The fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent enlargement of the European Union eastward presented special opportunities for the two cities which had lost their hinterland after the second world war: Berlin and Vienna.
Time had come to reconnect ancient ties and build an integrated future for central Europe. Schwechat, a municipality adjacent to the City of Vienna has a particularly privileged position. Judith Ryser speculates on an earlier urban planning proposal to present day.
Hosting Vienna’s International airport presents unique opportunities for innovative growth and development, yet its expansion with a third runway brings about serious challenges for the local environment which is already stressed by heavy industry, including one of the largest European oil refineries with a connected plastics plant and an important brewery in the middle of the town centre.
Moreover, Schwechat is a natural multimodal logistics node. A main European east west axis runs through it, linking Austria to Bratislava and Budapest. Proposals for north south motorway links between the Baltic and the Adriatic are converging in Schwechat where they connect up with main ring road of Vienna. A fast train links the airport to Vienna city centre and is planned to connect Bratislava and its national airport 60 km away.
Schwechat has a port on the Danube for freight transport and is integrated in the regional rail network with a major marshal yard for Vienna’s rail transport. Main pipelines run also through Schwechat, connecting the refinery to crude oil sources and distributing refined oil to users throughout Europe. The image of Schwechat is one of an industrial town, with smoke stacks and smells, a place to travel through rather than a destination.
Brief
Schwechat’s ambition is to redress this image. A closer look uncovers tremendous environmental assets, the natural park along the Danube and its tributaries, the river Schwechat and others with their green banks running through the town centre. In the regional plan, Schwechat is designated as part of Vienna’s green belt, although the most desirable natural areas are the forests and vineyards in the western and northern outskirts of Vienna.
Schwechat is composed of its main town and several villages dispersed among green fields, some with fertile land for agriculture. It is fostering affordable housing in this green environment to attract young knowledge workers and is implementing sustainable energy use.
Its ambition is to increase its residents from 16,000 to 20,000 to reach city status. This should be achievable as it hosts more workplaces than residential premises, 10,000 of the 18,000 jobs are provided by the airport alone which, until the economic crisis, was growing rapidly as the main central European hub with fast connections to the Middle East.
Schwechat wants to take advantage of its prime location to become a supra-regional knowledge hub. Owing to the Austrian fiscal system, Schwechat is a rich municipality and is wisely investing in knowledge economy infrastructure. It has built business parks and regenerated the town centre.
It has good leisure and sports facilities, besides some restored historic buildings put into public use. Its latest addition is a multifunctional conference centre, well connected to the airport and its golf course adds to the assets sought by high earners.
This panorama depicts the contradictory issues which an international team of planners (offered in the form of an Urban Planning Advisory Team – UPAT – by Isocarp – International Society of City and Regional Planners) had to confront when they were invited in 2007 to contribute development strategies to accommodate the wishes of their two clients, the municipality and the airport authority.
UPAT Approach
It was not possible to ignore the importance of institutional hurdles hampering bold, integrative projects, despite Centrope, an ambitious trans-regional institution coopted by local politicians to strengthen an emerging polycentric mega-region which benefits from EU regional structural funds. Centrope encompasses cities and regions in four countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Austria with at its heart the city of Vienna, amounting to 6.5 million population (compared with 8 millions of Austria), 3.5 million jobs, 25 universities with 250’000 students, three international airports, two Danube ports.
From its inception to 2003 its GDP rose from 0.8% to 3.6%. Despite its common vision for 2015, few projects were realised across these competing regions besides information pooling. An example is the failure of Vienna and Bratislava airports to pool their resources while establishing some mutually beneficial division of labour. When revisiting Schwechat in 2010, the market seems to have achieved what institutions were unable to construct to their mutual advantage.ii Despite a dynamic mayor and a competent team, the municipality of Schwechat did not have the appetite to bid for a more proactive management of Centrope proposed by UPAT.
UPAT focused on three layers of decision making and vertical cooperation between them to achieve the necessary attractiveness of Schwechat as an international hub of the knowledge society. They devised various scenarios and made proposals for the regeneration of the existing fabric, using traffic calming to reduce existing through traffic and turning the high street into an eco-boulevard for urban living.
Retaining viable existing industries required pollution curbing and fostering innovation to attract clean, sustainable industries to a cluster where they could draw on existing strengths and diversify into high value added goods and services.
Four scenarios
Ensuing a SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), four complementary scenarios emerged. ‘Centropolis’, benefiting from Centrope cooperation, was building on Schwechat’s international infrastructure, and postulated the idea of a Freeport connected to air and water transport with ancillary activities to turn Schwechat into a high value added logistics node.
‘Airport City’ was advocating synergy between municipal services and airport related growth, including creating greater connections with the knowledge hub. Housing provision for staff formed part of this strategy to reduce commuting and raise the population within the municipality. ‘Living Lab’ was to be lead by CEIT,iii a technology institute funded by the municipality to develop eHealth and ICT specialisms and expanding to sustainable energy technologies in cooperation with existing energy industries.
New R&D could benefit from the cooperation with Vienna Technical University, and start ups could form the core of an expanding technology park with incubation facilities, resorting to live experiments involving the local population. ‘A Place to Meet’ was valorising the many high quality places and facilities of Schwechat for more intensive use of recreation, ecology tourism and meetings by visitors, airport staff and passengers. This included interactive e-Communication and city marketing.
Synthesis
UPAT saw its task as concentrating on strategic concepts with regional and international ramifications to cope with planning constraints and enhance Schwechat’s identity and urbanity.
Valorising the large amount of green belt land, the strategy proposed to densify the town centre and the existing villages and to use the land blighted by the third runway to create an innovation hub of regional importance which would constitute a physical link between the airport and the town centre.
Schwechat’s future as a knowledge hub could resort to creative synergy between existing industries and brands, its outstanding transportation networks, its cooperation with Vienna Technical University and many international R&D activities, its proximity to Vienna and its cultural offer, as well as its rich nature reserves.
It was a matter of transforming Schwechat from a through corridor into a destination. This required a balancing act between steering natural trends towards sustainable development while coping with commercial pressures towards low value logistics.
Implementation tools
Such a bold vision requires institutional capacity-building and better communication between the key stakeholders, horizontally as well as vertically. Centrope should be harnessed, together with the international knowledge network, activities coordinated with the city of Vienna. At the local level Schwechat would benefit from closer links between local industries, the airport, residents and commuting communities.
Evaluation
The UPAT visions had surprised both clients, although both held high ambitions for Schwechat’s future. UPAT was hoping that their intervention would lead to a closer dialogue between them to derive realistic possibilities from the UPAT scenario which was kept deliberately bold, the privilege of an outside standpoint.
Short interventions from the outside can have positive catalytic effects and reassessing them after a period of time can provide instructive lessons, both for clients and professionals. The global economic crisis had changed the optimistic mood of Schwechat. The good news was that its considerable impacts on its industries and the airport confirmed its internationality. Drastic changes were a good reason to revisit the UPAT proposals and what had become of them.
A brief desk review showed the difficulties affecting Vienna and Bratislava airports, the fading of Centrope, and a change of emphases by the municipality resorting to its industrial strength. What – if anything – of UPAT’s vision could be of use in the current circumstances? Cooperation between the municipality and the airport did not seem to have intensified. Nor were new sustainable industries settling in Schwechat.
There was no data about how many new residents had moved to Schwechat since then. The technology institute had successfully restructured to carry out R&D projects and provide high tech training. The refurbishment of the town centre has been completed, albeit without going all the way of turning the high-street into an eco-boulevard. A kindergarten has been completed and a new convention centre is being built next to Schwechat railway station which has already a full programme of activities lined-up. The municipality is keeping the momentum going, but strictly within its remit regarding its responsibilities towards its constituents, without excursions into international ambitions.
Currently Schwechat presents a pleasant image with its convivial walk- and cycle- ways, green spaces, sports facilities, children play spaces, shops, cultural venues, pubs and cafes. The town hall is practising an open policy to ensure that the public services are accessible and used. However, only a hands-on survey can answer questions more realistically about future development opportunities. Such an undertaking may prove difficult in the current circumstances but would be of value as investments and resources are bound to become of a premium in an increasingly interdependent world having to share finite means for their future. An evidence based knowledge cluster, such as this follow-up would provide both the municipality, the airport, other key stakeholders and prospective investors with a competitive advantage.
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Judith Ryser, Isocarp, Urban Planning Advisory Team leader
CityScope Europe, www.urbanthinker.com © London July 2010
Reference
1 – UPAT Isocarp reported back to the clients and published a report in 2007 written by the team leader Judith Ryser with inputs from the whole team. www.isocarp.com
2 – See: Judith Ryser. 2010. What happens to the east-west cornucopia? regional development opportunities in Schwechat revisited. Paper given at CORP10. www.corp.at
3 – CEIT was instrumental in making the UPAT 2007 happen and assisted with the running and production of the outcome. www.ceit.at
Such a bold vision requires institutional capacity-building and better communication between the key stakeholders, horizontally as well as vertically. Centrope should be harnessed, together with the international knowledge network, activities coordinated with the city of Vienna. At the local level Schwechat would benefit from closer links between local industries, the airport, residents and commuting communities.
