Sustainable Urban Implantation
This project was a series of three commissions from the Vienna Division of Urban Development and the National Bank of Austria to make studies and proposals for an ecological overbuilding of the main rail terminal yard in the city of Vienna with a new urban neighborhood. It was designed in a collaboration between Dr. Heidi Dumreicher, director of Oikodrom: Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability, and Prof. Richard S. Levine, director of the Center for Sustainable Cities, USA. The long term goal of the Westbahnhof project, as a Sustainable Urban Implantation was to heal the wound in the urban fabric created by the tracks leading to the terminal with a dense urban node of sustainability, which would have acted as a seed for a sustainability model that would spread to rest of Vienna and beyond. To provide for its material needs, the Westbahnhof project would have used a Partnerland, the town of Mistelbach, in the countryside near Vienna. Linking the Mistelbach with the Westbahnhof City-as-a-Hill Sustainable Urban Implantation would have enhanced the life quality of citizens of both places, by not only creating an economic and materials link between them, but by also creating an important social exchange between the citizens of the two places.