Back in early February, we travelled to Vienna on holiday. Ironically, the only thing affecting our travel was Storm Ciara which disrupted the return journey. This post is published in very different circumstances. Stay safe and stay well.
The Gemeindebauten municipal tenement blocks of Red Vienna are probably the most celebrated council housing in the world β epic in conception, construction and, in , conclusion. When the programme ended, one in ten Viennese citizens β around , people β lived in municipal housing: the city had built some 61, apartments in tenement blocks and around houses on 42 more suburban estates.
This was not merely a housing programme. The dramatic context for this unheralded experiment lay in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in The population of the rump Austrian state which emerged stood at 5 million, less than a tenth that of the former empire.
Vienna itself, the erstwhile imperial capital, had, at peak in , a population of 2,, The Gemeindebauten were to be its practical expression. Initially, however, the Viennese municipality under Reumann pursued an architecturally more conservative strategy though a series of peripheral garden suburbs. Some of these Siedlungen were built by the municipality, some by cooperatives; they were inspired by both the established Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard and the contemporary practice of Weimar Germany.
The major β political and financial β shift occurred in It suited both conservative and radical politicians that Vienna became a wholly self-governing province in Crucially, this allowed the municipality to pursue an independent taxation policy.
