In Vienna, a mini forest has to make way for a multi-storey car park. A city not far from Vienna shows that things could be different.
Crime scene 1020 Vienna. At the beginning of last week, the Pensionsversicherungsanstalt (PVA) had numerous trees cleared on its property at Handelskai in a cloak-and-dagger operation. There is already a garage with 762 parking spaces under the glass complex. But that’s not all, a 17.5 meter high garage will now offer space for another 442 cars on a 2000 square meter green area.
The fact that the public connection to the PVA is excellent and could be further improved by extending the S45 – the track bed already exists – is apparently irrelevant. Desperate drivers looking for a parking space are said to be circling the area due to the lack of capacity in the existing underground car park. A fairy tale, as residents report: bottlenecks only occur regularly when visitors crowd into the nearby Serbian church or when the Danube Island Festival is taking place.
Grotesque: garage instead of green
How practical for the PVA that everyone involved seems to have their hands tied: From the point of view of the building inspectorate, all regulations were observed. All parties in the district reject the construction of the multi-storey car park, but they too have no legal recourse. And the Ministry of Social Affairs, which is entrusted with the supervision of the PVA, “has no possibility to stop this project for ecological reasons”. It can only intervene in questions of expediency, economy and economy.
It’s grotesque: Vienna is increasingly groaning under heat waves – which will become more frequent – but there is obviously always room for another concrete monster. There may be so many studies that Austria’s cities are being sealed more and more or that “mini forests” improve the urban climate significantly. A city in Lower Austria, not far from Vienna, shows that things can actually be done differently. In Tulln, the Nibelungenplatz, which has been sealed off with parking spaces, is being converted into a green space. Green instead of garage, the signs of the times were recognized here.
2023-08-21 06:23:47
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