Vienna parks: Lots of fresh air upstairs

Urban ventilation systems, social rooms, open living rooms: parks have to do a lot. This also challenges those who shape it.

Garbage dump, cemetery, rusty tracks, something can come of this. The Danube Park alone has proven it, it was largely a landfill. Or the Währinger Park, it was the final resting place. Many would like to see something similar happen to the tracks at Vienna’s Westbahnhof: a future that is open to the top – as Westbahnpark. A couple of committed landscape architects are currently working courageously to ensure that the city of Vienna is also making the right design for the important course: in the direction of meadow and water instead of more asphalt and even more concrete. The city is also otherwise the caretaker. It creates green beyond the balconies. At least since the emperor himself no longer decreed it in handwriting or opened former hunting grounds for everyone in grand gestures. Or even have extra gardens laid out, such as the “Volksgarten” in 1823, the first of its public kind in Vienna, which already bears its original target group in its name.

However: “People” meant something else in the time of the emperor. “There were definitely social barriers,” reports garden and landscape historian Christian Hlavac. One would not have liked to see the workers from Ziegelteich on Wienerberg there, he says. It was better to see aristocrats and citizens walking. In the book “Parkgeschichten”, published by Amalthea Verlag, he collected various anecdotes and observations on many Viennese parks. Today, the “antipodes to the densely built-up city”, as landscape architect Pascal Posset from the Zurich office of Hager calls it, are conceptually designed quite differently. Open spaces in the city are often open to use today. Nevertheless, they are heavily loaded: even with socio-political tasks. This is also noticeable when the next pandemic could get tight again between the skate course and the drinking fountain. Parks have to meet quite a few expectations, demands, and now norms and standards as well. And use design and landscape architecture to help.

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