Vienna often takes the top spot in the most liveable city rankings conducted by respectable names such as The Economist, Mercer, Monocle etc. I have therefore been curious to visit for a while. I finally got the chance in the middle of the corona times this summer.
Vienna has many things going for it. It has for centuries been a hub for arts, music and culture. The city of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven. Also Sigmund Freud. It is also well known for its vibrant coffee culture Kaffeehauskultur bringing people together around coffee and pastry to chat about life, art, culture and the mundane.
My idea for the trip was to explore by moving around on foot, bus and trams. The city is divided into 23 districts of which the first 9 form the inner core and the remaining 14 are more suburban in nature. I started the day by walking on the high street in the 6th district — Gumpedorfer Strasse — a fairly high-end commercial street with shops, restaurants and cafes. It was hot and sunny today, around 30 degrees. After the first walk, i took the tram to cover the tourist spots. The museum quarter MQ in the 7th district. The Belvedere Palace, Rathaus etc. A cool thing about sreet names in Vienna is that the first digit(s) in them neatly capture which district they are in. So you always know where you are.
Back to the liveability of the city. Most western European countries have a high quality of life with benefts like affordable healthcare and free public education. So why would a Vienna rank higher than say Paris, London or Amsterdam was an area of enquiry. And my guess is the answer probably lies in affordable housing.
Most if not all big cities today are suffering from high costs of home ownership. This is making it harder for younger people to enter the housing market and increasing suburbanization. In Vienna though tenancy is the most common form of housing. The quality of community housing is of a high standard. And rents are affordable, ballpark 600–900 euros per month for a two/three room apartment in a decent neighborhood. This is a conscious effort by the state to prevent ghetosisation in the city and make sure that high income and low income people can live as neighbors. The state is the largest residentital property owner in Vienna.
So while London may be a lot livelier, diverse and culturally richer, an average Jill will likely be pushed out to a far out suburb where she may sometimes feel scared walking home late at night or be living with roommates at 40. She may thereofore be better off living in Vienna and actually experiene what the city has to offer from time to time, even if the price it requires of her is to learn saying wunderbar everytime she has the urge to say how delightful. But hey Jill, don’t take my word for it. Where you can take my word Jill is that you can do spontaneous weekends in the Alps or city breaks in Munich, Prague, Budapest to name a few.
Is the community housing solving completely for ghetosisation? Probably not. I headed to Favoriten, a suburb in the 10th district and took long walks along Favoitenstrasse and the longest street Gudrunstrasse to see for myself. Favoriten felt a bit run down and it seemed to have a lot of immigrants, walking around i noticed many Turkish and Arabic joints and majority of the people on the streets also seemed to be from these communities. The vision of everyone living everywhere is noble and Vienna may even have come longer than other cities in achieving that. But solve completely for pocketisation, it hasn’t. It’s a hard one to crack for a variety of cultural and economic reasons. Classes rarely mix well.
