Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the interrelatedness of social housing politics and questions of belonging, dispersed relationships and social practices in a municipal housing complex in Vienna. Findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out within the KASS (Kinship and Social Security) project.

Paper long abstract:

Municipal housing in Vienna has increasingly been a focus of media and political attention during the last months in Austria: the implementation of the EU-Council Directive 2003/109/EC of 25 November 2003 concerning the status of third-country nationals who are long-term residents requesting the opening of municipal housing for non-Austrian-citizens, and the rising concern of an impending "ghettoisation" of social housing have been widely discussed.

Against the background of the specific Viennese situation of social housing politics and diversity politics, this paper deals with questions of belonging, multilocal relationships and social practices in a municipality housing complex, and its challenges for politics on one hand and anthropological research on the other hand.

Today in Vienna about 600,000 people live in so called "Gemeindebauten", public housing estates owned by the municipality. Up to now, besides "social needs", the eligibility for social housing in Vienna has been linked to Austrian citizenship and a minimum of two years main residence in Vienna by the time of application. Thus, inclusion and exclusion of certain social groups has been one of the major consequences of social housing politics in Vienna.

In Vienna about 300 housing estates were built during the "Red Vienna" era (the time of Social Democratic Administration of the Viennese municipality from 1918 to 1934) Besides providing affordable housing for working class residents, a fundamental idea of the social housing projects was to support a corporate feeling among the tenants, and thus to effect and to ensure solidarity and a sense of "lived community".

As for "Karl Marx-Hof", considered as the archetype and most outstanding example of Vienna's municipal housing of this period, this was supposed to be fostered on the one hand through the architecture of the complex, characterized by big interior courtyards with paths, squares and playgrounds. On the other hand, the complex accommodated several community and social facilities such as a counselling centre for mothers, a dental clinic, a library, a youth home, two kindergartens, two central washhouses and two public baths.

Since the opening of Karl Marx-Hof and its 1.400 apartments in 1930 the inhabitants' composition has diversified significantly regarding education, family structures, employment structures and region of origin; the latter especially due to the rising proportion of naturalized immigrants, who have moved in mainly during the past ten to 15 years.

The originally endorsed feeling of community has changed remarkably. The developments of the last decades, new neighbourhoods and a rising diversity have led to a deteriorating reputation of living in Karl Marx-Hof and are holding potential for conflicts among neighbours and tenants. These developments and the recent discussions around the opening of municipal housing also to non-Austrian citizens pose new challenges on the political and social level which need to be analysed and dealt with in the near future.

The paper offers a deeper insight into Austrian and especially Viennese social housing politics and its interrelatedness with exclusion and inclusion of different social groups and reflects upon the impact of urban diversity on social security.

Findings presented in the paper are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Vienna's Karl Marx-Hof between May 2005 and March 2006, within the interdisciplinary project "KASS - Kinship And Social Security", funded by the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme. The project draws upon the importance of kinship networks and networks of "alternative" kinship (friendship, neighbourhood) as sources of security and mutual assistance. Fieldwork consisted of qualitative interviews, structured genealogical interviews, participant observation and informal conversations with inhabitants of the housing complex, as well as qualitative interviews with experts of social and local institutions.