The Unlivable Livable City
From planting more trees to building out the city’s district cooling network, Vienna's climate change policies need to make the city inhabitable for everyone
Servus!
Paris is preparing for a future in which summer temperatures hit highs of 50°C (122°F) and planning to spending hundreds of millions of euros to make the city habitable. The French capital will have to plant trees, create shaded areas at the street level, and build out its district cooling and clean water infrastructure. Thousands of social housing units, hundreds of schools and kindergartens, and many other public buildings will have to be retrofitted with better windows, appropriate shutters, greened roofs, and shaded common areas.
So goes Paris, so goes the continent. “Since the 1980s, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth,” state the Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization. “Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, and southern Europe is seeing widespread droughts. Glaciers in all European regions continue to melt” with, for the Swiss village of Blatten for example, disastrous consequences.
In Vienna, temperatures in 2100 may be five degrees (Celsius) warmer than they were at the beginning of this decade, and the tipping point is approaching after which the Austrian capital will become uninhabitable at the high point of summer. In the fight against climate change—or, perhaps, with climate change—Vienna does have certain in-built advantages: excellent municipal water and public transport networks, growing investments in district heating and cooling, large areas of park- and woodland, plus its social housing stock. The city’s governing apparatus is also broad, deep, and interventionist, meaning it can force through climate change policy.
And yet: Vienna is a city in which, for too long, the car has held dominion over the cyclist and the pedestrian. Park- and woodland is too often concentrated in places like the Burggarten and Schönbrunn Palace, leaving densely-built urban areas in poorer districts devoid of natural shade and cooling. Too many urban developments, including those completed in the past 10 to 20 years, resemble ‘concrete deserts,’ and some efforts to fix this—for example, introducing fountains that spray cold water into the air, increasing humidity while wasting a valuable resource—haven’t been properly thought through.
With this in mind, the old-new city government of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and liberal NEOS plans to:
Create up to 400,000 square meters of new parkland over the next five years,
Plant at least 20,000 new trees,
Promote the ‘greening’ of building facades, roofs, and courtyards via new financial and regulatory incentives,
Expand the use of photovoltaic panels to generate solar energy and continue the phaseout of fossil fuel heating systems,
Build new U-Bahn and tram lines and explore expanding the above-ground rail network,
Introduce traffic calming measures in the city center and reconfigure the Ringstrasse for the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists.
The SPÖ-NEOS program for government also raises the concept of the ‘garden street,’ described by the city as “a new innovative element of green space provision: concrete-free, intensively greened recreational areas built on urban streets primarily in densely built-up areas.” This is important because—as their coalition agreement also recognizes even if the SPÖ itself has often been too slow to do so—climate change in the urban environment is not only an environmental issue but also a social justice one. Installing (polluting) air conditioning units or escaping for two months every year to your second home in the country are not climate change solutions. Only through planting more trees, creating ‘garden streets’, ‘greening’ buildings, installing proper shutters, and building out the city’s district cooling network can Vienna be made livable for everyone.
Bis bald!
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Government Responds To School Shooting
The government plans to tighten gun control legislation, bring more psychologists and social workers into schools, and introduce social media age restrictions as part of their response to the Graz school shooting. A 21-year-old former pupil of the school shot and killed 10 people and injured 11 others during a rampage on June 10.
Pride, Still
More than 300,000 people took part in Vienna’s annual Pride Parade on Saturday. The opening stretch of the parade from city hall down to parliament took place in silence out of respect for the victims of the Graz school shooting, while representatives of the NEOS withdrew from the event.
Jewish Street Festival Off
Vienna’s Jewish community has called off its annual street festival which would have taken place on Sunday. Security considerations were not the issue; rather, the Jewish community did not wish to stage a celebratory event at a time when Israel was under attack from Iran and flights in and out of Israel were being cancelled.