[Image source: Research Centre for New Social Housing, TU Wien]

From 16 to 20 September 2024 Data Stories post-doctoral researcher, Danielle Hynes, attended the 2024 Summer School on New Social Housing. This was the seventh edition of the annual summer school, and this year it was held as a collaboration between TU Wien, the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Fourteen participants came from many parts of the world to learn about the past and present of the Viennese model of social housing. As the theme this year was ‘housing experiments revisited’, there was a particular focus on the past, with the participants visiting a number of housing experiments in Vienna. These included the Heimhof ‘one kitchen house’, or Einküchenhaus, a 1920s experiment in liberating women from the kitchen, which was abandoned with the rise of Austrofascism and the building was renovated to add kitchens to each of the apartments. Heimhof is now municipal housing, with beautiful rooftop gardens and onsite childcare.

[Image source: Danielle Hynes. A historical photo of one of Heimhof roof terraces, where the students now stand and hear from cultural studies scholar and historian, Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah, about the history of the building]

We also visited housing cooperative Sargfabrik (which translates to coffin factory, as the building is located where there once stood a coffin factory), an inspiring example of cooperative living that offers an alternative form of tenure to homeownership that is equally stable, but not based on private property. As well as visiting other social housing experiments, we saw community space Amerlinghaus, a site of community building and skill sharing that was able to remain a community space through activists squatting the property in the 1970s. During each of these excursions we heard from experts about their history and place in the current Viennese housing system, and had the opportunity to ask questions and connect aspects of these examples with our own contexts.

[Image source: Danielle Hynes. Students hear about the past and present of Sarfabrik from one of the founding members of the cooperative, shown here in Sargfabrik’s bath house]

As well as visiting these experiments, participants presented work of their own. Offering perspectives of housing experiments past and present from India, Croatia, Italy, the UK, the US, Colombia and Guyana. Danielle presented work building on her PhD thesis, considering how the neoliberal imaginary of housing shapes and constrained what is considered possible and desirable with regard to social housing. Alongside presentations from students, faculty members presented on the history of social housing in Vienna from multiple perspectives (sociology, urban studies, architecture). Finally, participants had the opportunity to work together on a small research task, bringing together some of the ideas we had considered during the week and connecting them with our own work, and presented these at a public event attended by officials from the City of Vienna, who responded to our presentations, generating lively discussion.

[Above image source: Danielle Hynes. Mapping housing experiments and related issues in order to generate discussion and consider the research task. Below image source: Caterina Sartori. Danielle Hynes, Anna Marocco, Arianna Scaioli and Randolph Hunte (left to right) present their research during the final seminar]

The summer school was a fantastic opportunity to connect with housing academics and practitioners from across the world, coming from many different disciplines. Whilst the summer school was not focused on issues relating to data, it offered many opportunities to connect with work relating to the Data Stories project. Presenters spoke of issues relating to the register-based census Austria conducts (instead of a traditional census), the use of data and technology in housing activism, as well as discussing methods and approaches to undertaking arts-based housing research like we do in the Data Stories project.

Danielle would like to thank the organisers, curatorial team and funders for the wonderful opportunity to participate in what was an inspiring and generative summer school.