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Red Vienna Is Still Alive

The Austrian capital chose not to privatize the commons, and it shows.

The Karl-Marx-Hof public housing project in Vienna, Austria.

As a city dweller, I often find myself sandwiched between pro-social and anti-social situations. Most urban environments drift closer to one of those two poles than the other. Chicago may have beautiful parks, but it comes at the cost of anti-homeless policies like encampment clearance or hostile architecture that makes benches impossible to sit on. And that’s nothing compared to the omnipresent din of police helicopters and sirens I suffered in Baltimore. While New York City expands access to public toilets and the arts, Waymo descends upon Denver. Before visiting Vienna this past summer, I knew about its reputation as one of Europe’s most aggressively pro-social cities, boasting ample green space and excellent public transit. But I hadn’t realized how easy being there would feel, and how the city’s social-democratic attitudes toward urban planning would be reflected in liberal attitudes the people who live there have toward one another.

Many European cities are entering a fraught era of austerity, overtourism, widening income inequality, and social pressures like immigration (from both wealthy Westerners and the world’s refugees). These burdens—in addition to facilitating the slow but steady rise of nationalist and right-wing political groups and parties—are often evident in the urban built environment and the ways people interact with it.

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When I was in Berlin earlier this year, Berliners were still reeling from an act of domestic terrorism in which a van plowed into a crowd at the city’s annual Pride parade. The German Historical Museum and the Bauhaus Archive were both closed for long-delayed renovations due to lack of municipal funds. Alternative für Deutschland posters crowded utility poles. The police were omnipresent, and public activism tepid following the moratorium on free speech........

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