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

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.