Page - 42 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

42 siting futurity ered tame by Viennese standards (Ebner and Vocelka 1998).4 The conservatives lost their majority in 1970, the year after color television came to Austria (Mantler 2002), and the socialists enjoyed a majority from 1970 to 1983, led by Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who initiated a plethora of reforms. It was in this color-filled, socialist national context that Vi- enna caught up with European movements protesting the prior- itizing of the land under buildings as a profit-making machinery over the buildings themselves as spaces for living. Faced with the need to house increasing populations, European cities in the grip of the modernizing zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s were quick to tear down buildings in need of repair and erect much taller, sleeker, and more profitable structures in their place, something that met with substantial resistance as “[a]ctivists confronted a dubious system in which the state protected own- ers’ right to destroy their property profitably” even in the face of an enormous housing crisis (Sedlmaier 2014, 208):5 Diese Flächensanierung — also die Zerstörung gewachsener kleinteiliger Strukturen und ihre Ersetzung durch mono- funktionale Bebauung — sowie ihre zentralstaatlich-büro- kratische Durchsetzung waren vielfach umstritten; vor allem brachte die Sanierungspolitik kaum Abhilfe für die drängen- den Wohnungsprobleme. Denn der neue soziale Wohnungs- bau war teurer als die Mieten in den abgerissenen Altbauten, und die Ausschreibung von Sanierungsgebieten und ihre öf- fentliche Finanzierung begünstigten den spekulativen Leer- stand von Wohnungen. [This form of renewal — the destruction of structures with small pieces that had grown together and their replacement 4 Clips of the Actionists’ actions can be found online on UbuWeb under the heading “The Films of the Vienna Actionists” at http://ubu.com/film/ vienna_actionists.html. 5 While the circumstances a century earlier, when Paris built its boulevards, and Vienna, its Ringstrasse, were very different, the effects on the cities’ morphologies and class structures were not too dissimilar.