The area of the former airport Aspern, once the first airport in Austria, having been in decay for decades, is where Vienna’s biggest and most ambitious development project happens. It’s called “Seestadt Aspern” and the idea is, to build high and condensed. One of Vienna’s Underground lines, the line U2, has been elongated to strongly tie the new “Lake City” to the center.
Our government has been criticized a lot for the “waste of money”, but I really appreciate the big idea and the strong vision. After all, it’s a chicken/egg problem: you can’t get a profitable train line into an area where nobody lives, but then, why would anybody want to live there without basic infrastructure?
Big government? It’s still not clear whether they’ll succeed and there’s a lot that could potentially go wrong, but if there is a right way to do something like that, this is it.
The Song of the Day is “Dots & Lines” by Lupe Fiasco. Hear it on YouTube.