least in a critical cross-analysis with the Vancouver case. Touching upon the re-articulated model function of 1920s Red Vienna, Heindl presents her approach to combining strong claims (Setzungen) in public planning with a critique of paternalistic governance and with maintaining zones of contact with popular agency.