German to English translations, English copyediting, and coordinating English translation team for the ARCH+ edition, Vienna: The End of Housing (as a Typology), published by Spector Books in March 2024. Addressing Vienna’s housing policies – from Red Vienna’s social housing initiatives to today’s innovations – it sheds light on how Vienna’s century-long commitment to housing as a human right created one of the world’s “most livable” cities and prompts reflection on crucial questions about housing of the future.
From the publisher’s website:
Anyone looking for role models for a successful housing policy will sooner or later end up in “Red Vienna”. Its myth is unbroken and owes its existence to the Viennese municipality’s enduring political insight that housing is a social responsibility and must not be left to the market alone. Despite this basic consensus, Vienna’s housing policy has undergone many changes and transformations over the course of an eventful century and has certainly become more market-oriented in the process. But it has never lost sight of two crucial things: the need to build and maintain a housing stock and its lasting social ties, and the need to reserve land. Against this background and in view of the enormous population growth in the Austrian capital, which is currently accompanied by lively construction and development activity, this publication uses the example of Vienna to address the status quo of housing construction. When building housing today, how? Do monofunctional typologies and the functional-spatial separation of living and working still correspond to the realities of our lives? How social is social housing?
