Red Vienna: Housing Re-imagined

Red Vienna describes the period between 1919 – 1934 when a social democratic city government implemented a wide range of reforms.

This included the building of over 64,000 homes in a mix of garden city estates, large apartment block estates, stand alone blocks, clinics, welfare centres, youth centres, theatres, sports centres, libraries and much else.

The talk will cover the origins of this radical change in the collapse of the central European empires, the revolutions in Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary and the development of workers’ councils in control of towns and cities.

It will look at how the Settlers’ Movement in Vienna involved over 100,000 people who appropriated land and started to build their own housing and cultivate their own food.

Through photographs and maps, the talk will consider the involvement and influence of people such as Josef Frank and Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky and how the housing was influenced by the principles of space, light, air and sun.

Using images from across the housing estates in Vienna, the talk will look at how many of the ideas pre-dated those of Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs in terms of how place must support people.

Housing in London is now dominated by expensive, sometimes poor quality, private housing.

The conclusion will be how the ideas of ‘revolutionary-reformism’ in Vienna in the 1920s could be used to re-imagine London today in the 2020s.