Vienna, a city seen through a feminist lens

Our second field trip as part of our Environmental Justice program led us this time to Vienna, with our partners from Virage Énergie, the Seine-Saint-Denis department, and the City of Paris. On the agenda: the topic of gender-sensitive urban planning, a hallmark of the City of Vienna, which has been implemented for over 30 years in housing development, park design, and budget management... We also addressed the issue of energy through a meeting with Our Power and the Austrian Energy Agency, focusing on the movement to reclaim energy production and the challenges related to including women and young people in these movements. Finally, we met with Alexandra Jing-i Wang, who coordinated the Der gute Rat  initiative launched by Marlene Engelhorn—an Austrian activist and heiress who mobilized a group of citizens as representative as possible of Austrian society to propose ideas beneficial to society for the use of her fortune.

Among the questions that guided and preoccupied us during these meetings: what does the city’s iconic feminist approach look like 30 years after its launch, how has it become institutionalized, and how does it integrate the more recent challenges facing these movements (diversity, intersectionality, etc.)? How do these gender priorities engage with more recent challenges regarding climate and environmental issues? How do these initiatives align with or challenge our own practices?

In the 1990s, under the leadership of urban planner Eva Kail, the Austrian capital began to focus on the specific needs of women. She established the Frauenbüro and launched a series of pilot projects, including the Frauen-Werk-Stadt (external link), a residential complex designed in part by architect Elsa Prochazka. The aim was to better address child care, a sense of safety in public spaces, the diversity of family structures, and the need for flexible apartment layouts. These initiatives led to the development of a series of recommendations and guidelines (external link) for city administration to create more inclusive public spaces. 

One observation remains today, shared by Julia Girardi-Hoog, Director of Urban Planning: the disappearance of women from public spaces as they grow older. The city is working to involve young girls in planning projects to address their needs regarding recreational spaces and safety. For example, emphasis is placed on the quantity and diversity of street furniture to offer a variety of gender-neutral uses (inclusive play and sports areas, the creation of seating areas and platforms that can be used for gathering to chat, engaging in artistic activities, dancing, etc.). 

To enhance the sense of safety, urban planning focuses on ensuring that people can “see and be seen” and on lighting; in parks, this involves creating open spaces with minimal low-lying vegetation and shrubs to promote social surveillance. The issue is also addressed through services offered to users, particularly the ability to report any problematic or unusual situation that creates a sense of insecurity: a “hotline” system allows users to submit requests regarding the layout of spaces or lighting; emergency call boxes located at tram stations allow users to alert authorities in case of a problem by connecting them to a live operator who can provide reassurance or dispatch assistance.

Among the points of tension is the conflict between the priorities of securing public spaces—which leads to limiting low or intermediate vegetation layers—and biodiversity concerns, which would instead call for denser vegetation. We also considered the diversity of women’s profiles: how, for example, can we better account for the specific situation of women of color (given that Vienna is home to communities from various immigrant backgrounds—Eastern Europe, Turkey, Russia), which may act as a barrier to their engagement with public spaces, the commons, and public policies?

To date, a gender-sensitive perspective has become deeply embedded within the administration. This commitment has been institutionalized through, among other things, a Gender Mainstreaming Department, established in 1991 and now directly integrated into the general directorate that oversees the City’s strategy; internal training courses that must be completed, for example, to hold positions of responsibility; or a handbook titled “Gender mainstreaming - made easy (external link),” which offers advice supported by very concrete examples for integrating this approach into staff practices, covering topics such as language and representations (including inclusive writing in all communications), methods of analysis and data collection (systematically incorporating gendered data), accessibility to services, decision-making and management practices (during meetings, how many women and men are invited? What are their hierarchical positions, and what roles will they play? etc.), steering and evaluation processes, the development of standards and regulations (by questioning gender biases reflected, for example, in acceptable noise limits set for construction workers but not for early childhood educators), public spending (promoting women’s participation in the execution of public contracts), etc.

This also involves the annual implementation of a “gender-responsive budget (external link)” by the city’s 60 departments, which scrutinize their projects to assess the relevance of their actions in terms of gender equality. Michela Shatz, head of the city’s Gender Budgeting Department, describes approaches that align with best practices for implementing a carbon or climate budget: the importance of integration across departments and cross-cutting approaches, the transformation of governance models, the involvement of staff and the issue of competencies, and tools for monitoring and evaluation—all within an integrated framework that enables more precise steering and clearer policy decisions. 

How, exactly, do these two issues intersect? The city has indeed adopted a climate law that combines transition and social justice, along with a roadmap that also includes a climate budget. The latter is quantified, unlike the gender-responsive budget, which does not specify a financial value. Our interviewee explains this choice by pointing to the greater difficulty in quantifying measures related to the gendered approach, but also by the fact that gender equality is less widely accepted than the transition. The City, moreover, communicates little publicly about the gendered approach (which is used primarily as an internal management tool) and finds it easier to discuss the concept of quality of life with the general public.

Since 2019, the city of Vienna and its universities (26 universities and 120 research institutes) have committed to strengthening their collaboration, particularly on climate issues. On the part of public institutions, the applications are diverse and similar to those of French local governments: better understanding the causes of climate change, identifying future trends, providing scientific backing to justify government actions and explain their rationale, and supporting the development of solutions, tools, programs, and indicators to address these challenges.

A fairly sophisticated dialogue process has been established, bringing together nearly 200 experts and officials to identify the research needs of city departments and formulate research questions specific to the municipality (external link); these are organized into 16 themes, one of which focuses on climate justice. The goal of the final document is to serve as a practical tool to facilitate dialogue and joint projects (led by clearly identified thematic leaders). For universities, the catalog is intended to provide guidance, align research topics with the specific needs of local governments, and give research projects a concrete field of application with access to data and users. For the institution, it allows staff members to access a solid body of scientific knowledge on the topics they deal with on a daily basis.  

Beyond this catalog, other activities and events embody this collaboration, such as sessions to curate research findings for public officials, or, conversely, “policy briefs” written by researchers for elected officials to summarize the key scientific findings on a given topic. Meetings are also organized in libraries to allow researchers to share their research topics.

The goal of the cooperation between researchers and the City is to ensure “a high quality of life in Vienna for everyone”; the way research themes and questions are organized may bring to mind the mission-based approach theorized by economist Mariana Mazzucato (Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, UCL). Without claiming any direct connection to her work, this approach provides a common framework for the various research projects that can be conducted across diverse disciplinary fields.  

We were also welcomed by Anke Schaffartzik, a researcher in environmental science and policy at the Central European University, for a conference-workshop titled “Who Shapes the City” with young researchers and members of civil society to share our respective approaches. Citizen participation, conflicts, and the role of unions; the intersection of social disadvantages based on gender, origin, and social class; artistic interventions in public spaces to challenge the dominance of cars in the city; and mobility constraints faced by minorities in Paris, Vienna, Istanbul, and South India were among the themes discussed during this meeting, which was notable for the greater representation of women and researchers from gender and ethnic minorities among the participants. 

In Vienna, a number of organisations are taking the lead on the energy transition by striving to make it as inclusive as possible. OurPower is an energy co-operative founded in Vienna in 2018, whose aim is to involve citizens in the electricity market. It connects producers and consumers by running a ‘marketplace’. Traditionally, energy producers tend to be predominantly male and from rural areas, but OurPower runs the ‘Women’s Dialogue’ platform, a space where women can come together in discussion groups on the energy transition and support one another in becoming energy producers (via the roofs of their homes or by installing wind turbines, ground-mounted solar panels, biogas plants or hydroelectric dams on land they own). Our Power also offers specific time slots during which female customers are guaranteed to speak to a female adviser who can answer their questions about energy with kindness and without judgement.

For its part, the Austrian Energy Agency is running several projects to promote women’s involvement in the energy sector, such as the ‘Equality in Energy Transition Initiative’, an initiative aimed at accelerating gender equality and diversity as part of the transition to renewable energy. It is also taking part in the European Gender4Power project, which helps to develop gender-equitable energy solutions within local energy communities.

In 2024, a unique initiative was launched in Austria: Der Gute Rat, spearheaded by Marlene Engelhorn, heiress to a vast industrial fortune, who was determined to donate 24 million euros to causes of public interest. To this end, a panel of 50 people was selected by random draw from 10,000 invitations, with particular care taken to ensure social representativeness. The aim was to overcome the usual participation biases and include profiles often absent from such schemes. Generous remuneration, full coverage of expenses, translation services, childcare or specific support: everything was designed to remove barriers to participation. Over a six-week period, supported by facilitators and experts, the participants deliberated on the allocation of these funds, using a consensus-building method aimed at reaching a shared agreement. The result: 77 organisations supported, and a consensus reached more quickly than expected, despite the diversity of participants' backgrounds and initial opinions.
However, it is difficult to turn this experience into a replicable model. Its cost (2 million euros), the scale of the resources mobilised and the exceptional nature of the approach - a private redistribution outside any institutional framework - make it a unique case. But it is precisely this freedom that makes it a valuable testing ground. The evaluation highlights, in particular, the participants' ability to engage with complex issues, develop their skills and evolve their viewpoints within a demanding deliberative framework. For some, the experience even constituted the first genuine recognition of their voice within a democratic process. Here, the quality of the journey undertaken seems to matter just as much as the final outcome, inviting us to take a close look at what such citizen immersion actually achieves in practice.
At the heart of the scheme lies a highly pragmatic approach to redistribution: no theoretical debate, but a simple, tangible question: what should be done with 25 million euros? Participants were thus led to weigh up priorities, using criteria that combined social impact, justice, the credibility of stakeholders and long-term transformation. Rather than redistributing funds directly to individuals, they chose to fund organisations, following an approach similar to that of public policy. Whilst this approach highlights a practical way of tackling inequalities, some grey areas remain: there is little information on how these issues were experienced and debated in depth, or on the actual effects in terms of transforming public debate. Somewhere between a democratic experiment, an act of activism and a public relations campaign, 'Der Gute Rat' initiative thus leaves a series of questions unanswered, particularly regarding its ability - or lack thereof - to inspire other, more everyday forms of action.

This article was written collaboratively by the participants on this journey. Thank you to all of them!