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Photo: Richard Conway/Bloomberg CityLab.
The 478-unit Reumannhof, public housing completed in 1926, was named for Vienna’s first Social Democratic mayor, Jakob Reumann.

Making sure all residents have decent housing is a challenge for cities around the globe. Richard Conway at Bloomberg CityLab says Vienna pretty much figured it out in the 1920s. He maintains it’s the reason Vienna is such a livable city today.

“The housing crunch that the growing city of Vienna faced a century ago,” he writes, “might seem strikingly familiar today: Private developers in the Austrian capital were good at building elegant luxury residences and substandard tenements for the poor, but they’d failed to create enough units to allow average residents to live in decent comfort at an affordable price.

“In response, Vienna’s Social Democratic government pursued a solution that modern cities still struggle to emulate: a massive construction program for public housing.

“The municipal apartment complexes they built, known as Gemeindebau, provided new homes at a volume and level of quality never seen before, and rarely seen since. The long-term results not only saw conditions for the average Viennese skyrocket, they also provided a hugely influential example for cities from Moscow to Manhattan.

These cities-within-a-city included medical facilities, schools, libraries, post offices and theater spaces.

“The Viennese Gemeindebau — plural Gemeindebauten — emerged in a city already in flux. Following Austria’s defeat in World War I, the country’s empire had dissolved and its monarchy was replaced by a democracy, in which the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAPÖ) had the largest number of seats, both nationally and in Vienna. Once in power, the Social Democrats started addressing an issue central to their base: the overcrowding plaguing the new republic’s capital.

“In the 40 years leading up to 1918 … working-class families often lived in tenements known as Bassena, so named after the communal sinks found in their hallways. While they could look grand from the street, six or seven people might pack into a single apartment; often, each household shared a toilet and a sink and lacked electricity or heating beyond coal and wood stoves. They weren’t cheap, either: About 25% of a tenant’s wages went toward monthly rent, according to a 2022 MIT study.

“Starting in 1919 and continuing through to 1934, the Social Democrats launched a series of wide-reaching urban reforms focused on improving living conditions, education and social services. This period of SDAPÖ rule, widely known as Red Vienna, was informed by non-Bolshevik Austro-Marxism, which emphasized democracy, parliamentary politics and public investment. The Gemeindebauten, or municipal housing projects, were born.

“In the early days of the administration, there were two competing types of Gemeindebau. The first was associated with the settler movement: a group of low-income Viennese and refugees displaced from Austria’s fragmenting empire who occupied squatter settlements on the city’s periphery in an era of postwar political and social disruption. Viennese authorities eventually took over these informal communities, formalizing and planning them using elements of the Garden City philosophy.

“It was a second, much more common type of Gemeindebau, however, that came to define Vienna — the superblock-scaled Volkswohnungspaläste (‘people’s apartment palaces’). …

“Neither elaborately decorative like Vienna’s prewar tenements nor strikingly spare like the glass-and-steel apartments of the later International Style, the Gemeindebau often straddled an intriguing line between late 19th historicism and 20th century modernism. …

“Like older tenements, the buildings were typically aligned with streets, accessorized with some decorative features such as fancy brickwork or statuary and grouped around shared common yards. But while Bassena courtyards tended to be narrow, treeless and drab, the huge courtyards of the Gemeindebauten were spacious enough to serve as as combined garden, sports facility and public square, all accessible and sheltered from street noise. …

“In general, the shared areas within the superblocks were in fact as important as the individual homes, reflecting the Viennese administration’s social philosophy. These cities-within-a-city included medical facilities, schools, libraries, post offices and theater spaces. Curved staircases connected large floors — often as many as seven — and spacious landings. …

“The individual apartments, while varying in layout, shared key features. They included a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and some had small entrance hallways inside the front door. Almost all units featured running water, while many had large windows and balconies. Each apartment usually housed an individual family.

“Vienna employed nearly 200 architects to build more than 380 Gemeindebau complexes between the wars, a construction boom that created 60,000 new municipal apartments. In her book The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919-1934, Harvard professor Eve Blau describes how the municipal government was able to do this through expropriation, the use of tax policies to reduce land values and zoning laws. By 1931, it owned a third of the city’s area.

“Working-class citizens might now expect to live in airy apartments and access shared facilities. Indeed, the urban philosophy of Gemeindebauten is neatly captured by a term carved by artist Mario Petrucci into a statue outside a housing project: … ‘Light in the home. Sun in the heart.’ This was more than just a slogan; it represented an entire worldview.”

More at CityLab, here. No paywall. Interesting pictures.

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