The book analyzes the typology of the Höfe, the workers' housing built in Vienna from 1919 to 1933.
[Red Vienna. Housing policy in socialist Vienna] The “socialist monument” of “Red Vienna” between the two world wars is the Hof, workers’ housing in the form of a superblock that contains a wide range of common services: daycare centers, schools, kitchens, laundries, crafts workshops, green spaces. It is a model that does not imply the hypothesis of a new urban organization. Instead, it is inserted in the fabric of the existing city, accepting all the related constraints. In substance, from 1919 to 1933 Vienna grew on itself, denying the need to envision a new world. The diversity does not lie in the overall reorganization of the metropolis, but in the socialist configuration of its individual parts. Precisely due to this rigorous realism, “Red Vienna” has been seen as a forerunner of the experiences of the City of Bologna and of Eurocommunism. Actually this was a grand experiment, an exceptional situation, involving unusual theoretical and practical instruments, in a historical moment that marks the decline of the international function of Vienna and the maximum effort on the part of the Austrian workers’ movement to find a place in Austrian society after the breakdown of the Empire.