Page - 28 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

28 siting futurity minder of the incursions global capital has been able to make into Vienna’s politically protected cityscape.9 My project thus nuances Saskia Sassen’s concept of tactical urbanism into a kind of tactical culturalism. If “[t]actical urban- ism can find diverse spaces in such cities, spaces that might have been previously submerged, invisible, or without voice” (Sassen 2018), tactical culturalism describes diverse cultural projects that enliven the histories of urban places and make space for the voices of radical pasts that are, for the most part, ignored or dismissed by scholars and other cultural practitioners inter- ested in more elite forms of culture and therefore for the most part unknown both outside of Vienna and in Austrian and Ger- man Studies. Which brings us to the challenges of working on Vienna and its environs, especially for someone who does not self-identify as an Austrian or even as a German Studies scholar. Rather, my academic background is in Comparative Literature and my post-national focus here is on not Austria but Vienna. While the Humanities program I am in is, at the time of writ- ing, in the process of being “rethought” in response to much the same kind of woes facing national language, literature, and culture programs,10 its wide-ranging approaches distance them- selves from the “regressive territorial language” and “attach- ment to the soil” that Latour identifies as a key aspect of the anti-climate change discourse and that remain a key orientation 9 How much longer this remains true is admittedly a question. Vienna’s status as a UNESCO world heritage site is once again imperiled, this time by a development at the Heumarkt in the inner city that threatens to include high rises that would mar the city’s postcard-perfect profile. Previous threats of tall constructions have been defeated, such as the book tower that was proposed for the Museumsquartier, or limited to the city’s periph- ery, such as UNO City on the Danube, the Hundertwasser smokestack at the Economic University (WU), and the new development in the twenty- second district. All are far enough away from the center that UNESCO does not feel they blemish the city’s historical core. 10 For a reasonably up-to-date discussion of these issues by prominent scholars in the United States, United Kingdom, and Austria, see the special section entitled “Forum: Austrian Studies” in The German Quarterly 89, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 221–39.