150 YEARS OF „BIG PLANS“ FOR VIENNA

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ROBERT MISIK IN CONVERSATION WITH RUDOLF SCHICKER
150 YEARS OF „BIG PLANS“ FOR VIENNA

Vienna has always been a city of change. Much of it happened chaotically, but much was also planned. The demolition of the city wall was followed by the Gründerzeit, the construction of the Ringstrasse and the Gründerzeit. In the First Republic, the municipal housing estates and the reorganisation into a social city. In the Second Republic, the era of the „grand plans“ began, which have been labelled „urban development plans“ since 1984 and are adopted by the municipal council every ten years.
Is Vienna today experiencing a new Gründerzeit, with the construction of entire neighbourhoods - from Seestadt to Sonnwendviertel and Nordbahnviertel, etc.? Is Vienna once again a role model in terms of „urban aesthetics“ with these new building styles that aim to avoid all the mistakes of satellite towns? What needs to be done to prevent exploding rents? How can social housing hold its own against the speculative property boom? And how can we create the climate-friendly city of the future? We debate all these questions with Rudolf Schicker, who is doubly competent: as a spatial planner, he gained professional and technological expertise, and as a politician and Vienna City Councillor for Planning between 2001 and 2010, he also has unique political expertise.

Rudolf Schicker studied surveying, spatial planning and regional planning at the Vienna University of Technology after graduating from high school. He completed his technical studies in 1976 with a degree in engineering and worked as a research assistant at the Austrian Institute for Spatial Planning until 1978. Between 1978 and 1987 he was a consultant in the Spatial Planning and Regional Policy Department of the Federal Chancellery and between 1988 and 2001 he was Managing Director of the Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK).
Rudolf Schicker became involved in politics at an early age. In 1967 he joined the Association of Socialist Secondary School Students, from 1970 to 1974 he was involved in the Red Falcons, from 1974 to 1982 in the Young Generation Vienna, where he was deputy chairman. From 1983 to 1994, Schicker was a district councillor in the 3rd district, from 1988 to 1994 he was club chairman of the SPÖ-Landstraße, from 1994 to 2001 he was a local councillor and member of parliament for the 3rd district. From 2001 to 2010, he was a member of Vienna's provincial government as a planning councillor.
Since 2014, Schicker has been one of the two coordinators for the Institutional Capacity and Cooperation sub-area of the European Union Strategy for the Danube Region, based within Wien Holding. Since 2018, he has held a similar position as Head of the Vienna-based International Danube Strategy Point of the Danube Region Strategy.

Moderation Robert Misik, Author and journalist