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F. Hauer, A. Krammer:
""Wild" Vienna. Looking back at a century of informal city development in Vienna, Austria";
Talk: EURA-UAA Conference City Futures IV, University College Dublin, Irland; 2019-06-20; in: "EURA-UAA Conference City Futures IV Conference Abstract Book", (2019), 66.

The development of Vienna in the 20th century was strongly influenced by informal settlements. On a structural level the traces of these formerly "wild" colonies or "Bretteldörfer" are still widely present in today´s city fabric. 1918, after the end of WWI, a large part of Vienna´s 2 million inhabitants was struck by severe famine, cold, disease and desperate housing conditions. In this precarious situation, several thousands - some sources speak of more than 100 thousand urbanites - were forced to self-empowerment. Illegal forest clearings, vegetable gardens and squats with primitive houses and sheds were expanding in the Danube floodplain and the alpine foothills, in the fields and wastelands on the fringes of the city. Albeit reduced in scale, this form of informal colonization reoccurred during the world economic crisis of the Thirties and in the instable, precarious years after WWII (Hauer & Krammer 2018).While some minor areas were cleared by the authorities, from the 1950s to the 1990s most former illegal settlements were upgraded, connected to public water-, power- and traffic infrastructure and legalized. As a consequence, former "slums" began to transform into high-value residential areas, dominated by posh single-family-houses in recent years - contributing to the current overheating of the city´s real estate market. The paper will elaborate on this largely unknown history of Vienna, which is today one of the world´s seemingly most formalized urban environments. It will give special attention to the role of flood menace, drinking water supply and the problem of wastewater disposal in shaping the patterns of illegal settlement and the processes of consolidation alike.

Informal settlements; Legalization; Vienna; Urban gardening; Public upgrades