The Seestadt Aspern (officially also Aspern Seestadt, project name: aspern – Vienna’s Urban Lakeside) is a district under construction in the 22nd district of Vienna, Donaustadt, and one of the largest current urban development projects in Europe. Over a period of around 20 years, a new district is to be built in which over 20,000 people will live and work. The Seestadt is being built in several construction stages, starting with the “Pionierquartier” in the south of the man-made lake in the center of the Seestadt.
The area northeast of the historic village of Aspern in Marchfeld was named after an artificial lake in the middle of the development area. On the former Aspern airfield, Vienna’s airfield from the interwar period, around 10,500 apartments for 20,000 people are to be built by 2028. In addition, facilities for 15,000 office jobs and 5,000 jobs in trade, science, research and education are to be created. Wien 3420 Aspern Development AG is responsible for development and exploitation, a real estate development company that was founded in December 2004 as a subsidiary of the Vienna Business Agency, a fund of the City of Vienna (73.6%), and the Federal Real Estate Company (26.4%). The planning is carried out in agreement with the responsible municipal departments of the city administration and Wiener Linien, the transport company of the City of Vienna.
The urban planning concept of the Seestadt is geared towards the mixing of functions, there should be no pure residential or commercial use. This is to avoid a satellite city and to create a lively district during the entire day. The master plan for the Seestadt was drawn up by the Swedish architect Johannes Tovatt and approved unanimously by the Vienna City Council on 25 May 2007. Essential contents are the functional arrangement of uses and the spatial design of small as well as large urban planning gestures to form an overall urban concept.
The geographical center of the Seestadt is a five-hectare lake in a nine-hectare park. The lake is fed by groundwater. The public space – streets, squares and parks – takes up 50% of the total area of this urban development area. In order to make the public space attractive for the people who live and work in Seestadt, the Danish open space planner Gehl Architects were hired by Wien 3420 AG and the municipal department 19 (architecture) to create a planning manual for public space (a “Score of the public space”). The planning manual is based on the idea that public life is a precious commodity that needs to be concentrated. That is why Gehl Architects have worked out particularly important axes in the Seestadt: the Ringstrasse as the main traffic axis, which has been given the name Sonnenallee, the Rote Saite (shopping street, culture), the Blaue Saite (Seepark and promenade) and the Grüne Saite (green areas, recreational areas). By 2015, three parks with a total area of eight hectares had been built, the central Seepark, the Yella-Hertzka-Park and the Hannah-Arendt-Park. The traffic-calmed streets around the latter are called Hannah-Arendt-Platz.
