The City of Vienna launches a Europe-wide ideas competition for the Naschmarkt parking lot. The aim: to steer the deadlocked situation in a new direction. One reason for the deadlock is political. In February 2022, Rosa Schaberl reported on visualizations as a PR tool using the example of Vienna’s Naschmarkt.
The City of Vienna launches a Europe-wide ideas competition for the Naschmarkt parking lot. The aim: to steer the deadlocked situation in a new direction. One reason for the deadlock is political. In February 2022, Rosa Schaberl reported on visualizations as a PR tool using the example of Naschmarkt Vienna.
Discussions about visualizations for the parking lot at Naschmarkt Vienna
The 12,000 square meter area next to Vienna’s Naschmarkt is still a dreary concrete surface – a parking lot and one of the largest heat islands in the city. The Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) wanted to build a market hall on this site, while the Greens wanted a park. An open competition was to be held in the fall of 2021, but currently only suggestions for use are still being sought from Viennese citizens.
In the run-up to the competition, there were numerous discussions about the visualizations that the SPÖ and the Greens had brought to the city. The architect Katharina Puxbaum was responsible for the Greens’ visualizations. “The Greens approached me in spring 2020. They had visions for the area, but were looking for professional expertise to present these initial ideas in such a way that they could be implemented,” she says in conversation. The visualizations could be seen everywhere in Vienna in 2021: in the daily newspapers, on posters outside and on social media. While the SPÖ won the Vienna elections in 2020 and included the market hall in its government program, the Greens tried to gather supporters for their idea and petition. Around 20,000 people are said to have signed it in the meantime.
SPÖ: “No realistic or even realizable designs.”
The SPÖ and the business group “Innovation, Urban Planning and Mobility”, which was led after the election, took a different approach to this project. They did not include any planners in the visual representations. In response to inquiries, they let us know: “The ‘renderings’ were created internally and were only intended to initiate a discussion about the redesign of the Naschmarkt parking lot. No architect was involved, as these were not realistic or even realizable designs.” This desired discourse was also initiated via the platform markthalle.wienwirdwow.at as a public participation process for the redesign of the Naschmarkt parking lot. “Due to the enormous interest”, as it says on the platform, the participation process was even extended over the summer in order to collect suggestions, wishes and ideas for the redesign of the Naschmarkt. This participation is still ongoing.
Presentation or propaganda
“Are visualizations a means of propaganda?” asked the Bernese daily newspaper “Der Bund” in an article worth reading entitled “The fantastic images that anticipate the future” at the beginning of 2021. In Vienna, some people would currently answer this question with a “yes” with regard to the plans for the Naschmarkt. But is it really that bad? After all, the City of Vienna’s floating gardens by Carla Lo Landschaftsarchitektur, which are now not only well received but extremely popular, are no different.
Before the municipal elections in 2015, the office was asked for a visualization: “Inspired by the floating gardens in Paris, we were asked to green the Kaiserbadschleuse on the Danube Canal. We found the idea interesting, the visualization was fun, but we couldn’t say whether it would actually be implemented,” says Lo in the interview, and indeed, the visualizations were heavily promoted during the election campaign. After the elections, however, the project went quiet. Some obstructive circumstances had to be clarified first. When the 2020 election campaign began, everything happened very quickly. Just three months after the start of construction, the floating gardens were a prestige project. The opening was staged with extra-large trees delivered for journalists.
In direct comparison
It is to be hoped that the redesign of Praterstrasse in Vienna’s second district by 3:0 Landschaftsarchitektur will not have to wait quite so long. One less lane, more space for cyclists and pedestrians and 80 newly planted trees will turn this connecting road into a green boulevard. The project was presented during the 2020 municipal election campaign with visualizations contrasting the current (traffic) situation. However, the fact that Praterstrasse became an election campaign project is more of a coincidence. The competition had already been won by 3:0 a year and a half ago. Corona delayed the project, so it was only presented in the fall of 2020. Nevertheless, these examples illustrate how landscape architecture visualizations are repeatedly used to gain votes for the respective parties. This is particularly noticeable when politicians are praised in the media for their projects, but the landscape architects can only be found in the credits of the renderings.
The impact of renderings
“The green ring on the plan simply has no meaning – even for people who can read plans. A closed cubature can also be captured in the floor plan, but a tree – in all its different forms and with all its qualities – is very difficult for many people,” says Daniel Zimmermann. He co-founded Büro 3:0 over 20 years ago and in this position has followed the development of presentation methods over the years.
For him, the advantages of visualizations are obvious: “Especially in participative processes, strong renderings can achieve a lot. After all, we want to communicate with people who can hardly read plans, if at all. We have also found that we can illustrate the temporal perspectives particularly well. Landscape architecture projects don’t simply end with a ‘handover of keys’. We can show everyone involved what our project will look like in five, ten or fifty years’ time.” This is an important aspect, especially when you consider that visualizations are always perfect, even confusingly similar to reality. The disappointment that the project does not yet look as presented when it opens can be avoided in this way.
Visualizations as “green washing”
“But visualizations are no longer just a presentation tool. We already develop mainly in 3D. For us, it provides quick creative feedback and we see the benefits in interdisciplinary projects. The step into the third dimension is particularly important in the street space, when you work hand in hand with existing buildings, traffic planners and climatologists. This allows us to see very quickly and clearly for everyone whether the various measures have a holistic effect.” Zimmermann also believes that you are never immune to becoming a PR pawn in an election campaign, especially when planning in public spaces.
However, he sees a bigger problem elsewhere: “I can no longer look at luxury real estate magazines. The ‘green washing’ that goes on in this scene via visualizations borders on fraud. Of course, as a landscape architect, I see these pictures and know that this façade cannot be planted in this form. That the plants won’t grow or that the tree can’t even stand there because of the underground parking garage. As a layman, all you can see is the beautiful green future living space that will never exist.”
Naschmarkt Vienna: back to the future
Of course, the visualizations of the park at Naschmarkt could also be used for “green washing”. This cannot be ascertained at the present time. What is certain, however, is that the visualizations are not only green and atmospherically beautiful, but also technically sound and with high design standards. “The concept, the pathways and the water features are intended to make people aware that they are standing right above the Wien River. The current parking lot is nothing more than a lid on this highly regulated river. However, the planting mounds would allow us to plant smaller trees and shrubs, creating a public park for all age groups, with opportunities to spend time without the pressure to consume.”
The professional approach to visualizations seems to be paying off. For example, a video by an opposition party claiming that this cover could not be greened has already disappeared from the internet. But even if the Greens are successful with their petition, the design will probably not be implemented in this form. A tendered competition is mandatory for a public project. It therefore remains to be seen what will happen at this site.
Possible labeling of visualizations
It is also unclear how visualizations themselves and their use in landscape architecture will develop in the future. The suggestion that visualizations – similar to advertisements – could be labeled as mandatory makes sense to all of the interviewees. In this case, the credits would be liable for the quality. In the meantime, city dwellers and media consumers will have to get used to the fact that visualizations can be both concrete proposals and populist “fake news”. But they are primarily one thing: valuable opportunities to present landscape architecture, sometimes even anticipating a green future.
More projects and news from the Austrian capital: The new IKEA Vienna by Querkraft Architekten presents itself with a green façade and an airy, mixed-use design. Furthermore, Vienna recently won the Lee-Kuan-Yew World City Prize 2020. The February 2022 issue of G+L also focused on landscape architecture and urban planning in Austria. Find out exactly what we looked at in the editorial by editor-in-chief Theresa Ramisch.
