A Public Lecture featuring Gabu Heindl

Alternatives to the Housing Crisis: Case Study Vienna. Urban Planning, Dissensual Politics and Popular Agency.

Date: Friday,May 19

Time: 7:00pm

Place: Simon Fraser University Woodwards, World Art Studio.

The worldwide crisis of a dramatic lack of affordable housing – even in affluent cities such as Vancouver and Vienna – is part of a larger urban crisis that is based on speculation of urban land, the re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, and on the collectivization of losses and the privatization of gains characteristic of neoliberalism.

Therefore, is a politics aiming at the right to affordable housing for all is necessary in this moment And housing, of course, is always more than itself – for we are housed in cities and thus also in infrastructural networks, power relations, public spaces, all of which are under pressure from market appropriation. In this talk Gabu Heindl proposes equality, justice and the enabling of political dissensus as parameters for city planning.

Using Vienna as a case study, this lecture explores the relationship of affordable housing to urban planning politics and will discuss historic and current housing policies, not least in a critical cross-analysis with the Vancouver case. Touching upon the re-articulated model function of 1920s Red Vienna, Heindl will present her approach to combining strong claims (Setzungen) in public planning with a critique of paternalistic governance and with maintaining zones of contact with popular agency.

Respondents: Stephanie Allen, Matt Hern, Wendy Pedersen

Gabu Heindl is an architect and planner from Vienna, Austria on alternatives to the housing crisis.

The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century exhibition, curated by Wolfgang Förster and William Menkins, explores housing in Vienna, Austria, through its portrait of the city’s pathbreaking approach to architecture, urban life, neighborhood revitalization, and the creation of new communities.

Exhibition Partners:

Museum of Vancouver

Western Front

SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology

SFU Institute for the Humanities

SFU School for the Contemporary Arts

SFU Urban Studies Program

UBC School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture

Vancity Office of Community Engagement

Institutional Partners: