Vienna`s Urban Waterscape 1683-1918. An environmental history

The interdisciplinary project URBWATER investigates fundamental changes of Vienna`s waterscape from 1683- 1918 and analyzes the influence of the dynamic aquatic environment for Vienna`s urban development. While the Danube and the adjacent riparian area have been reconstructed back to 1529 in the precursor project ENVIEDAN, the environmental history of its tributary system remains largely unknown. We have developed three hypotheses. (1) Different natural conditions of the urban waterscape resulted in distinct spatial adaptations of water uses. (2) The system of tributaries, hitherto almost totally neglected by historians of Vienna, played a pivotal role for city development. (3) Urban development was fundamentally influenced by both contemporary and older arrangements of water use which were often resistant to human intervention. We also assume that fundamental changes progressed in multiple steps and likely happened in a non-linear way. To test our hypotheses, we will study how changes in Vienna`s waterscape, particularly in the urban and peri-urban area west of the Danube, affected urban water use. We shall investigate modifications of resource demand and extraction technology which translated into different uses of the waterscape and affected it during the city`s transformation from a 17th century pre-modern fortified seat of the imperial court to the early 20th century industrialized capital of a by then much smaller territory. Simultaneously, Vienna`s population increased from less than 200.000 to about 2 Mio. inhabitants. To prove our assumptions, we shall study the long-term evolution of natural and social phenomena and the multiple feedback loops, unintended long-term consequences and legacies of prior uses. The study period starts with the Ottoman siege in 1683 and follows developments throughout the most dynamic phase of urban growth between 1850 and 1918. Understanding why and how a network of watercourses used in multiple ways was transformed into a predominantly subterranean set of channelled and vaulted flows is crucial to an understanding of urban spatial development and of the fundamentally changed interaction of urban actors with a dynamic, natural system. A unique, regressive-iterative approach to reconstructing historical landscapes using geographical information systems (GIS) has been developed in ENVIEDAN and will be applied and further refined. URBWATER is organized into 5 work-packages (WP). All work-packages are based on the concept of socio- natural sites as nexus between practices and arrangements and the conceptual interaction model developed in ENVIEDAN. Interdisciplinary co-operation is ensured by three means, via joint use of sources, shared concepts and a designed communication process. URBWATER will yield a time series of GIS-based maps of the urban waterscape. They are based on the detailed reconstruction of hydromorphological evolution and on a spatially explicit reconstruction of the built environment. Results will be published in high-ranking journals and a synthetic book.

URBWATER investigated the Viennese waterscape between 1683 and 1918. The project focused on the small tributaries of the Viennese Danube, thereby complementing the investigations of the precursor project ENVIEDAN (Environmental History of the Viennese Danube 1500-1890). The project aimed at enhancing our understanding why and how the urban network of surface waters was transformed and how this changed urban space as well as interactions of urban actors with their waters. URBWATER was performed by an interdisciplinary team of environmental historians, urban morphologists, hydro-morphologists and environmental scientists and showed, how environmental history studies benefit from the cooperation of scholars from the humanities and sciences. The project used the concept of socio-natural sites and a conceptual model of river-city interactions developed in ENVIEDAN. URBWATER continued the methodological advances of ENVIEDAN, especially the spatial analyses. The research team investigated the material and energetic uses of urban waters as well as hydromorphological characteristics and processes and the interplay with urban form. The project synthesis integrated the complex interactions. Our results show the large diversity of surface waters and groundwater resources and their impact on urban development as well as on the types and means of water use. For instance, the city-wide study of the milling landscape demonstrated that adapting to natural dynamics of streams was decisive for hydropower use. Harmonisation with other often conflicting water uses was also a prerequisite. Groundwater played a large role for both drinking and process water until the 1870s, when the first city-wide water pipeline supplied from Alpine springs was opened. Water-dependent crafts such as slaughtering, tanning, dyeing, textile printing, beer-brewing and chemical industry were not solely located at the rivers, which functioned mainly as waste- and wastewater discharge. The small size and specific hydrology of urban streams limited fish productivity. Local and regional fish were delivered from the Danube or from Bohemian carp ponds until the late 1890s. To date, results of URBWATER are published or accepted in nine peer-reviewed journal and book articles and 18 other articles and book chapters. A thematic issue of the International Journal of Water History is a main product. URBWATER was presented at several international and national scientific conferences and workshops (altogether 28 presentations). A larger public was informed by various articles and interviews in newspapers, journals and on national radio programs and in particular by an exhibition organized at Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv from September 2015 to February 2016.