October 7, 2026
The Austrian capital chose not to privatize the commons, and it shows.
The Karl-Marx-Hof public housing project in Vienna, Austria.
(Mark H. Milstein / Getty)
As a city dweller, I often find myself sandwiched between pro-social and anti-social situations. Most urban environments drift closer to one of those two poles than the other. Chicago may have beautiful parks, but it comes at the cost of anti-homeless policies like encampment clearance or hostile architecture that makes benches impossible to sit on. And that’s nothing compared to the omnipresent din of police helicopters and sirens I suffered in Baltimore. While New York City expands access to public toilets and the arts, Waymo descends upon Denver. Before visiting Vienna this past summer, I knew about its reputation as one of Europe’s most aggressively pro-social cities, boasting ample green space and excellent public transit. But I hadn’t realized how easy being there would feel, and how the city’s social-democratic attitudes toward urban planning would be reflected in liberal attitudes the people who live there have toward one another.
Many European cities are entering a fraught era of austerity, overtourism, widening income inequality, and social pressures like immigration (from both wealthy Westerners and the world’s refugees). These burdens—in addition to facilitating the slow but steady rise of nationalist and right-wing political groups and parties—are often evident in the urban built environment and the ways people interact with it.
When I was in Berlin earlier this year, Berliners were still reeling from an act of domestic terrorism in which a van plowed into a crowd at the city’s annual Pride parade. The German Historical Museum and the Bauhaus Archive were both closed for long-delayed renovations due to lack of municipal funds. Alternative für Deutschland posters crowded utility poles. The police were omnipresent, and public activism tepid following the moratorium on free speech regarding the genocide in Palestine.
Meanwhile Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city I lived in on and off during the post-lockdown years, has slowly grown unrecognizable. Already very small (its ring road is about five miles in circumference), it has been pushed to the brink by overtourism as more cruises dock there and more direct flights serve it despite its severe lack of accommodation for visitors. Slovenia carried out one of post-socialist Europe’s most radical housing privatizations after the fall of Yugoslavia. Ljubljana, which has no rent control or stabilization, has long been susceptible to rent hikes and AirBnBification. Since the country joined the EU in 2004, foreign investment has poured in to claim unoccupied luxury apartment buildings in the capital as illiquid assets. Now the cost of living has skyrocketed, and everyday life has become unpleasant because of severe overcrowding and boorish tourists.
Cities live and die based on how well they can avoid anti-social policies that privatize the commons and sell it out from under the people who live there. This doesn’t mean more policing, but rather policy decisions that keep housing affordable, free expression alive, tourism in check, and culture a core part of everyday life in a big metropolis.
Vienna stands out from other European cities first and foremost in its relationship to housing. Its “Red Vienna” period of social-democratic governance (1918–34) ushered in remarkable progressive reforms and design innovations before the rise of the Third Reich. Artists, architects, activists, politicians, and intellectuals set themselves to the task of imagining new ways to live with one another.
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Feminists like Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, who would later go on to design the famous Frankfurt Kitchen, considered the impact design had on women’s labor in the home. (The prototype for Schütte-Lihotzky’s fitted kitchen—a surprisingly groovy organic form integrating sinks and shelving—can be viewed in the Wien Museum Karlsplatz.) Architects like Karl Ehn and Josef Frank built sprawling palaces for the proletariat in the newest—that is, modernist—architectural styles, buildings in which communal living was baked in. Kindergartens, bathhouses, laundries, and kitchens were all collectivized, which saved on per-unit cost. During my visit, I was surprised to see the degree to which these famous buildings—like Ehn’s Karl-Marx-Hof, a kilometer-long public-housing complex—remain working-class strongholds, occupied by immigrants, laborers, and young families.
From the postwar period onward, the city went on to produce many proudly self-identified if architecturally demure social housing projects. While many cities have reservations about public housing, Vienna does not—it is a point of civic pride. Some 50 to 60 percent of Vienna’s population lives in social housing. Most of its non-social housing is also under some form of price regulation.
Cheap rent keeps the city affordable and dynamic. It keeps resentment against people who are different from you at bay when they are your neighbors in your city-run apartment complex. While right-wing sentiment in Austria is on the rise as a whole, Vienna remains true to its social-democratic roots. Less money spent on rent means more trips to the theater, the opera, or out to eat. It enables people to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children, for whom there is a robust municipal infrastructure of programs, playgrounds, and parks. Free, clean, and accessible public bathrooms are abundant, and a shared sense of public trust—rather than invasive surveillance—keeps them in good shape.
Of all the large cities I’ve been to in Europe, Vienna is the one with the fewest visible police officers. (Which is not to say that when political protests pop off, they don’t show up in full force.) Even the city’s transit system relies on common trust: You buy a ticket at the kiosk but do not need to validate when going through a turnstile. Many European cities unleash aggressive transit police on suspected fare evaders, but Viennese transit employees calmly check tickets at the entrance to the stations.
When public trust is high, people act in pro-social ways. A friend and I were at a vegan schnitzel place when an old man walking with a cane slipped and fell hard onto the sidewalk. All bystanders of various ages and ethnicities sprang into action to help—including the restaurant owner, who was sporting a bitcoin shirt (this is an important detail). My friend called an ambulance. I helped put his glasses back together.
It’s not that I think such a thing couldn’t come to pass in the United States (though I doubt that it would in certain parts of it). It’s that these acts of compassion and solidarity should be taken for granted in urban life, which inherently enmeshes us with others. The more cities become commodified, touristified, and homogenized, the less likely we are to extend that compassion to one another, because now we’re competing for resources. Both the left and the right tend to frame the problems of urban living as a question of how to surmount our baser instincts. The pro-social politics of Vienna give us a glimpse of how we might all be better if we assumed we all want to inhabit a better world.
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