Vienna's Historic Ground Floor and its Socio-Urban Potential - Integrative Diversity Par-terre?

摘要

In recent years, both academic discourse and administrative interventions have focused on public space, overshadowing the potential of semi-public space, that is: the ground floor and street-level environment. Public street-level space is a much coveted good: on one hand, the fight for a re-structuring of transit space seems lost, while on the other hand financially powerful, mostly global actors compete for every inch of sidewalk space, with shops, service facilities, events companies, and advertising agencies colonizing the city's open space with mobile stalls and stationary kiosks. As a result of these and other trends - both economic (closure of shops, globalization, etc.) and administrative (parking space requirement, misdirected subsidies, etc.) - Vienna's ground floor spaces are being vacated and homogenized. In order to prevent the impending abandonment of these ground floors and the connected public space, an intervention in the current process of structural evolution is needed. These spaces need to be attuned to and developed for current and future requirements. If satisfactory action is taken, the potential for a genuine New Urbanism exists - beyond any calculated orchestrations.