Musicologica Austriaca (Jul 2024)
Sounding Out Municipal Housing in Vienna: Ethnographic Insights into Music and Sound in the Anton-Figl-Hof
Abstract
Municipal housing in Vienna, called Wiener Gemeindebau, is gaining new significance in research and cultural work in the discourse on affordable housing in the city and the increasing heterogeneity of urban life. However, it has also been a field imbued with the ideological projections, desires, and anxieties of various political parties. In the revival of the historical myth as a sociopolitical utopia of the so-called Red Vienna period and the simultaneous culturalization of conflicts and precarious living, municipal housing is a sensitive field within which questions of cultural coexistence are constantly negotiated. This article draws on insights gained through fieldwork in the context of the research project “Klingender Gemeindebau” (Sounding out municipal housing), which was conducted in the Anton-Figl-Hof, a medium-sized complex from the late 1950s in Vienna’s fourteenth district. Approaching municipal housing primary through the lens of music consumption, this study examines the potential of music for understanding neighborhood relationships and creating spaces for encounter: How does the diversity of origin, languages, age groups, and interests resonate in the musical preferences expressed by the residents? What role do sound and music play in everyday life and in the ways in which municipal housing is imagined and narrated by its residents? And how does public music consumption affect interpersonal relationships between so-called longtime and new tenants in providing space for both conflicts of non-belonging and inclusive forms of musical sociability?
