The background:
In view of the rapid processes of social and climatic change worldwide, as well as the continuing exorbitant consumption of land, it seems necessary to discuss how we want to live, work and live in harmony and co-existence with nature in the future.
The urban population will continue to grow in the coming years. What does a co-existence of the dense city with its hinterland, with its nourishing cultural landscape look like?
The challenge:
The increase in Vienna's population, as well as changes in the housing market, in our lifestyles, consumption habits and diet, as well as the new challenge of the pandemic, raise questions:
How do we want to live in the future: close to nature, climate-neutral and inclusive?
How much land do we need for our food supply, how much of it can we provide at all for the high demand on the housing market, and what does a future coexistence in harmony with nature look like?
New and old challenges, such as the provision of sustainable mobility, securing or enabling jobs and infrastructure, are also up for debate alongside the need to protect the soil.
At which well-developed locations in the city can building density be increased, should new building land be developed at all and, if so, where?
Which areas should continue to be left undeveloped and dedicated to the provision of green space, agricultural space and natural space?
What does a sustainable local supply and disposal system look like that does justice to the issues of the climate-neutral, resilient city?
What forms of densification and development go hand in hand with this vision, which pursues suitability for everyday life, inclusion and the human scale as its top priorities?
The project:
The fields around Breitenlee, north of the lakeside town of Aspern, largely belong to the Schottenstift. The "Schotten" have been running the monastery's farms here for decades. This serves us as one of the examples to be analysed in which the co-existence we are looking for is or was lived.
In the context of Transdanubia, we find further examples of agrarian structures, such as old Angerdörfer, garden city settlements from the interwar period, newly emerging glass houses and allotment gardens, some of whose origins can be found in informal settlements and which are now transformed into year-round inhabited single-family house quarters.
We take these structures as the starting point for our analyses to develop the vision of a new co-existence of nature and city for the generations of the future. Are the garden cities of the 21st century emerging here? The new Anger villages? Self-sufficient units like in F.L Wright's vision of a Broadacre City - as an antithesis to the dense city, so to speak? Or does the future lie in rationally organised farms, next to high-density housing units in which food is grown on an industrial scale, in an energy-saving way?
Aims of the course:
The aim of the course is to understand how closely cultural landscape, nature and urban landscape are linked and to what extent they complement and depend on each other.
Part of the discussion should be to what extent we make cultural landscape available for development and to what extent we build up our precious and finite resource, the soil, or use it in other ways. The AzW exhibition 'Soil for All' presented and discussed this topic in a very well-founded way, especially with regard to Austria.
Methods and visions will be developed on how a productive co-existence of natural landscape, cultural landscape and urban landscape is possible, how we want to live, work and live in a post-pandemic future in a climate-neutral and inclusive way on all levels, while dealing responsibly with the finite resources of our earth.
The task is to discuss how Breitenlee relates to the hinterland of the city of Vienna, but also to the city itself, and in particular to Transdanubia and the immediate surroundings (Seestadt Aspern, Grüngürtel, Regionalpark DreiAnger) and in what form and to what extent the area can be used productively, for building, land cultivation, open space.
The course is run in cooperation with Urban Innovation Vienna, the Schottenstift as well as the BOKU and the Angewandte. Cross-over workshops with the BOKU and Angewandte courses are planned.
