EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Environmental standards for large housing construction - Vienna

Environmental standards for large housing construction - Vienna - Austria

Introduction

The "Viennese Model": increasing sustainability and quality standards in the housing sector by competition on public subsidies.

Problem

Issue Traditionally, the housing sector is a strong policy field in Austria, and especially in Vienna. Hence, public funding of the social housing sector (applied to new construction and renovation) is a key issue of state and federal social policy.Actually every year new housing projects comprising about 6.000 apartments – that amounts to 90% of annual Viennese construction volume of new apartments – are granted public subsidies.

Description

From 1995 on the city of Vienna adopted a new way of granting subsidies to the social housing sector. Every developer of social housing projects has to take part in quality competitions to obtain public subsidies.

This policy framework challenged a structural revolution in the social housing sector and a dramatic raise of project qualities. Principle goal was to raise environmental standards, living conditions and economical efficiency in construction of high volume, multi storey residential buildings.

Approach

The jury and the expert group, holding planners and scientific experts, representatives of the housing sector and key actors of the administration, evaluate all residential building projects that rely on public subsidies and select best projects to be realized. The weight of environmental criteria contributes by 1/3 to the choice. There are assessment fields each holding 4 major assessment categories and more than 50 assessment criteria.

Results

Since end of 1995 more than 170 projects were assessed in large scale competitions, more than 250 projects by the expert group, all together more than 55.000 apartment units were assessed. Thereof projects totalling more than 25.000 apartments were recommended to be realised and granted public subsidies. The projects are actually under construction or in state of final planning. Overall financing volume of the recommended projects yields to approximately 3 billion Euro.

General outcomes of the Viennese model are:

Large scale competitions set up and established new common standards for all of the Viennese residential building sector;
Environmental quality standards of new buildings have risen significantly;
Competition evolved a dynamic increase of quality: for being positively assessed today projects have to match comparatively higher quality standards than projects launched a year ago;
Total construction costs lowered by more than 10 % despite of better environmental standards and improved planning and architectural qualities;
Extra costs for ecological measures amount to EUR 22 to 110 per m² net area (where average net construction costs amount to approximately EUR 1.000 to 1.150 per m²);
Total extra investments for ecologically sound measures from 1996 until now sum up to more than 180 million Euro;
Regional innovation potentials got a remarkable kick-off, especially concerning the promotion of higher planning standards, and new construction and environment technologies.

Contact info

Raum & Kommunikation
Phone: +43 17 86 65 59
korab@gmx.at

Project start date

01/01/1995

Links

The city of Vienna is a partner in the Energie Cités Network

Download the 'Environmental standards for large housing construction - Vienna - Austria' Report (PDF, Eng, 42 KB)

Document type

case

Themes

Urban Policy > Housing > Housing quality

Keywords

Housing design & standards