RC21 Conference 2026

Excursion description: An alternative walking tour, where we walk past the beautiful buildings in Vienna, and focus on the loser architecture that nobody ever talks about. In particular, we look at the bad taste of rich people and institutions. It is humorous, but also refreshing, to learn how these structures were allowed, and how we can avoid making the same mistakes. Nazi tower, five-star hotel, government ministry, postmodernism. We started with the aim to get locals to see their home from new perspectives, and fight against kitsch tourist images. The tour has featured in Guardian, Zeit, Arte and USA Today. The group votes and debates the aesthetics of each choice. Beauty can be boring, but ugly never is. 

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: Why are there no smells walks of our city? Why do we think that cities must smell bad – when they mostly don’t? How has the city’s odour changed over the last 30 years? Which smells of 19th century Vienna remain, and what are the new signature scents of the city? Which smells have migrants brought with them? How do the smells vary across the seasons? Which are your guilty pleasure scents – those smells you are uncomfortable about enjoying? Why do we mostly think of grass and trees when planning a walk, instead of architecture and people and LIFE? This is an urban adventure. 

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: Red Vienna’s social housing innovations continue to resonate around the world. Other cities are jealous of the achievements of that remarkable period. These visionary buildings still work well after 100 years, and we will explore why on this tour. But the story continues, and so we will fast-forward to the 1980s, and a declining city up against the Iron Curtain. Our tour visits Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Haus in Marxergasse. And to bring things up to date, we visit a three year old house, in Favoriten, to look at new models of financing and experiments in social living.

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: This is a classic introduction to Vienna tour – but the twist is that we visit the famous beauty of central Vienna, and learn the context, but at the same time, guide Eugene shows you contemporary ideas of city life and why Vienna is the best city in the world to live, in 2026. So there is a tension between what we hear, and what we see. Locals learn a lot, and it is a humorous walk.

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: Strangers sit down to for dinner together, in a historic café, with a menu of questions to ask each other. The questions lead to storytelling, and participants, and the evening is an adventure in. We want to revive the spirit of debate that existed in the coffeehouses 100 years ago. Most conferences leave no trace in their host city, but we want to open up useful dialogue between residents and delegates. Some questions on our menu will reflect the themes of RC21. Other questions explore travel, friendship, work and inspiration. Previous dinners have led to weeks of email exchanges, where the pair continued to discuss the ideas presented. Coffeehouse Conversations build on Oxford University professor Theodore Zeldin’s Conversation Meals, which have taken place as part of street festivals, in art galleries from London to Singapore, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: This field trip explores how Vienna navigates the tensions between housing affordability and the climate crisis. Focusing on the Nordbahnhof redevelopment area and the historic neighbourhood of Alliiertenviertel, participants encounter contrasting urban fabrics: from challenges of greening and decarbonising the historic private rental housing to newly built neighbourhoods that mix subsidised and private developments.

Through on-site observation and discussion, the tour examines key questions of housing inequality and the green transition: how affordability is maintained or undermined through retrofitting, densification and urban greening? How do different tenure segments ­ particularly the private rental sector and limited-profit housing ­ shape unequal outcomes? And to what extent do planning frameworks, land policies and the Vienna housing subsidy scheme enable inclusionary development while potentially reproducing new socio-spatial inequalities?

Tour Guides: Judith Lehner & Michael Friesenecker

Excursion description: A tour through the habiTAT project SchloR plus discussion about the current housing system in Vienna

About SchloR – a European Collective Housing Award Finalist 2024: No private ownership. No resale. No profit from rent. A circus hall, a workshop, a community kitchen, and around 20 people living and many more working together on a 3,000m² site in Vienna’s 11th district.

SchloR – Schöner Leben ohne Rendite – is part of the habiTAT solidarity network, which adapted the structures of the German Mietshäusersyndikat for Austria. The model is legally constructed to prevent speculation: residents and the association jointly establish a limited company to purchase the property through direct loan campaigns. HabiTAT holds a veto on any future sale. The land is permanently removed from the market.

The architecture, completed in 2023, followed the same logic as the ownership model: careful use of resources at every stage. Existing buildings were kept, refurbished, extended. New additions were built in straw-insulated timber frame construction. All building footprints were retained; asphalt was removed by hand and outdoor spaces fully unsealed. The site is now largely self-sufficient – air-water heat pump, solar energy, rainwater collection for sanitary use and green roofs.

The result is a small city within a city: co-living units, a non-profit circus centre, workshops, rehearsal rooms, ateliers – affordable spaces for residents and neighbours alike.

Tour Guide: Gabu Heindl

Excursion description: Our tour takes us to the Viennese graffiti and street art hotspot: the Danube Canal. There, the often artistic, sometimes socially critical murals stretch for several kilometers. Even though only a part of the area has been officially designated for graffiti artworks, an urban center of Austrian graffiti culture has developed here over the last two decades.

However, most of the works are very ephemeral and new artworks are created here daily. During our walk, we will examine and explain the various manifestations of this culture. In particular, we will explore how illegal graffiti art has gained widespread acceptance in this location, enhancing and revitalizing the area.

Tour Guide: Stefan Wogrin

Excursion description: Vienna’s international profile is dominated by its golden age, before 1914, and yet this is one of the fastest-growing cities in the EU. On this tour, we look critically at the concept of liveability, and how to compare cities across the globe. Why does Vienna regularly rank as one of the 2 best cities in the world to live? What remains of the adventurous, socialist government between the wars? We will walk through residential districts in the west, discussing culture, green space, food, location, education, housing, architecture, mobility, music and calm.

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: Vienna is recognised internationally as a pioneer city for its approach to including women’s needs into planning and budget decisions. Mariahilf was selected as a district to experiment with many progressive ideas, which have now been adopted across the city. Please join us for a look into the past, present and future of Vienna, and how the city seeks more social justice through better public space, mobility, nature, comfort and a more friendly, social, supportive place to live. We look forward to hearing your perspectives. And this is a lovely place to walk through. This is a tribute to Eva Kail, who is retiring, and you will hear so much about her on the walk. Walk leader Eugene is known for his Feminism for Men walks for schools, to counter the rise of toxic masculinity influencers online.

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Event description: What does it take to create fair and inclusive working conditions in today’s cities, especially in Vienna? Join us for a visit to the FAKTory, innovation and networking hub of the chamber of labour in Vienna. Located right next to the University of Vienna in the FAKTory, new ideas and alliances are being developed to address the challenges of a changing world of work. Through conversations with representatives of the chamber of labour and of trade unions, researchers, and platform workers, participants will gain first-hand insights into ongoing struggles and innovative approaches to promoting equality, representation, and decent work in urban labour markets.

With:

Malena Haas (Vienna Chamber of Labour, FAKTory)
Sara Hassan (author “Wer Gegen wen?”)
Robert Walasinski (Riders Collective; initiative of bike messengers)

Moderation: Mara Verlič & Christian Pichler (Vienna Chamber of Labour)

Excursion description: This Fringe Event engages with grassroots spatial appropriations in Vienna, thereby pluralizing dominant narratives of urban inhabitation and expressions of the Right to the City beyond its well-known social housing programmes. This event embraces the pluriversal ethos of City, recognising that knowledge production should move beyond the confines of academic conferences and emerge from diverse, situated practices and voices.

The programme consists of two parts. First, a guided walk around the historical and cultural center “Kulturzentrum Spittelberg im Amerlinghaus”, 51 years after the space was first occupied in 1975. Second, a collaborative workshop to bring together people and urban collectives from and beyond the RC21 conference participants. By focusing on both historic and recent initiatives, the session examines the ongoing tensions between invited and claimed spaces of participation, asking what it means to inhabit the city.

Tour Guide: Urban Sustainability Living Lab (University of Vienna), City journal, Research Platform “The Challenge of Urban Futures” 

Excursion description: In a fast-growing city, where we all must live more densely together, it is important that public space is well-designed and inclusive. Praterstern railway station used to be a place where various marginalised groups would socialise, and access showers, food, mental health services and toilets. But since heavy new policing, and an alcohol ban in 2018, the social mix at the station has changed.

Hostile Design – sometimes called Hostile Architecture – is a modern phenomenon where spaces are made less inviting to people experiencing homelessness, but also poorer people and youth (through high-pitched sound), since they cannot sit, lie, or even stand comfortably on these surfaces (benches, walls, even floors), unless they consume something. And a lack of comfortable seating opportunities affects all kinds of groups, including elderly people, people with disabilities, tired workers, pregnant women, people caring for young children. The repeated announcements on public transport quickly become irritating to those who spend more time on there.

Most buildings have limited accessibility for people who use wheelchairs, those with children in buggies, blind people, etc. Architects and spatial-planners often make their spaces deliberately difficult for skaters to play on.

We have all had the experience of walking between tall buildings and being confronted with uncomfortable wind. Or darker surfaces which get so hot in sunshine that we cannot sit on them.

What are the features which encourage us to spend more time in public space? Trees and shade, good seating, playful features, access to water and toilets, beauty and other people. Vienna has done some good work in the new millennium to invite more people to spend time outside, with each other, enjoying the new urbanism. But nobody has told so many banks, hotels and shopping centres about this trend towards softer, more sympathetic spaces.

Hostile design can be seen in New York’s former traffic commissioner Robert Moses designing a stretch of Long Island Southern State Parkway with low stone bridges so that buses could not pass under them. This made it more difficult for people who relied on public transport (mainly African Americans), to visit the beach that wealthier car-owners could visit. Social control could also be seen in the change from narrow streets in 19th century Paris getting widened, to help the military end protests quickly.

Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn

Excursion description: Red Vienna. Leaving the Habsburg Empire behind, Vienna holds its first free communal elections on May 4th 1919. It becomes the first city of over a million inhabitants to appoint a social democratic administration, whose work between 1919 and the disruption of democracy in February 1934 is to earn much international acclaim.  

The “New Vienna” is a unique socio-political experiment, as it embraces and reforms all spheres of life – from social and health policy to education and housing.  

The permanent exhibition “Red Vienna” is located on the first and the top floors of Washhouse No.2, where originally the bathtubs and showers were accommodated, as well as the water reservoir.

Tour Guide: Lukas Gallee (Waschsalon)