Vienna at the Crossroads: A “Just City” Under Pressure
“Never let a crisis go to waste” is an adage that emerges in every crisis, aiming not only to foster a consoling attitude in times of discomfort and need, but also to seize opportunities for broader, more transformative societal change. Rarely has this been truer than in Vienna at the end of 1918, when the First World War ended, and the Habsburg Empire dissolved. At that time, Vienna experienced one of the deepest crises in its history. Previously at the centre of a vast empire, the city was stranded on the eastern fringe of a small, geopolitically rather irrelevant republic. It was severely affected by economic and social devastation. From a rich and glittering metropolis, it transformed into a dirty, disease-ridden city facing starvation (Cockett, 2024: 73-75). In this context, in May 1919, the Social Democratic Workers´ Party won with the absolute majority of votes in the municipal elections, and Jakob Reumann became the first socialist mayor of Vienna.
This political change kicked off a period of deep transformation in which Vienna´s Social Democratic city government pursued an ambitious program of municipal socialism. “Red Vienna” (1918-1934) became the label for the development of large-scale housing (Gemeindebauten) projects, extensive welfare services, and cultural and educational initiatives aimed at improving the living conditions of the working class.
This process was also propelled by the fact that in 1922, Vienna became an autonomous province of the Austrian federation, leaving Lower Austria, the Bundesland it had belonged to. The political contrast between the (progressive) city and the rural part of (conservative) Lower Austria had led to conflict over taxes and infrastructure, hindering development and proper administration, bringing about the separation as the best solution.
Vienna’s new legal status as a city-state with jurisdictional power provided the city with greater degrees of freedom and allowed, for instance, social-democratic reformers to introduce new local taxes, develop new policies, and provide new services, turning Vienna into a model city for social and inclusive policies: “a just city”. The significance of Red Vienna can hardly be overestimated (Cockett, 2024:71) as it was at this critical juncture that some of the most innovative and resilient policy solutions were formulated, establishing a legacy that continues to permeate contemporary everyday life.
Vienna as a Just City
The concept of the “just city” – developed to capture these aspects, in part – has deep roots in critical urban theory, drawing on multiple intellectual traditions that link spatial justice to broader questions of equity, democracy, and social rights. David Harvey’s Marxist-inspired framework (1989) emphasizes the right to the city as a collective right to reshape urban processes and to claim urban space, arguing that capitalist urbanization inherently produces spatial inequalities through accumulation by dispossession. Henri Lefebvre’s foundational work (1968) similarly conceptualizes the right to the city as encompassing both the right to inhabit urban space and the right to participate in its production, emphasizing use value over exchange value and collective appropriation over commodification.
Given Vienna´s strong institutional and policy-embeddedness of the idea of justice, we will ground our analysis more prosaically on Susan Fainstein’s concept of the “just city” (2010), which provides a more policy-oriented framework for linking critiques of global neoliberal developments with local policies and their redistributive consequences. Fainstein’s approach assumes that local and national policy retains meaningful room for manoeuvre in defining urban development trajectories and living conditions despite rising global interconnectedness.
This approach can be complemented by emphasising the role of policy instruments in the overall governance of urban change (Kassim and Le Galès, 2010) as principles of justice do translate into policy measures, which not only define the regulatory framework within which actors unfold their struggles, but also provide them with resources, rights and duties, opportunities and constraints (Kazepov and Verwiebe, 2022:6).
This Contribution
This contribution provides IJURR readers and RC21 conference participants with an overview not only of how Vienna addresses inequalities across different domains today. It also traces the historical roots of the model and addresses the challenges it is facing. Given the complex and rich legacy, as well as the multiple domains in which inequality is structured, this contribution is necessarily a synthesis of many fragmented contributions on a limited, selected set of fields. We will focus on three of them that have emerged as particularly crucial for understanding new fault lines in the production of inequality: migration, demographics and political representation, housing and segregation, and environmental justice and climate change. Our choice doesn´t diminish the importance of other domains that contribute to the consolidation or production of inequalities; rather, it focuses on “relatively” new and complementary developments to more consolidated approaches.
Migration, Demographics, and Political Representation
Vienna’s demographic transformation – driven by sustained population growth and successive waves of migration since the 1960s – has produced a super-diverse metropolis and intensified demand for housing and public services. The city’s population rose markedly from 1.54 million in 1991 to over 2 million in 2025, with the number of foreign citizens more than quadrupling. Today, nearly half of residents now have a migration background, reflecting layered labour, family, EU, and refugee mobility. These shifts intersect with entrenched governance patterns: long-standing Social Democratic municipal control has shaped expansive social rights and city-specific redistribution mechanisms, yet institutional arrangements and Austria’s restrictive citizenship regime produce substantial political exclusion. Citizenship gaps, residency requirements such as the Wiener Wohn-Ticket rule, segmented integration outcomes, and barriers to qualification recognition, language acquisition, and stable employment reinforce labour market and housing inequalities. Newcomers disproportionately rely on a selective private rental sector and experience unequal access to welfare. Assessing Vienna’s claim to urban justice, therefore, requires attention to how governance structures enable meaningful democratic participation, who controls living environments, and how institutional barriers perpetuate unequal political voice and resource distribution amid rapid socio‑demographic change.
Decommodified Housing under Pressure
Vienna’s housing system – long celebrated as a cornerstone of urban justice – rests on an unusually large decommodified stock shaped by the legacy of Red Vienna. Its “housing for all” model blends extensive municipal and limited‑profit social rentals with private-sector rent regulation, generating affordability through competition between regulated and market segments. Yet this model now faces mounting pressures. Demographic shifts, immigration, rising inequality, escalating property prices, and liberalisation of tenant regulation at the federal level have begun to erode affordability.
Two policy changes are especially consequential and will be examined in detail in the paper: a) the transfer of most new social housing construction to limited-profit associations, and b) the progressive deregulation of private rent controls.
Together, these shifts have contributed to a structural dualisation of the housing system, widening the divide between secure insiders who benefit from stable, low-cost units and more precarious outsiders, newcomers increasingly confined to high‑priced, low‑quality private rentals. These “arrival spaces,” disproportionately often inhabited by non‑EU migrants, raise critical questions about whether Vienna’s model continues to deliver equitable outcomes across its increasingly diverse population.
Sustaining Urban Liveability under Climate Change
Vienna’s high liveability reflects a century of planning that links environmental quality with social welfare, combining compact development, extensive public transport, and the long-term protection of major green assets such as the Wienerwald, the Green Belt, and the creation of the Danube Island. Over the past three decades, the city has maintained nearly 50% green space and has embedded climate mitigation across transport, housing, and land‑use policy, notably through reducing car dependence and decarbonising buildings. Yet accelerating climate impacts, especially extreme heat, have elevated adaptation as a second strategic pillar. Heat risks concentrate in dense working‑class districts with limited vegetation, where social vulnerability and environmental exposure intersect. Despite Vienna’s emphasis on equitable access to green infrastructure, inequalities persist, particularly among low‑income residents, migrants, and elderly populations. This uneven cooling capacity has prompted a shift toward small‑scale interventions, such as street trees, de‑sealing, and shaded spaces, often constrained by competing uses of scarce urban space. Research increasingly calls for prioritising measures where heat exposure, social vulnerability, and cooling potential align, an approach widely supported by residents. Vienna’s central challenge is to reconcile ambitious climate action with affordable housing, social inclusion, and balanced urban growth.
Can Vienna maintain its Reputation as a “Just City”?
The underlying question of this contribution is “Can Vienna maintain its longstanding reputation as a city characterised by social cohesion, quality of life, and robust state intervention amid profound contemporary pressures?” The central issue is whether Vienna’s historical commitment to redistributive policies and social inclusion, stemming from the Red Vienna legacy (Kadi and Suitner, 2019; Cockett, 2024), can withstand the challenges posed by demographic shifts, post-industrial economic transformations, climate change, and the recalibration of the welfare state that have emerged over the past decades. Here we examine Vienna’s responses across these critical fields and policy domains to understand whether the city’s institutional arrangements continue to deliver urban justice or are eroding under the weight of globalisation, financialization, and demographic change.
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Michael Friesenecker
Department of Landscape Planning, BOKU University
Is a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Landscape Planning at BOKU University in Vienna. He is also affiliated to the TU Wien, where he coordinates the local unit of the ReHousin project (www.rehousin.eu). His research focuses on the intersection of urban planning, social policy, and environmental policy, and their socio-spatial impacts. On these issues, he conducted extensive research and published widely. His most recent research examines the management of urban greening initiatives and the prevention of undesirable socio-spatial impacts.
Yuri Kazepov
Department of Sociology, University of Vienna
Is a Professor of Urban Sociology at the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Vienna). His research interests address the territorial dimension of social policies in a comparative perspective, multilevel governance arrangements, social and environmental sustainability, school-to-work transitions. On these topics he carried out extensive research at European level in different policy domains. For his publications see the u:cris portal. He served as president of the Research Committee 21 on Urban and Regional Studies of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014), was a founding board member of ESPAnet Europe, the Network for European Social Policy Analysis (2002-2008) and founded and co-chaired ESPAnet Italy (2009-2011) and co-founded ESPAnet Austria (2016).
Tatjana Boczy
Department of Sociology, University of Vienna
Is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and is interested in comparative urban and regional research, eco-social change and the further development of mixed methods. She holds a doctorate in social sciences in the field of sociology, a master’s degree in social and political theory, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Her master’s thesis on the topic of smart cities was awarded the prize for outstanding theses by the Austrian Sociological Association. In her dissertation, she conducted a comparative study of neoliberal changes in the local welfare system between 2008 and 2023, using the example of labour market policies in urban and rural territories of England and Austria.