Concept
WHAT WOULD BE
“BETTER LIVING” FOR ALL?
The objective of the AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING is to explore opportunities, spaces, and rules that provide BETTER LIVING for all. The exhibition asks how such BETTER LIVING can be successfully implemented, illustrated by examples from two cities, Vienna and Rome. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to join the AGENCY and, in doing so, to become part of a transformation. During the Biennale, the courtyard of the pavilion will become the AGENCY’s working and negotiation space, in which models and processes for and architectural approaches to BETTER LIVING will be developed together with visitors and other actors as part of a packed program of events.
SPECULATION VERSUS
THE RIGHT TO A HOME
Nothing is more urgent today than the issue of affordable housing. Apartments have long since become tradable financial products or, seen another way, objects of speculation. The provision of living space is widely left to the private sector, rents are rising rapidly, and cities are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Investment or luxury apartments are being built instead of social housing and existing properties are being let out via Airbnb. Capitalist market mechanisms are increasingly determining how well or badly one can live in a city. People who have to spend more than half of their income on rent are no longer able to afford life in the city and are being squeezed out. The situation is explosive, which is why this is precisely the moment for beginning to approach living in a new way.
Sonnwendviertel neighbourhood, one of the new city districts in Vienna
Photo: Paul Sebesta
DWELLING AND WORKING,
LIVING AND LOVING
So what would be BETTER LIVING for all? Our belief is that we will not be saved by economic solutions alone. In an age of multiple crises, we must take a comprehensive look at how we define our relationships with other people, with the city and its existing fabric, and with nature – at how we dwell and work, live and love together. A city’s resources belong to all its citizens, they all have the right to BETTER LIVING – and this would be an excellent starting point. The economic model must be the right one, for then the architecture will also be able to ensure that our shared existence is more social, selfless, communicative, climate-friendly, and empathetic.
TOP-DOWN
VERSUS BOTTOM-UP
The AGENCY FOR BETTER LIVING seeks alternatives to speculative housebuilding. And it does so by putting forward the following hypothesis: In order to find better forms of living together for the future, we must learn many things from many sides. The Austrian Biennale contribution recounts two parallel but very different “mythical” stories about two divergent approaches. The first is the successful story of the planning of social housing in Vienna, a unique system that stretches back over more than a century and in which a city has ensured that (almost) everyone has had access to an affordable home. Vienna embodies the exemplary top-down model. The second story is that of informal housing in Rome, an exemplary model of a bottom-up strategy, which has produced extraordinary forms of housing and living by reusing rundown buildings and former elements of the urban infrastructure. Presented in the pavilion, these two systems provide a basis for thinking about how affordable housing and BETTER LIVING could be successfully achieved in future. The exhibition in the pavilion tells these two stories – with their sometimes astonishing parallels – about issues, buildings, and structures in Vienna and Rome.
Protests at Lago Bullicante - Ex-Snia in Rom
Photo: Pierre Kattar