Enrique Arenas Laorga, Basabe Montalvo Luis Manuel, Luis Palacios Labrador
Wildgarten Quartier in Wien. Ten Vectors for a Democratic and Sustainable Urban Development in Southwest Vienna
Wildgarten was born eight years ago, in 2009, as a winning entry in the EUROPAN-10 competition in Vienna. The competition brief required the development of an entirely new urban fabric on a quite isolated green island in the city’s southwest, between a big municipal cemetery and an amorphous sea of single-family houses and small allotment gardens. The proposal’s primary intention was to carefully reread and re-write the essence of peripheral urbanity, and its notable tendency to privatisation and dispersal. It was not about creating something instead of the suburb but much more about delving deeper into its structuring elements, and about looking for ways to transcend its evident lack of compactness, efficiency, complexity and cohesion through its own logic. From a theoretical point of view, the project’s approach was very much influenced by the authors’ contextual circumstances. In fact, it was a frontal reaction to the failed over-planning of Spanish peripheries, which have left a degraded landscape around cities like Madrid. At that time, a whole generation of young Spanish offices was desperately looking for alternatives to it, resulting in a whole range of process-oriented, participative and collaborative planning approaches. The search for this kind of alternative to conventional urbanism found a fertile ground in Vienna’s political context. On one hand, the decennial Strategic Plan STEP’05 has stimulated the consolidated city’s densification through big housing developments on former industrial grounds. On the other hand, the Green Party’s entry into the municipal Government in 2010 was a catalyst for a series of innovative planning and development initiatives, such as collaborative processes, participative design actions and co-housing projects. They have happened to fertilise “red Vienna’s” housing traditions quite well, and have been crucial for the success of many large Viennese housing projects over the past years, certainly including Wildgarten. The following text lists a series of intentional positions – what we like to call vectors – , which have been crucial in the conceptualisation, definition and development of the project. They aim to explain the project genesis and its underlying ideas, but also happen to build a quite accurate outline of our office’s approach to the city and its production. Liquid City
What is the role of the planner in the production of the city, that shows itself increasingly as an extremely complex and changing reality?
We understand planning as the generation of infrastructural supports, not only for buildings but also for the many processes that make up the city. Regarding Wildgarten, we have understood our task as the definition of a flexible support, capable of
Planum. The Journal of Urbanism
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