Vienna's Frauen-Werk-Stadt: a women-designed housing district — 357 flats for daily life

In the early 1990s Vienna's planner Eva Kail found every recent urban project had been led by men, while women still did most care and household work. The city's women's office decided to prove that planning for women's daily lives would make better housing for everyone.

Open a design competition only to women and grade plans by daily life — childcare, safety, chores — building a district around how residents live.

In early 1994 eight women-only teams competed; a jury chaired by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky chose Franziska Ullmann's master plan. Four female architects built 357 flats on 2.3 hectares with on-site day-care, a doctor's surgery, well-lit overlooked paths, kitchens as true workplaces, and low-traffic child-friendly public space.

A 1998 resident survey recorded high housing satisfaction, and Vienna made women- and everyday-appropriate design a mandatory review criterion for every housing project using public funds — a rule the city still applies.

In the early 1990s Vienna's planning office noticed something odd: every recent urban project, competition or direct commission, had been led by men. Eva Kail, a city planner who had run workshops and a photography exhibition on how women actually use the city, argued that planning was missing half of everyday life — the unpaid care and household work still done mostly by women.

The city's women's office (MA 57) responded with a radical brief: a competition for a new district that only teams led by women could enter. In early 1994 eight teams competed; the jury, chaired by pioneering architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, chose Franziska Ullmann's master plan. Ground broke in August 1995 in Floridsdorf, and in 1997 about 357 flats on 2.3 hectares opened — at the time Europe's largest housing project designed by women.

The design treated daily life as the brief: kitchens placed as workplaces with views over the street, well-lit paths overlooked by windows, day-care and a doctor's surgery on site, low-traffic streets, and generous shared green space. A 1998 resident survey recorded high housing satisfaction, and the city made women- and everyday-appropriate design a mandatory review criterion for every housing project that uses public funds — a rule Vienna still applies.

Restricting the competition to women changed the pool of decision-makers, not just the style of the result.

It measured housing against daily life — childcare, safety, chores — instead of abstract aesthetics or unit counts.

Residents were surveyed after move-in, and the findings were fed back into city-wide criteria.

It turned one district into a permanent rule: all publicly funded housing in Vienna is still reviewed against these criteria.

When one system keeps producing one kind of answer, change who designs the question: the women-only competition changed the criteria every later Vienna housing project is judged by.

Frauen-Werk-Stadt I became the reference case for gender-sensitive planning in Europe and was followed by Frauen-Werk-Stadt II (completed 2004) and the autonomous women's housing project ro*sa (2009). Vienna now requires every housing project claiming public funds to be assessed for women- and everyday-appropriate design, and the project is regularly cited in urbanism literature as the model for putting daily-life needs on equal footing with investment logic.