TEACHING / Wild Metropolis
Housing Design Studio, 2020/21
Research Unit of Housing and Design, TU Wien
Baroque, intoxication, flesh, madness, excess, lust...Vienna has an enormous atmospheric potential that (still) slumbers within the city body.
The urban promise of freedom, excitement and progress can only partially be fulfilled by the Smart City proclaimed as the "City of the Future". The rationalization of everyday life and infrastructural optimization that can be achieved through digitization are juxtaposed with open questions about future social, political and constructional aspects that enable specific qualities such as diversity, accessibility and openness.
The fruitful conflictualness threatens to be levelled out, the system Smart-City strives for standardized spaces and normalized urbanity - there is thus a need for irritation.
We will explore how Viennese nodes as infrastructural hubs within the existing urban network can provide the impetus for a transformation of Vienna into a "wild metropolis".
How can infrastructural, structural, functional, and social overlapping create density points that set pinpricks for a progressive development of Vienna into a post-capitalist metropolis?
How can this density of urban and private space be used to create enabling spaces for the multi-socio-cultural, the anonymous, the different, the bulky - even the wild?
What diverse typologies of housing can develop in this metropolitan millieu and contribute to an inclusive, equal, open, diverse and ultimately "exciting" urban society?