[A European city] that is still livable—with a tourist interior with increasingly higher rents but affordable housing just outside and an extremely efficient system of public transportation which makes commuting easy—is Vienna. The design for this type of housing is to be found in the city’s history and particularly in the period 1919 to 1934, called “Red Vienna,” where first Socialists and then Social Democrats were in power, and where the major project was the construction of not just public housing but also complexes such as the still standing Karl-Marx-Hof that were cultural centers as well.

The 100-year anniversary of the movement is being celebrated in the city with two exhibits at the Karl-Marx-Hof and at the Wien Museum opposite Vienna’s city hall, both of which call attention to this building feat. When the exhibition toured New York, it was met with overwhelming enthusiasm as architects and city planners flocked to see how Vienna in a previous period had made progress on a problem that is supposedly at the center of Mayor Bill De Blasio’s agenda. The social theorist Karl Polyani described the period as one where “a highly developed industrial working class…achieved a level never reached before by the masses of people in any industrial society.

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