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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 9 (January 1, 1930)

Vienna's Communal Flats

Vienna's Communal Flats.

Lately this question has been raised in a discussion between English observers of the Austian capital. Vienna is now the chief city of a Republic (the rump of a pre-war Empire) of 6,500,000 people, of which Vienna contains a third. To accommodate them better, this already over-swollen city has been building flats. Some people may have thought that post-war Vienna has not retained enough energy to do anything, but advocates of workers’ flats say that she has the finest specimens thereof in page 39 Europe. In 1925 Vienna built “a great block of workmen's dwellings …. consisting of 400 flats, and containing about 1,400 inmates.” The flat has its own kindergarten for children, its own communal wash-hall for the mothers, and many other communal features. The six-storey building encloses a stone-paved court “with plots of grass and flower-beds.”

The advocate of the “one-family house” takes the view that no amount of communal advantage places flats before it. “I do not believe (he writes) that barracks would suit English people; for the flowers, surely even the smallest garden is better than a window-box.”

To which the advocate of flats replies: “No doubt in the city of the future every family will occupy a house surrounded by a garden full of flowers,” but—“we must come down to brass tacks, and in the centre of great cities, such as London, where large numbers of workers must reside near their work, large buildings of flats are essential, owing to lack of space.”

So there you have basic agreement between the protagonists on the essential principle of one family, one home, with a reservation on one side dictated by immediate commercial considerations, real or apparent.

Is it even now sufficiently realised that in her urban and suburban building programmes New Zealand has already come to the parting of the ways—city flats or suburban dwellings?

Is it realised that society must look to transport for the chief restraining influence upon that commercialism which tends to centralise the workers in the city?

How the Railway Aids Settlement. Development of settlement in the industrial area adjacent to the Railway Department's Hutt Valley Workshops, Wellington, New Zealand.

How the Railway Aids Settlement.
Development of settlement in the industrial area adjacent to the Railway Department's Hutt Valley Workshops, Wellington, New Zealand.

That in New Zealand the most onerous and financially profitless (yet essential) part of transport's burden falls on the State railways that carry the working population to and from the suburbs at less-than-cost rates?

That publicly-owned transport, rails or rubber, is the life-line between the cities and a population that prefers to live outward and on the ground, but which, if it mistakes its true interests, may yet have to live within city limits and in flats, exchanging homing for herding?