International activities of the City of Vienna 2011

www.wien.at
Review 2011 – International activities of the City of Vienna
International
activities of the
City of Vienna
2011
VI
–C
cation o th Infor ation an
ress an Infor ation ervice
I
a
Vienna il Co
I
essa
I
ission
Vienna oar of
er ai an
orts
cation
ta t ien ar etin
raine
inance cono ic ffairs an Vienna
lic tilities
ecial nvoy of the City of Vienna for International cono ic ffairs
VI
I
C
I
C
CI I
C
Vienna
I
siness
ency
e art re
ratislava lova ia
ien ol in
enos ires r entina
I
– r an echnolo ies
– Central
Chi in
ol ova
Vienna
lic tilities
lic
Vienna
loy ent ro otion
C ech e
ro ean e ion
VI
C
ealth an
olan
trate ies
n
aff
ocial olicy
Vienna os itals ssociation
raine
Vienna ealth ro otion
I
I
I
I
C
I
– sse
ly of
ro ean e ions
C
– Co ncil of
Co – Co
or in Co
ro ean
nity of the an e e ions
nici alities an
e ions
se an
r
olicy Coor ination
issioner
Inte ration
o en s Iss es Cons
nti iscri ination nit for a e e
C lt ral ffairs an
e ions
ien
CI I
er rotection an
ifestyles
cience
ent rans ort Cli ate rotection ner y an
lic artici ation
C – r ani ation of orl
nviron ent
erita e Cities
s ffice for nviron ental rotection
ro ean e ions ith e islative o ers
s ffice for ni al rotection
C IVI I
C IV
Chief
2
ec tive ffice
C I
I
C
I
IV
I
IC
o sin
an eso rces
se
r an evelo
e Cities
–
stance
etire ent an Care o es
ittee of the e ions
Co ncil of an e Cities an
n
ffice of the ealthcare Co
C – ir ort e ions Conference
ona l n er
Vienna ocial
o sin Constr ction an
iener ohnen –
ohnfon s
ien
lic ho sin a
r an ene al
inistration
VI
In e en ent fficer for cc ational afety an
itin
ealth
C
V
– e ia liaison offices in Central astern an
o th ast
e art ent
C
I
I
ro e
VI
I
I
–C
I
I
C
I
ervices of eneral interest
I
ro ean ear of Vol nteerin
nici al istrict – ar areten
th
nici al istrict – e a
f n in – international coo eration
I
nite
I
I
ations
Vienna ervice ffice
IC
th
nici al istrict – i
th
nici al istrict – iet in
th
nici al istrict – en in
th
nici al istrict – tta rin
th
nici al istrict – ernals
th
nici al istrict –
st
nici al istrict – lori s orf
ro ects
I
– International Co
I
th
trate y for the an e e ion
electe
IC
ission for the rotection of the an e iver
C IVI I
erin
hrin
Centre for Interfaith ialo e
I –
C
n for International evelo
ent
ther activities
orl
I
CI I
CI
I
cono ic or
I
I
International
VI
ests receive
a
CI
I
y the ayor
I
ntries in the City of Vienna s ol en oo
I
ea ers of the Vienna rovincial arlia ent
I
C
CI
I
I I
I
I
CI I
VI I
VI
IV
IC
Vienna o se r ssels
Vienna e resentative ffice o yo
C
C
I
I
VI
Mayor and Governor
Dr. Michael Häupl
Foto: City of Vienna/PID, Hubert Dimko
In retrospect, the year 2011 was dominated by
profound and sustained changes in the economic
sphere. Governments and policy-makers – especially those of major European cities – found
themselves in a situation where they saw a need
to pull political objectives into sharper focus, with
the result that attention turned increasingly to
“internal” matters. The City of Vienna, however,
is trying to take a different road. As a city with
an international outlook, we continue to make our
know-how available to partners all over the world,
based on the conviction that cities can successfully
pursue their justified interests only if they cooperate among themselves and speak to national governments and the EU on an equal footing. And we
are also motivated by the simple idea of solidarity
among cities in striving to improve the lives of all
those who live in metropolitan areas.
The concept of solidarity is also important in voluntary work, which was highlighted last year when
the European Union declared 2011 the European
Year of Volunteering in honour of the contribution
of voluntary activities to economic and social cohesion. In this context, the City of Vienna focused on
support for organisations – especially those active
at the international level – whose effectiveness and
sustainable impact depend in no small measure,
if not entirely, on the contribution of volunteers.
I want to stress in particular the role of those
NGOs that are active in the areas of development
cooperation and humanitarian aid and their commitment to help improve the situation in the most
disadvantaged regions of the world. Supporting
and encouraging these initiatives and networks
in Austria and abroad is a special concern of ours.
As a city whose expertise in administration and urban technologies enjoys international recognition
and is much sought-after, as evidenced by many
best practice examples, Vienna is fully aware of its
obligation in this area of international cooperation.
Particular mention should be made in this context
of the network of European cities, initiated by
Vienna 25 years ago, that is dedicated to disaster
prevention and crisis management and relies on
mutual support and assistance in case disaster
strikes. Vienna’s local platform of relevant government and non-government institutions, the
“K-Kreis – die Helfer Wiens”, is an international
best practice example in this field.
Finally, I want to avail myself of this opportunity
to say a personal “thank you” to all those who work
for the City of Vienna, whose untiring efforts in
international relations have helped Vienna not
only to maintain its excellent international standing, but to improve it even further in 2011.
Dr. Michael Häupl
Mayor and Governor of Vienna
T
a
ar et
estinations
e ai an
A delegation of businesspeople and experts from
Vienna, headed by Deputy Mayor and Executive
City Councillor for Finance and Economic Affairs Renate Brauner, visited Baku in September
within the framework of the City of Vienna’s focus
activities in the Azerbaijani capital.
Austria perceives Azerbaijan as an increasingly
promising growth market for the Austrian economy owing to its wealth of natural resources and a
large number of ambitious infrastructure projects.
Additionally, the Azerbaijani government has
launched a process of technological renewal. Baku
expressed a keen interest in Vienna’s know-how,
as Vienna enjoys an international reputation for its
excellent quality of life, first-rate infrastructure
and highly efficient urban technologies. There is
also great potential for Viennese businesses in the
country’s cultural and tourism sectors.
ment Promotion Foundation AZPROMO. More than
60 Austrian experts and business representatives
presented pertinent know-how.
The topics included cultural and tourism management, transport and traffic planning, e-government, alternative energies and waste management. In conjunction with the business forum, the
delegation from Vienna also conducted talks with
high-ranking members of the Azerbaijani government and the City of Baku as well as representatives of the local business community.
The highlight of the social programme was a gala
reception hosted by the City of Vienna after a concert by the Vienna Chamber Orchestra at the Philharmonic Hall in Baku on the occasion of the 75th
anniversary of the hall. 350 guests representing
the political, business and cultural communities
attended the event.
e a
Deputy Mayor
Renate Brauner with the
Azerbaijani Minister of
Culture and Tourism
Dr. Abulfaz Garayev
(City of Vienna)
The focal point of the visit was a two-day business
forum, “Vienna’s urban technologies for Azerbaijan”. Ali Abbasov, Minister of Communication and
Information Technology, and Niyazi Safarov, Deputy Minister for Economic Development, officially
opened the forum, which was organised in cooperation with the Austrian-Azerbaijani Chamber of
Commerce and the Azerbaijan Export and Invest-
aine
The Black Sea metropolis with a population of
more than one million and 130 different nationalities was the venue of a Vienna Week in May. The
two cities have maintained close relations at both
a bilateral and a multilateral level for many years.
Like Vienna, Odessa is a member of the Board of
Directors of the League of Historical Cities and has
been a reliable partner and host of several DonauHanse workshops.
The Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa
exhibited pictures showing the topography and
perception of Vienna in the eyes of local artists.
The magnificent, newly renovated Odessa Opera
House, originally built by the Viennese architects
Helmer & Fellner from 1883 to 1887, staged its
first performance of famous arias by Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Johann Strauss the Younger presented by the National Academic Theater
orchestra and ballet together with soloists from
Vienna. The park behind the opera house on
Tchaikovsky Boulevard is to be converted into a
“Viennese Garden”. The Odessa Russian Dramatic
Theatre hosted a very special performance: the
play Odessa staged by Vienna’s Drachengasse
I
Theatre was performed in German for the second
time after a first showing in 2010. Subsequently,
the production was invited to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Irkutsk.
Odessa City Hall hosted a one-day symposium
with workshops on urban mobility organised and
managed by TINA Vienna in cooperation with
Wiener Linien. More than fifty schoolchildren participated in a drawing competition on the topic of
“How I see Vienna”; the works were exhibited in
the lobby of the City Hall; the prizes were awarded
by the head of the Viennese delegation, City Councillor for Cultural Affairs and Science Dr. Andreas
Mailath-Pokorny, and Odessa’s Mayor Oleksii Kostusiev. The Vienna Week ended with a conference
on “Good Governance and Democracy in the Black
Sea Region” organised by the Austrian Institute
for Parliamentarism and Democracy Questions
and the Austrian Federal Ministry for European
and International Affairs together with the Berezovka Higher Educational Institution at the Odessa
National Polytechnic University.
In Odessa, the City of Vienna financed a Caritas
project aimed at preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The Austrian delegation also paid
a visit to Izmail, a town in the Danube Delta, to
inspect a Caritas care and assistance project for
abandoned children and street children. Mayor
Sergej Masur also received the visitors.
The Vienna Week was a joint project organised
by the City of Vienna, the Austrian Embassy in
Kiev, KulturKontakt Austria Odessa and the City
of Odessa and its institutions. n
Professor Melanie Sully,
Vice President of the Institute
for Parliamentarism and
Democracy, at the presentation of her book “Anchors of
Democracy” at the University
of Odessa
(Mechnikov University)
I
City Councillor for
Cultural Affairs and
Science Dr. Andreas
Mailath-Pokorny (centre)
with (from left)
interpreter, defence
attaché Colonel
Josef Hölzl MA, Daniel
Löcker from the
Councillor’s office,
Ambassador Wolf-Dietrich
Heim, Roland Fink MAS
of MA 7, Dr. Bernhard
Denscher, head of the
cultural unit of MA 7,
and Dr. Berthold Ecker,
head of the fine arts unit
of MA 7 (City of Odessa)
V
ienna s coo eration
ro ects ith other cities
an co ntries
a subsidiary of Wien Holding, and Raiffeisenlandesbank NÖ-Wien. The Twin City Liner was also a
partner of the 2011 Lower Austria Regional Exhibition in Carnuntum.
The Slovak University of Technology’s urbANNAtur exhibition at the Lobau National Park Centre in Vienna showcased new green space concepts
for the conurbations of the two cities. Vienna’s
Danube wetlands have had National Park status
since 1996.
en
Deputy Mayor
Maria Vassilakou and
Mayor Dr. Milan Ftáčnik
on an excursion to
Vienna’s biggest cycle
route project along the
Ringstraße boulevard
(Schaub-Walzer/PID)
ati a a
a ia
Mayor of Bratislava Dr. Milan Ftáčnik joined Vienna’s Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner on a visit to the
Bombardier tram and light rail vehicle factory in
Vienna. The City Bike system and traffic safety issues were the main topics discussed during a bike
ride together with Deputy Mayor Maria Vassilakou.
ie
entina
To mark the Bicentenario – the 200th anniversary
of Argentine independence celebrated in 2010
– the City of Vienna sent Argentina a replica of
the 1892 statue of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by
Viktor Tilgner that stands in Vienna’s Burggarten,
Mozart being extremely popular in Argentina. The
statue was handed over at an official ceremony in
front of a sell-out house at the world-famous Teatro Colón, accompanied by a musical programme
organised by the Mozarteum Argentino with performances by the Vienna Piano Trio.
A conference was held at Vienna City Hall to mark
the completion of the three-year Supraregional
Employment Initiative, which was jointly implemented by the Vienna Employment Promotion
Fund (waff) with Slovak and Austrian partners.
Dozens of pilot projects have been realised since
2008, ranging from the multilingual Internet
platform “jobtour” to the networking of training
and labour market organisations. This year’s beneficiaries of the successful apprentice exchange
programme were budding chefs and restaurant
professionals.
The Twin City Liner boat shuttle has been operating between the city centres of Vienna and Bratislava for five years now. With a second ship added
in 2008 and five services a day, the Twin City Liner
has carried over 700,000 passengers to date. The
Twin City Liner is operated by Central Danube,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Teatro Colón with former Austrian
Chancellor and current director of Volkswagen Argentina S. A. Viktor
Klima (r.) and Ambassador Dr. Robert Zischg (Marko Vombergar)
VI
C
I
C
I
CI I
C
I
The statue was also a token of gratitude for the
generous donations of money and meat Argentina
sent to Vienna following the First World War, as
also commemorated by Argentinierstraße (“Argentina Road”) in Vienna’s 4th municipal district.
Buenos Aires was also the 2011 World Book Capital.
ent a
ean e i n
The CENTROPE Political Board, consisting of the
political representatives of the member regions
and cities, convenes semi-annually. The main topics of the summit held in Györ under the Hungarian chairmanship were labour mobility and enhancing the region’s attractiveness to businesses.
R&D activities are to be fostered through crossborder initiatives under the INAT (Infrastructure
Needs Assessment Tool) project. Within the framework of the CENTROPE Capacity project, the Vienna Business Agency and its partner organisations
are to organise joint appearances at international
events. At the second summit of 2011, held under the Slovak chairmanship in Tomášov, discussions focussed on infrastructure development
and future EU programmes; the region’s tourism
potential was the central topic of a public conference entitled “destination@centrope”. Vienna was
represented by Professor Elisabeth Vitouch, member of the Vienna City Council and Chairwoman
of the Committee for European and International
Affairs; Europaforum – Center for Urban Dialogue
and European Policy presented proposals for
optimising mobility.
On the part of the City of Vienna, CENTROPE content foci are coordinated by the Executive Group
for Construction and Technology, Urban Planning
Group. CENTROPE Capacity outlines the vision of
the cross-border region as a cosmopolitan and tolerant economic and living space where European
integration becomes a self-confident and successful everyday reality. The project aims to create a
binding and lasting multilateral framework for cooperation between the region’s local authorities,
companies and social institutions.
Strategic cooperation projects are developed
within the framework of four main fields of work:
Knowledge Region, Human Capital, Spatial Integration and Culture Region. One of the first
projects to be implemented was the CENTROPE
Regional Development Report, an instrument
for regular transnational analysis and policy
recommendations. The project is conducted by a
multilateral consortium of economic research institutes from all four states (headed by the Austrian Institute of Economic Research) and entails the
compilation of an annual Regional Development
Report plus four thematic focus reports. The reports aim to provide an overview of major economic developments in the region and provide a basis
for medium-term economic forecasting, as well as
concrete policy recommendations.
The CENTROPE prize for 2011, endowed with
10,000 euro in prize money donated by Raiffeisenlandesbank NÖ-Wien, was awarded to Petr Kotyza
of Masaryk University in Brno. For the past seven
years he has been arranging breaks in the Czech
Republic for children from Schwechat in Austria
whose families cannot afford a holiday.
The CENTROPE region encompasses the Hungarian counties Györ-Moson-Sopron and Vas with the
cities of Györ and Szombathely, the Slovak regions
Bratislava and Trnava with the cities of the same
name and the Czech regions of Southern Moravia
and Brno, as well as Lower Austria and Burgenland with the cities of St. Pölten and Eisenstadt,
and Vienna.
i in
a
Numerous international guests joined City Mayor
Dorin Chirtoacă LL.B. and the people of Chişinău
to celebrate the 575th birthday of the charming
capital of the Republic of Moldova. To mark the
Participants in the autumn
meeting of CENTROPE
in Slovakia, with host
Pavol Frešo (centre) and
City Council Member
Professor Elisabeth
Vitouch (to his right)
(Arge centrope – Balajka)
VI
C
I
C
I
CI I
C
I
occasion, 130 brand new
trolleybuses were taken
into operation. The highlight of the sightseeing
programme was a visit
to the world’s largest
subterranean wine cellar in Mileştii Mici, where
thousands of barrels and
bottles of the famous
Moldovan wine are stored
in 250 km of passageways
40 to 80 m below ground.
At Chişinău City Hall:
Director of International
Relations Dr. Oskar Wawra,
EU project assistant Maria
Damian MBA, head of the
international relations unit
Gabriela Ciumac BA and
Thomas J. Resch (MD-EUI)
The Republic of Moldova
is a priority country of the Austrian development
cooperation programme, with projects focussing
on water supply, wastewater management and vocational training. The Concordia social project run
by Father Georg Sporschill SJ provides humanitarian aid in manifold areas, from soup kitchens for
the very poorest in society to the “City of Children”,
a large modern complex with living quarters and
other facilities in the municipality of Pirita.
e
The Videň runs regular
services on Brno
Reservoir (Brněnská
přehrada). (TJR)
e
i
In Brno on 14 May, Mayor Roman Onderka MBA
and Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl performed the naming ceremony for the ship Videň/Wien (“Vienna”);
the vessel operates regular services on Brno Reservoir and is a special example of the close relations
between the two cities. The 10 th Czech-Austrian
Ball was held at the Czech Philharmonic Hall; the
guest speakers at the 20 th “Dialogue at the Centre of Europe” on the topic “What holds European
societies together?”, which took place shortly before Easter, were Dr. Jiři Gruša (†) and Austrian
Ambassador Dr. Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff. An
international conference was held to mark the
European Year of Volunteering; the social NGO
Hilfswerk Wien participated in the conference and
also made a series of
follow-up v isits in
which it presented information about volunteer work carried
out by older members
of society.
Within the frame work of the EU project
“Development of
Methods to Evaluate
10
Architecture from 1945 to 1979”, Municipal Department 19 (Architecture and Urban Design,
MA 19) participated in workshops with representatives from Brno at which the GIS base layers
of the two cities were discussed. MA 19 was also
represented at a meeting relating to the EU project
“Partnership Austria–Czech Republic in the Central European Region – PRO 2013+” in Mikulov.
The Health Committee and the Committee for Regional Affairs of the Czech Parliament visited the
Parliament and a series of government ministries
and hospitals in Vienna and gathered information
relating to their respective topics of interest during
expert talks in Vienna and Lower Austria. Prague
took the occasion of St. Wenceslas Day in September to showcase itself in the Austrian capital.
Czech delegations visited municipal departments
and institutions of the City of Vienna.
At the invitation of the Austrian Cultural Forum
Prague, visits were exchanged between the City
of Vienna’s School of Fashion Design at Schloss
Hetzendorf and the College of Fashion Design in
Prague. The Product Design department of the
Vienna School of Fashion Design visited leatherworking enterprises in Nový Jičín near Ostrava.
an
As a follow-up to the focus activities in Poland
in 2010, the mayors of Kraków, Lublin, Poznań,
Szczecin, Łódź and Bydgoszcz visited the Austrian
capital at the invitation of the City of Vienna and
the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (WKÖ).
In a two-day workshop on “The Viennese Model”
they found out more about waste and wastewater
management, energy, traffic and transport management and PPP models in Vienna. During the
workshop the participants also had the opportunity to forge contacts with specialist enterprises
from the relevant fields. Also on the programme
were meetings with Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner
and Speaker of the Vienna Provincial Parliament
Professor Harry Kopietz.
Mayor Paweł Adamowicz of Gdańsk came to
Vienna to gather information about health policy
issues and waste management facilities in the city.
Besides a meeting with Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl,
other items on the itinerary included talks with
companies, visits to the Pfaffenau and Spittelau
waste incinerators and a tour of the Therme Wien
thermal spa.
VI
C
I
C
I
CI I
C
I
Delegations from all over the world, including a group of experts from
Kraków, visited the Pfaffenau waste-to-energy plant. (MA 48)
Professors from Austrian
universities also travelled to
Ukraine for the Ivan Franko
University’s 350 th anniversary celebrations.
A delegation from Warsaw headed by Deputy Mayor Jaroslav Kochaniak came to find out more about
waste management in Vienna. Following meetings
with Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner and City Councillor for Environmental Affairs Ulli Sima, the visit
was rounded off by tours of the Pfaffenau and Spittelau waste incinerators and the “48er-Zelt” waste
treatment plant in the 22nd municipal district.
A 17-member group of experts from Kraków also
visited the Pfaffenau waste incinerator and the
biogas plant.
Among the many activities carried out by the
Polish representations in Austria in conjunction
with Poland’s EU Presidency in the second half of
the year was a symposium on green technologies
organised by the Polish Institute.
aine
For many years now, Ukraine has been a close
partner in Vienna’s various international activities;
this year’s highlight was the Vienna Week in Odessa (see dedicated chapter). For the 6th time in succession the Gala Foundation Odessa and Vienna’s
Amadeus travel agency organised the Creative
Festival in Vienna, with hundreds of children and
youngsters from several countries taking part in
a music competition.
To mark the 20 th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, the Austrian Embassy
published the bilingual commemorative volume
Österreichisch-Ukrainische Begegnungen (“Austrian-Ukrainian Encounters”).
The year under review also saw another one-week
visit to Vienna by a group of social workers, lawyers, civil servants, judges and police officers from
Chernivtsi organised by the Vienna-based NGO
“Confinis cf – association for the implementation
of charitable projects in developing countries”
and the Chernivtsi-based Nova Simja (New Family) association. The two organisations take care
of HIV sufferers and their children, drug addicts
and prostitutes. In Vienna the delegates learned
about the local procedures and organisations in
a number of different fields. Among the institutions visited were the Drug Policy Coordination Office, the Criminal Investigation Department and
the Ganslwirt health, social care and counselling
centre for people with drug problems, as well as
detention centres and prisons.
Various Ukrainian delegations visited the City of
Vienna, including a group from Kiev who were also
received by Speaker of the Vienna Provincial Parliament Professor Harry Kopietz. n
Children from a home
in Izmail in the Danube
delta staging a performance for visitors from
Austria. The home for
abandoned children is run
by the local association
Bessarabia with support
from Caritas, a charitable
organisation of the
Archdiocese of Vienna.
(Larisa Kiselevitch)
The office of the Austrian Agency for International
Cooperation in Education and Research (ÖAD) at
the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv published a textbook on Austria for use by teachers of
German throughout Ukraine. It also co-organised
an international conference on railways, 4 November 1861 having seen the first train service from
Vienna to Lviv, the first ever to Ukraine. The conference was held at the Center for Urban History
of East Central Europe of the Dr. Harald Binder
Private Foundation and received support from
the Province of Carinthia as well as from Vienna.
11
I
nter re ional
an inter local
or anisations
e
ean e i n
aer e
The 2011 General Assembly convened in Ponta
Delgada at the invitation of Carlos Manuel Martins do Vale César, the President of the Portuguese
Autonomous Regional Government of the Azores.
The presentations and panel discussions focused
on “Mastering globalisation with the strength of
the regions”. Dr. Pascal Goergen, formerly the representative of Brussels at the Permanent Representation of Belgium to the EU, was appointed new
AER Secretary General, succeeding Klaus Klipp,
who held this function for ten years.
In St. Pölten, AER President Michèle Sabban,
Lower Austrian Provincial Governor Dr. Erwin
Pröll, European Commissioner for Regional Policy
Dr. Johannes Hahn and representatives of other
organisations signed a joint declaration in support of continuing assistance for 208 regions and
114 municipalities after 2014.
The City Hall of Ponta
Delgada, capital of the
Azores, with a statue of
Archangel Michael, patron
saint of the biggest Azores
island of São Miguel, in
front of the building
(Bernhard Bouzek)
The individual commissions, work groups and
committees were actively involved in preparing
projects, peer reviews, workshops and conferences
and implementing EU programmes. For instance,
a Black Sea conference convening 150 participants
was organised in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, an
autonomous republic in southwest Georgia; a conference on the topic of EU Danube Region Strategy
was held in Vienna; Thessaloniki was the venue
for a conference on risk management. Committee 1, chaired by Jönköping, is dedicated to the
Economy and Regional Development; Committee
2, chaired by Friuli Venezia Giulia, to Social Policy
and Public Health; Committee 3, chaired by Istanbul, to Culture, Education, Youth and International
Cooperation.
Four Training Academies held in Brussels, Bratislava and Hradec Králové were organised for public
sector employees. The Austrian province of Carinthia became a member of the Eurodyssee youth
exchange programme. The innovation prize was
awarded to the Polish region of Wielkopolska; Catalonia was awarded the title of Most Youth Friendly
Region.
The AER Summer School, which celebrated its
25th anniversary, was held in the Dutch province
of Flevoland. 150 participants, more than half of
them youngsters from many European countries,
held discussions on the topic of youth and entrepreneurship. Flevoland is an area entirely wrested
from the sea; the majority of its inhabitants are
young people and commuters from Amsterdam.
Almere, a municipality with some 250,000 inhabitants, has gained a reputation as a centre for
innovative technologies and creative industries.
The participants mourned the death of Norwegian youngsters who had enrolled for the Summer School, but had been killed in the massacre
on Utøya.
The AER was the first regional organisation in Europe to implement concrete cooperation projects
with Tunisia. In June, the AER signed a memorandum with the ministries for regional development
and equal opportunities; seminars on promoting
equality and on regional and local democracy were
already held in the Abruzzo region in the summer
months. In order to ensure sustainability, an AER
branch office was opened in Tunis. A fact-finding
mission was sent to Seoul to take part in a convention of the Association of North-East Asia Regional
12
I
I
I
C
I
I
Governments (NEAR) with member regions in
Mongolia, Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic
of Korea, the Republic of Korea, China and Japan,
its objective being to enhance relations with this
part of the world.
The AER Youth Regional Network brought together
representatives of regional youth parliaments and
youth councils in various projects and actively participated in all AER activities. The 2011 plenary
meetings were held in Orléans and Wrocław. The
Presidency was again awarded to the region of
Jämtland, Sweden.
The AER members include more than 200 regions
and 16 interregional associations. The AER General Secretariat is based in Strasbourg; AER offices
are located in Brussels, Alba Iulia and Tunis.
i
t e i n
n e en e
air ortre ions or
At the Annual Conference in Fingal County (Ireland), City Council Member and Chairman of the
Environmental Committee Erich Valentin was
elected Vice President. The Presidency passed on
to Catalonia. Founded in 1994, the ARC now has 33
member regions and cities in 17 countries. Its objective is to improve cooperation between airports
and the respective regions. Vienna, a member
since 1999, contributes its experience in mediation processes. The various working groups deal
with issues regarding traffic infrastructure, noise
and air pollution as well as economic impacts. Airports within the ARC region handle more than
550 million passengers annually.
in
na
n e
nit
t e an
on upgrading the Danube ports into multimodal
trans-shipment terminals; the Danube Tourist
Commission marketing association developed
new cross-border concepts, among them a further
ambitious project for an uninterrupted cycle path
running the entire length of the river.
Deputy President of ARC
and member of the Vienna
City Council Erich Valentin
with Anne Devitt, President
of ARC 2002–2011, and
the ARC Secretary General
Léa Bodossian (r.).
(Vienna Airport)
Vienna held the chair in the Work Group on Transport and Navigation as well as in the Steering Committee of Corridor VII/ the Danube, one of the ten
pan-European transport corridors.
e e i n
ar e ona at
In 2011, the second year of Vienna’s presidency,
the Conference of Heads of Government of ARGE
Donauländer was held in the presence of the governors of Vienna and Lower Austria, Dr. Michael
Häupl and Dr. Erwin Pröll, in the Banqueting Hall
of Vienna City Hall. A special cultural project was
presented on this occasion: Literature in Flux –
Via Danube, a two-week literary journey on the
Danube organised by the arts association Alte
Schmiede Wien under the auspices of the Halma
network of European literary institutions. Offering
readings by authors from Danube countries, the
historic paddle steamer MS Stadt Wien travelled
up the Danube, reaching Vienna on the Austrian
National Day. A focus of the ARGE’s activities was
Lower Austria’s Governor Dr. Erwin Pröll succeeds Vienna’s Mayor and Governor Dr. Michael Häupl
as chairman of ARGE Donauländer (Working Community of the Danube Regions). (Alex Halada/PID)
1
I
I
I
C
I
I
Apart from the meetings of the work groups on
Spatial Planning and Transport, Culture and Science, Economy and Tourism and Youth and Sport,
Vienna – in cooperation with the Working Community of the Danube Regions, the Assembly of
European Regions (AER) and the Committee of
the Regions (CoR) – implemented an action plan
to promote the EU Strategy for the Danube Region.
The EU Strategy for the Danube Region was officially signed under the Hungarian EU Council
Presidency; Austria will take the leading role in
three areas.
The Working Community was founded after the
fall of the Iron Curtain. Its members are the regions along the Danube, including the Republic
of Moldova and Odessa. The General Secretariat
of the Working Community is in St. Pölten, Lower
Austria.
an
e i n
n i
ean
ni i a itie
ccre or
The CEMR is the European umbrella association of
regional and municipal authorities; its members
are 54 national associations from 40 countries. In
2011 the CEMR celebrated the 60 th anniversary
of its foundation. The organisation with offices in
Paris and Brussels is an important point of contact
at the European level. The current CEMR President
is the Mayor of Stuttgart, Dr. Wolfgang Schuster.
ittee
t e e i n
cor e
In the reporting year, the Committee convened in
six plenary sessions and adopted opinions previously prepared in expert commissions, i.e. issuespecific subcommittees. Vienna was represented
in the expert commissions for culture, youth, education and research (EDUC) and cohesion policy
(COTER). The latter is, among other things, in
charge of transport and urban policy.
A focus of activity of special importance for Vienna
was the future of regional development policy. The
current funding period expires at the end of 2013;
in October, the European Commission presented
the long-expected proposals for the new period
from 2014 to 2020. The CoR joined the discussions
at an early stage: the Committee’s core demands
included promoting a cohesion policy across all
regions including urban areas. The consultations
on this topic are currently being conducted in the
Council and the European Parliament.
1
This regional policy example also shows that a
proactive, forward-looking approach is increasingly gaining importance within the CoR. The Committee’s voice is just one of several contributing
to the formulation of proposals submitted by the
European Commission. In recent years the CoR’s
activities have therefore focused on the preparatory stage of Commission proposals. Expert input is
collected through the networks established by the
CoR, which provide a rapid and non-bureaucratic
channel for exchanging information. Vienna is
an active member in the network for subsidiarity
control and also participates in the inter-regional
group on the Danube area and the regions with
legislative powers group.
The CoR is the institutionalised representation of
regional and local authorities. The 344 members of
the CoR from 27 Member States participate in the
European legislative process in an advisory capacity. Austria delegated a total of twelve members
and the same number of deputy members. Vienna was represented by Vienna Mayor Dr. Michael
Häupl and by Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner in the
function of Deputy Member. Moreover, City Council Member Prof. Elisabeth Vitouch held the function of Deputy Member delegated by the Austrian
Association of Cities and Towns (Städtebund).
n i
an
e itie an
e i n
co cr co
This organisation was officially established in
Budapest in 2009; it is chaired by Ulm, Vienna
is represented in the Presiding Board. The 2011
European Conference was held in Belgrade. With
a generally more pronounced focus on cities, the
Council promotes activities aimed at furthering
cooperation among cities and regions along the
Danube in the various fields of work.
e rocities e
The 2011 Annual Conference and AGM under the
motto “Planning for people” took place in Genoa;
the keynote speech was given by the world famous
Genoese architect Renzo Piano, who planned the
port of the host city. A panel event featured best
practice examples presented by participating cities; Vienna, represented by City Councillor Rudolf
Schicker, organised a “speed networking session”.
Vienna played a very active part in EUROCITIES
in 2011, chairing the Knowledge Society Forum
and the Services of General Interest and Housing
I
I
I
C
I
I
& Homelessness Working Groups and holding the
vice chair in the Mobility Forum and the Working
Group on European Neighbourhood Policy and
Enlargement. Further, Vienna was a member of
the Executive Committee, which submitted statements on the Fifth Cohesion Report, the Action
Plan for Energy Efficiency, the draft directive on
a sustainable future of the European Social Fund
as well as the green papers on procurement and
state aid.
Within the framework of Eurocities, which is the
most important city network, Vienna made ample
use of the opportunity to exchange information
and represent its interests at the European level.
Vienna delegated representatives from its various
municipal departments to the following fora and
working groups: Cooperation (WG Branding Management and City Attractiveness, WG European
Governance and Partnerships), Culture Forum,
Economic Development Forum (WG Cohesion Policy, WG Responsible Procurement and Consumption, WG Metropolitan Areas), Environment Forum
(WG Climate Change – Air Quality – Energy Efficiency, WG Green Areas, WG Greening the Local
Economy, WG Sustainable Urban Water Management, WG Waste Management), Knowledge Society Forum (WG Smart Cities), Mobility Forum (WG
Barrier-Free Cities for All, WG International Accessibility, WG Transport and Energy Efficiency) and
Social Affairs (WG Education, WG Employment,
WG ESF Task Force, WG Health and Well-being).
Municipal Department 22 – Environmental
Protection (MA 22) is a member of the Environment Forum. Key issues in the reporting year included financing of local environmental policy,
adjusting to climate change, and air quality. MA
22 actively participated in the working groups
Greening the Local Economy, Waste Management
and Climate Change, and Air Quality. A central
work focus was on participation in the consultation process on the revision of the EU Air Quality
Framework Directive (2008/50/EC).
With 140 member cities from 30 countries, EUROCITIES is the largest network of European cities.
It is also of particular importance as it serves as a
platform for representing the interests of cities at
the European level, for bilateral and multilateral
exchange of experiences among its members and
for implementing projects. The Mayor of Copenhagen, Frank Jensen, held the Presidency; besides
Vienna, the members of the Executive Committee
included Warsaw, Nantes, Birmingham, Ghent, Budapest, Genoa, The Hague, Leipzig, Stockholm and
Zaragoza.
e
City Council Member
Rudolf Schicker addresses
the EUROCITIES General
Assembly in Genoa.
(Eva Gsteu-Kirschbaum)
itie
fe cities at
With the European women’s network FemCities
(previously MILENA), the City of Vienna’s Women’s
Department (MA57) has provided an international
forum on issues relating to women and gender
equality since 1997. Key priorities include the
exchange of good practice models and the development of administrative structures promoting
women and gender equality. The related activities
of MA 57 include organising international conferences, exchanging examples of transferable good
practice, updating of the website and drafting and
distributing network publications.
1
I
I
I
C
I
I
World Heritage Site. “Defining Universal Heritage Challenges and Solutions” was adopted as
the main theme of the 13th World Conference of
Historical Cities to be held in Hue in 2012. Shigenori Shibata replaced Hisakazu Takagi as new
Secretary General of the LHC. Including the new
members Ankara and Sanliurfa/Turkey, as well as
Termez/Uzbekistan and Cape Town, the League
has expanded to embrace 92 cities in 57 countries.
ani ati n
e ita e itie
Vietnam’s historic
imperial capital Hue,
a UNESCO World Cultural
Heritage City, hosted the
International Music &
Dance Festival and the
world conference of the
League of Historical Cities
in 2011. (Yumiko Naya)
The 2011 international FemCities Conference was
held in cooperation with the Canton of Basel City at
the University of Basel. With the conference theme
“Migrant Women in European Cities and Municipalities – challenges and potentials from a gender
perspective, promising approaches by local authorities” FemCities addressed a highly challenging topic for European municipal authorities. More
than 37 cities participated in the conference. Stuttgart assumed responsibility for FemCities network
coordination in the German-speaking countries.
With the FemCities Danube Region project, FemCities has been contributing to the implementation of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region.
Project measures focus on interregional cooperation and good governance, a focus specifically
emphasised by the City of Vienna, as well as on
“improving institutional capacity and cooperation”.
The project, among others, encompasses the following modules: the FemCities Danube Network
is designed to strengthen the networks between
specialised administrative bodies in the field of
women and gender equality policy in the Danube
area and promote the exchange of information
on successful administrative practices; the Girls’
Day goes FemCities project aims at promoting the
diversification of education and career choice processes of girls and women in the Danube region;
FemCities.Media is designed to promote gendersensitive media coverage.
e ea
e
i t i a
itie
htt
city yoto so
o sai lhcs
The Board of Directors of the LHC convened in
the old imperial City of Hue, Vietnam, a UNESCO
1
ov
or
The 11th World Congress of the OWHC on the topic
of “World Heritage Cities and Climate Change” was
held in Sintra, Portugal. Vienna took part with a
poster exhibition entitled “Best Practices against
Climate Change”. Notable examples in the Vienna
city areas with World Heritage status, namely the
historic city centre and Schönbrunn Castle and
Park, above all include the photovoltaic systems
installed on the roofs of historic buildings, measures to promote bicycle traffic in the city, which
include the provision of free bikes for hire (CityBike project) and the city’s district heating system,
which also supplies Vienna City Hall. Vienna also
presented the film on its KliP Climate Protection
Programme and the new waste separation campaign “Oida, trenn!” (Separate, man!), which were
received with interest. 350 representatives from
140 cities in 70 countries took part in the Congress.
Tunis was awarded the Jean Paul l’Allier prize for a
road maintenance project in the casbah. The winners of the international video production competition for young people entitled “My City, Our World
Heritage” were Puebla and Segovia/Castile-León.
The newly elected Board of Directors consists of Bordeau x, Beemster/Netherlands,
Córdoba/Andalusia, Puebla, Quito, Valparaíso,
Sintra and Vienna. The organisation comprises
238 UNESCO cities worldwide. Its General Secretariat is headquartered in Québec City with regional secretariats in Tunis, Zanzibar, Budapest,
Valparaíso, Kazan and Regensburg (for North and
West Europe).
e i ati e
ean e i n wit
we
re le e
The Brussels Capital Region hosted the Presidency in the reporting year. The annual key objectives “Openness – Coherence – Inclusiveness”
were chosen with a view to further promoting the
I
development of the network; the work focus was on
economic issues in connection with the EU 2020
Strategy and the “European Semester”, a cycle of
economic and budgetary policy coordination at
the EU level. In some areas, the regions are inadequately involved in decision-making processes,
even though they are massively affected by the
outcomes. At the institutional level, cooperation
agreements were signed with the Conference
of European Regional Legislative Assemblies
(CALRE) and the Congress of Local and Regional
Authorities of Europe (CLRAE) of the Council of
Europe. Furthermore, REGLEG became a member
of CoR’s Subsidiarity Monitoring Network.
The external prestige and visibility of the organisation were enhanced by the publication of a newsletter and the introduction of so-called “CoCo+
meetings” – brief discussion rounds with other
stakeholders. The designation was chosen in analogy to the REGLEG CoCo meetings, i.e. the regular
meetings of the REGLEG Coordination Committee.
I
I
The Conference of Presidents of Regions with
Legislative Powers is an informal political network that promotes the special requirements and
interests of regions with legislative powers in the
EU decision-making process. It currently consists
of 73 member regions from eight EU states, i.e.
Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium, plus
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Portuguese
Azores and Madeira as well as the Finnish Åland
Islands, which all boast legislative competences
and their own regional governments, directly
elected parliaments and which are responsible
for the implementation of EU legislation. All in all,
the member regions represent almost half of the
entire EU population.
C
I
I
The Speaker of the Vienna
Provincial Parliament,
Professor Harry Kopietz,
receives a key as a symbol of his RegLeg chairmanship in 2012, together
with Daniela Urschitz/
MD-BD (5th from left).
(Brussels Capital Region)
In 2012 the Presidency will be handed over to
Vienna. Economic issues with a special focus on
the role of the public sector in the field of services
of general interest will be a key work focus. n
1
A
ctivities of the Chief ec tive ffice
ec tive ro s an instit tions
Chief Executive Director
Dr. Erich Hechtner
(centre) with colleagues
from Dublin, Helsinki,
Ljubljana, Nicosia, Riga
and Vilnius, host
Toomas Sepp (centre
right) and Stefan Leeb
MSc from the Chief
Executive Office (2nd row,
2nd from right)
(City of Tallinn)
ie
e
ti e
i e
ni ati n an nte nati na
nta t
The Chief Executive Director of the City and Federal Province of Vienna, Dr. Erich Hechtner, welcomed a group of more than twenty of his counterparts from municipalities in the region of Stockholm to a meeting in Vienna. The talks focused on
questions in relation to services of general interest
and the challenges faced by modern public administrations with respect to open government and
social media. The visitors also met with officials
of the Vienna Employment Promotion Fund (waff)
to learn about what Vienna does to assist young
migrants; the Vienna Business Agency presented
the city’s new Life-Science & Biotech Cluster.
In the run-up to an international technology trade
fair in Izmir, Dr. Hechtner received a group of journalists from this, the third-largest city in Turkey.
Tallinn, European Cultural Capital 2011, hosted
a meeting of municipal administration directors
who discussed the structures and processes of
their cities’ administrative bodies. The talks focused on current issues, but above all on the outlook for the future.
1
inati n
i ate
te ti n ea e
A delegation from Hamburg visited Vienna to learn
about the city’s climate protection programme,
and climate protection and air quality were also
at the centre of round table discussions at the
Vienna House and the London Bureau in Brussels,
in which officials from several cities participated.
About 350 delegates were present at a meeting of
the Climate Alliance in Munich. Vienna’s climate
protection policies were presented at the 51st congress of the Union of Capitals of the European
Union in Vilnius and the conference of World Heritage Cities in Sintra. The Climate Protection Coordination Unit participated in PUMA, an internal
environmental management programme run by
the City of Vienna, which was designated as a best
practice programme by the European Institute for
Public Administration in Maastricht. Vienna’s ecofriendly procurement programme ÖkoKauf Wien
even received the European Sector Award and the
Dubai International Award.
t ate i ne
i
The Strategic Energy Policy Unit is the core unit
responsible for all aspects of the City of Vienna’s
energy policy. It provides consultancy services and
analyses, develops strategies, policies and position
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
papers and represents the City of Vienna on relevant bodies. It is also legally mandated by the
Austrian Elektrizitätswirtschaftsgesetz (Power
Industry Act) to fulfil oversight functions in the
energy field.
In the year under report, the Strategic Energy Policy Unit presented the City of Vienna’s energy policy on visits abroad and to international delegations
visiting Vienna. A special focus were the Vienna
Days in Baku, where a presentation of Vienna’s
energy strategy was given under the heading
“Green & Smart”, highlighting in particular how
municipal administration, strategy development
and business have to work together to attain energy policy objectives. Several Viennese companies
also visited Baku and presented technical solutions
which are being used in Vienna in the practical
implementation of energy policy. Vienna’s Climate
Protection Programme was presented at the 2011
Climate Congress in Duisburg, and a delegation
from Poland visited Vienna to learn about the energy industry here and the strategies which Vienna
is pursuing in the field.
e ti e
e a
ai
The Subgroup for Civil and Criminal Law is a
member of the working group on legal issues and
questions relating to urban public transport of
the Association of German Cities and Towns, and
attended a conference in Aachen in this capacity.
The Subgroup for Constitutional Matters and EU
Affairs represented Vienna in international networks and ran the Vienna House in Brussels. As of
January 2012, this unit was integrated into Municipal Department 27 (European Affairs).
e ti e
e nne an nte na
itin
The Academy of Public Administration and Human Resources Development Subgroup organised
a study tour to Brussels, Maastricht and Rotterdam
as part of a training programme for high-level officials, who learned about innovative projects for
the modernisation of public administrations and
urban development. An international conference
on human resources development and continuing education took place in Berlin. The Austrian
Institute for Internal Auditing hosted the 6 th
international conference for auditors from the CEE
region. About 300 participants from 32 countries
attended the conference, which was held in Vienna
for the first time. Dr. Paul Jauernig, head of Internal Auditing, gave a presentation on internal auditing systems at the conference.
The Executive Group for Personnel and Internal
Auditing participated in a conference of the German Association for Human Resources Management in Wiesbaden, and information in the human
resources development field was shared with officials from Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt/Main and
major corporate dialogue partners from Germany.
The topics discussed were: human resources management between individualisation and discrimination; trends and their consequences in human
resources management; output management
between commitment and burnout; and lastly,
social media. A symposium on human resources
management took place in Berlin, where a staff
member from Vienna also spent time on an internship with the unit for domestic affairs and sports.
In the context of the programme “Fit for Europe”,
officials from France, Germany, Hungary, Finland
and Spain visited Vienna on internships, as did students from academies of administration in Kehl
and Ludwigsburg, who spent part of a one-year
practical training programme in Vienna.
The Austrian Minister for
Women’s Issues and the
Civil Service
Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek
with Germany’s Minister
of the Interior
Dr. Hans-Peter Friedrich
visiting the “Digital
Austria” booth at
“Moderner Staat”, a trade
show and congress for
public sector decisionmakers.
(Behrendt and Rausch)
e ti e
ani ati n a et an
e it
Vienna’s gender mainstreaming policy continued
to draw much international attention, with enquiries from many different countries, from Australia
to Kosovo to Ukraine. The Association of Finnish
Local and Regional Authorities (AFLRA) designated Vienna as a “flagship city” in this context,
along with Heidelberg and Kalmar (Sweden). Delegates from AFLRA, from the Swedish Ministry
of Culture and several Albanian ministries, from
Mongolia, the Czech Republic and the European
Institute for Gender Equality visited Vienna to
1
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
tions were submitted to an e-government competition for the German-speaking region of Europe,
in which Vienna won first prize in the category
“Innovative e-government project” for its combination of e-government and open data resources.
International visitors to the ICT Subgroup came
from St. Petersburg, the Czech Republic, Poland
and Taiwan, and officials from Vienna presented
IT solutions at a conference of the “Major Cities
of Europe” network held in Prato (Tuscany), in
Berne and at a meeting of German municipal
IT service providers in Bad Oeynhausen (North
Rhine-Westphalia).
Popular with delegations
from Austria and abroad:
the “bahnorama” visitor
centre and viewing
platform at the construction site for Vienna’s
new central rail station.
(Andreas Schwab)
gather first-hand information on how the city
implements its gender mainstreaming policy. A
presentation on childcare issues was given for
officials from several Turkish ministries in the
context of a twinning project conducted by the
Austrian Development Agency (ADA). The gender
mainstreaming unit was invited to participate in
a conference in Sydney and contributed presentations to meetings in Finland and in Vojvodina.
Meetings also took place in Brussels and at the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the latter dedicated
to the Vietnamese Women’s Union.
The Executive Group for Organisation, Safety and
Security (MD-OS) contributed a presentation on
quality assurance instruments in municipal administration to the inaugural meeting of a networking platform of the European Institute of Public Administration in Dijon. MD-OS officials also
participated in a meeting of the German municipal
management association in Nuremberg and spoke
about the Common Assessment Framework in Austria at meetings in Warsaw and Berlin.
The Subgroup for Crisis Management and Emergency Measures continued to exchange information internationally about the latest developments
in the areas of crisis management, firefighting, policing and ambulance services. An international
conference on these areas of activity took place
in Tel Aviv-Yafo. In addition to enquiries from
Prague, visitors from Poland were interested to
hear about Vienna’s past experiences with a view
to Poland’s co-hosting of the 2012 European Football Championship.
The ICT Subgroup participated in a conference on
“The modern state” in Berlin, which focused in particular on questions of transparency. 56 applica-
20
e ti e
n t ti n an e n
Vienna’s Director General of Urban Planning,
Development and Construction, Brigitte Jilka
MBA, welcomed several groups of international
visitors, including a delegation from Kraków that
came to Vienna in the context of the two cities’ bilateral partnership. She also received visitors from
the University of Seoul and from Turin, who were
on a fact-finding mission concerning eco-friendly
urban development and went to the construction
site for Vienna’s new central rail station and the
Flugfeld Aspern development zone. Similarly, a
group of urban planners from the Swiss canton of
Zurich were offered a tour around Vienna to see
urban development hotspots and the latest examples of new housing construction. Officials from
the Executive Group for Construction and Technology (MD-BD) went to Munich on a study tour on bicycle traffic and to Essen, where they attended the
16th International Conference on Urban Planning,
Regional Development and the Information Society. Another tour of urban planning experts was
made to Switzerland.
Kraków organised a conference under the heading “Intelligent City Kraków” which addressed
Smart City issues, i.e. the use of technology in the
everyday running of a city and its administrative
bodies. The role of the region Małopolska was also
discussed, and an Information Technology Park
designed to serve as a development platform was
presented.
Gender mainstreaming in urban planning processes was the theme of a conference held in Barcelona under the title “Urban Studies, Gender and
Feminism”.
Numerous international delegations – 450 visitors
in all – came to see the construction site where
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
High-ranking officers from
the Colombian Military
Academy in Bogotá
on a tour to Austria,
where they visited Vienna
City Hall, the Ministry of
Defence, the AntiCorruption Authority and
the United Nations Office.
(Bernhard Bouzek)
Vienna’s new central rail station is being developed, where a special exhibition area called “bahnorama” has been installed for visitors.
As the administrative body responsible for Vienna’s UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites – the
historic city centre and the Schönbrunn Palace
and Park ensemble – the Executive Group for
Construction and Technology had several meetings with UNESCO representatives. The focus of
the talks was to ensure the compatibility of major
urban development projects, such as the new central rail station, with the obligations resulting from
World Heritage status.
Moreover, the Executive Group for Construction
and Technology was responsible for Vienna’s contribution to the EU Strategy for the Danube Region
(see the “European Union” section) and for coordinating activities within CENTROPE Capacity (see
the section on “Vienna’s cooperation projects with
other cities and countries”).
and implementing policy strategies for bilateral
international activities of political and economic
relevance, including target destination activities.
It also coordinates activities under the City of Vienna’s cooperation agreements with other cities
and supports visits by foreign expert delegations.
In the year under report, MD-EUI organised conferences, seminars and other events and served
as contact point for other cities, regions and nations, their diplomatic missions in Austria and
the international organisations that have offices
in Vienna. To this end, MD-EUI cooperated closely with the Federal Ministry for European and
International Affairs, in particular with the latter’s protocol, political and cultural sections, as
Miroslav Benáček MAIS
from the Department for
European Affairs of the
Czech Government Office
and Iulia Iliut MAIS/IAEA
opening a conference on
“Migration and the
European Union” at
Vienna’s Diplomatic
Academy. (DASI)
e ti e
ean an nte nati na
ai
The Executive Group for European and International Affairs (MD-EUI) acts as the central hub
for Vienna’s international activities. The MD-EUI
team is responsible for strategic coordination
in the multilateral relations field, provides key
services for cooperation at the European and
international level, and designs and implements
Vienna’s contribution to international development cooperation.
Within MD-EUI, the International Strategy and
Coordination Unit is responsible for designing
21
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
well as with Austria’s diplomatic missions abroad.
Cooperation also continued with other long-established partners, including the bilateral friendship
societies and their umbrella organisation “Partner
of all Nations” (PaN), the Institute for Parlamentarism and Democracy Issues, the Institute for
the Danube Region and Central Europe (IDM),
the Intercultural Centre, KulturKontakt Austria
and NGOs.
As in previous years, MD-EUI worked on joint
projects with the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna
and organised a programme for students on the
Academy’s special study programmes. The 2011
conference of the Diplomatic Academy Student Initiative (DASI) was dedicated to “Migration and the
European Union”. The traditional social evening for
the graduates, which closed the academic year in
late June, was also co-organised by MD-EUI and
the Academy.
Encounters were organised at the political and administrative level, as were visitors’ programmes
for foreign experts. These included a delegation
from Turin who came to Vienna to gather knowhow to be used in a 130-hectare urban development project which the Italian city is currently
designing. Interest was particularly strong with
respect to big infrastructure projects, such as the
new central rail terminal and the urban development zone Erdberger Mais; other major items on
An exhibition
entitled “Mongolia in
the 20 th century” was
on show at Vienna’s
Main City Library.
(Mongolian Embassy)
I
I
visitors’ agendas were energy-efficient housing
construction, project design and project management, and how to find investors. Among the
numerous delegations were a group of military
leaders from Colombia, students from an Austrian
school in Quito, mayors from several cities in Iran,
student participants from the Erasmus World programme and interns of the European Economic
and Social Committee.
MD-EUI organised, supported and/or initiated numerous projects; here are some examples:
The re-opening of a children’s playground which
had been refurbished with financial support from
the City of Vienna was celebrated in the town of
Rechovot near Tel Aviv-Yafo. The playground belongs to a child daycare centre which provides
care and education for children up to the age of
three who come from the poorest sections of society. A century of Mongolian independence was
marked with an exhibition entitled “Mongolia in
the 20 th century” at the Main City Library. The
International Day of Peace on 21 September was
celebrated with a performance of The bat and the
sun, a play based on a fairytale from the Congo,
with musical accompaniment by the Global Peace
Orchestra. Continuing a long-standing tradition,
representatives from Vienna participated in the
annual celebration of the foundation of Odessa; for
the first time, Vienna was also present at similar
functions in Yerevan to mark the 20th anniversary
of Armenian independence. More than 100 English
teaching assistants – university graduates from
the US who spend a year as assistant teachers in
schools across Austria – visited Vienna City Hall,
where they showed particular interest in the City
Library.
Participants from the Compress target destinations met at dialogue forums in the spring and
autumn to discuss “Efficient human resources
management” and “Women’s interests as agendas
for successful cities”. A presentation about Vienna’s helpline for women and women’s shelters was
given at the autumn forum.
ati n
t
n
ati n an
t
The festival “Petersburg children” took place in
Graz and Vienna, presenting a colourful gamut
of young arts productions from the Russian metropolis with its rich cultural life. Children’s drawings were on show at Vienna’s Main City Library,
22
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
City Councillor Christian
Oxonitsch and actress
Mercedes Echerer at a
celebration in honour of
World Peace Day in the
Arcade Courtyard of
Vienna City Hall
(Votava/PID)
and City Councillor Christian Oxonitsch informed
St. Petersburg’s Vice-Governor Alla Manilova about
current education projects here. The 150-strong
choir of the Vienna International School (Vienna
International Junior Choir) made musical contributions to many major UN events. Mary Farrell and
Jim Pearson from the USA, founders of the choir
in 1988, received the City of Vienna’s Silver Decoration of Merit from City Councillor Christian Oxonitsch. Exchange students from Rockford, Illinois
took waltzing classes at home and then attended
the Concordia Ball in Vienna, where they were received by Mr. Oxonitsch.
A summer party at the Brossmannplatz kindergarten in the district of Floridsdorf was used to raise
funds for the people hit by the disaster in Japan.
The kindergarten children collected donations totalling 1,402 euro. The Japanese partner district of
Floridsdorf is Katsushika in Tokyo. Municipal Department 10 (Child Day Care Centres) welcomed
colleagues from Ljubljana for expert talks.
Since 2000, the Youth and Family Welfare Office (MA 11) has been a member of the European
Network for Social Authorities (ENSA), originally
founded by the Veneto region. The annual general
meeting of ENSA was held in Klagenfurt in 2011;
working groups on children, youth and social inclusion met in Vienna, where local officials and their
administrative units informed them about social
policies here. Expert talks with visitors from vocational training institutions in Magdeburg-Stendal
(Sachsen-Anhalt) and Bochum focused on fund-
ing and controlling of non-governmental youth
welfare agencies.
Together with partners from Hungary, Sweden,
Germany, Belgium, Italy and Norway, MA 11 submitted a project proposal under the title “CHAIN
– ExCHAnge of Experiences and Methods of Early
Intervention”. The project aims at training volunteers to intervene in disadvantaged families with
babies in cases where a baby may be at risk. A
meeting was held in this context in Dietzenbach
(Hessen); conversely, visitors from Västerås in the
Swedish region of Västmanlands län and from
Hungary were welcomed to Vienna. The Leonardo
da Vinci Project ENSA-Y aimed at gaining insights
into regional youth promotion projects. Project
meetings were held in Vienna and in Crocetta
del Montello (Veneto). A meeting of the
European Social Network (ESN) took
place in Paris.
UN Special Envoy
Dr. Elisabeth Rehn with
Norbert Ceipek, head
of the “Drehscheibe”
support centre for
unaccompanied foreign
minors, who received the
Golden Charter Award in
Sarajevo. (COMPRESS)
MA 11 conducted talks with Impilo, an
association that organises adoptions
of children from South Africa. Visitors
from Azerbaijan came to Vienna to learn
about adoption and fostering here.
“Drehscheibe”, a centre that supports
unaccompanied foreign minors awaiting
transport back to their home countries,
has earned international recognition as
a best practice model. Already several
years ago, Drehscheibe initiated the
establishment of children’s homes in
2
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
Karl Ceplak, Head of the
Youth Department of the
City of Vienna (Andreas
Pessenlehner/wienXtra)
I
youth organisations in Brussels and Antwerp,
European Youth Capital 2011. A delegation of officials from several youth institutions led by City
Council Member Jürgen Wutzlhofer and Karl Ceplak, Head of the Youth Department, travelled to
Toronto und Vancouver. The study tour focused
on immigration policies in Canada, the impact of
cultural diversity on education and labour, and
community work in connection with youth participation projects.
Bulgaria and Romania, a practice that has been
emulated by other cities in Austria and Western
Europe. The head of Drehscheibe, Norbert Ceipek,
has received several awards and is frequently invited to speak at international conferences; over
the years, he has also made hundreds of media
appearances. In 2011, Mr. Ceipek received the
Golden Charter Award in Sarajevo. The board
of the International League of Humanists (ILH)
presents this award every five years for outstanding projects and ideas that make an important contribution to society. Mr. Ceipek received the Award
certificate from the hands of Croatia’s former president, Stjepan Mesić, and UN Special Envoy and
former Finnish minister Dr. Elisabeth Rehn.
Designs by students of the
Hetzendorf fashion design
school were presented at
the 2011 fashion show,
“Synergies” (Wolfgang
Simlinger/Modeschule)
I
Municipal Department 13 (MA 13 – Education,
Out-of-School Activities for Children and Young
People) pursued manifold international activities.
The department’s youth and education experts visited Jerusalem to learn about projects in the field
of inter-faith dialogue, migration and diversity
there. The wienXtra Institute for leisure activities
management met with European and international
Youth experts from the city of Hannover visited
Vienna to learn about child and youth work here,
and MA 13 and the Intercultural Centre welcomed
the All China Youth Federation to Vienna in the
context of the EU-China Youth Year. A trip to Vienna concluded a Youth in Action seminar for young
people from Israel, Tyrol and South Tyrol/Alto
Adige. Other visitors to MA 13 came from Tel AvivYafo, Rotterdam, Belgrade and Györ. The European
Youth Forum, an umbrella organisation of more
than 100 European organisations, met for an information and networking meeting under the
banner “Can Youth Rights be Your Rights? Making
European Debates Reality?” in Vienna. The ENSA
working group on childhood, youth and social integration also held a meeting in Vienna, and an
international conference on the “Future and Reality of Gaming” took place here as well.
The fashion design school at Schloss Hetzendorf
continued its long-standing cooperation with the
Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo. Another regular
item on the annual curriculum is a week-long visit
to London for language training and creative work.
The fashion design school was also present at the
Techtextil trade fair for technical textiles and
fleece materials, which brought together 1,200
companies from 85 countries in Frankfurt/Main.
New trends in art education and the use of digital media were at the centre of talks at the Insea
World Conference in Budapest. School principal
Monika Kycelt presented the Hetzendorf design
school at the Fashion Net trade show in Düsseldorf
and on textile design study tours to Graz, Zagreb
und Lepoglava in the Varaždin region (Croatia).
Teachers and students from the college visited
a fabric trade fair in Paris and participated in a
trend seminar in Zurich.
The Vienna Public Libraries organised a staff exchange programme during which librarians from
Vienna worked for a week in other large public
libraries in Europe whose staff were hosted in
2
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Vienna; for this purpose, a study programme was
organised here. Traditional staff exchanges with
the City Library of Prague were continued, and
contacts were intensified with the City Library of
Helsinki to learn more about the latter’s pioneering efforts to promote reading. Another venue for
librarians’ encounters in 2011 was Amsterdam.
In London, staff from the local branch library of
Vienna’s Ottakring district acquainted themselves
with the “idea stores” concept, which combines traditional library services with new learning offers.
The Vienna Public Libraries also received many
international expert visitors.
As part of the international activities of the
Vienna School of Music and Singing, soloists of the
Salonorchester Margareten travelled to the New
England Conservatory in Boston; the School of Music and Singing participated (as the only Austrian
choir) in the International Children’s Choir Festival in Halle/Saale alongside choirs from Germany,
Belarus, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.
Vienna’s adult education institution Volkshochschulen GmbH participated in nine European
Grundtvig learning partnerships. These partnerships are organised under the Grundtvig
Programme, which supports new ways of cooperation in Europe to assist students, teachers
and organisations in adult education. By travelling abroad and participating in transnational
projects, adult education staff can acquire new
skills and competences for their professional life
and personal development. The partner countries
are Great Britain, Poland, Germany, Spain, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Finland, Norway,
Switzerland, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania
and Turkey. A conference of adult education institutions in major cities took place in Aachen. The
education consultancy service for learning partnerships met in Berlin, while a regional quality
management support office meeting was held in
Hannover.
it participated in conferences in Valencia and Istanbul in 2011. Students of musical from academic
institutions in Berlin, Essen, Leipzig, Munich and
Vienna met for the 9th time to present their talents
to potential employers in an audition organised for
theatre principals. A performance by graduates in
the musical field was staged in Leipzig. The dance
department was very active in contributing to the
interdisciplinary arts festival in Istanbul.
Final-year students of the
musical theatre study
programme of the
KONSuni performing arts
school (Guido Suchomski)
Founded in 2003 by a group of Colombian music
students living in Vienna, the ensemble “Arte
Latino Viena” is a project for cultural exchange
between Colombia and Austria. Between 2003
and 2005, a number of concerts and exhibitions
took place in the two countries, and in 2007, the
Austrian embassy in Colombia began supporting
the ensemble’s tours in cooperation with KONSuni.
The Konservatorium Wien private university
(KONSuni) is a performing arts school owned by
the City of Vienna and organised as a private enterprise. KONSuni engages in a range of international
activities:
In the year under report, teachers of composition
and KONSuni students again travelled to Colombia to work with several orchestras in Bogotá und
Neiva on both classical and contemporary music.
Furthermore, music teaching at the Municipal
Music School of Villavicencio, capital of the state
of Meta, was another major focus of the visit. A
return visit by a Colombian delegation to KONSuni
was planned for the academic year 2011/2012.
KONSuni is a member of the Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen and of the European
League of Institutes of the Arts; in this capacity,
In the spirit of its commitment to international
academic research, KONSuni participated in EU
education programmes as a partner in strategic
partnerships with more than 70 institutions,
2
C IVI I
Marcela Cerno and
Peruvian tenor Xavier
Fernández perform the
duet “Lippen schweigen”
from the Lehár operetta
“The Merry Widow”,
accompanied by the
Viennese ladies’ orchestra
“Fledermaus”.
The orchestra lent the
right musical flair to the
first Viennese Ball in
Lima. With 460 ballgoers, the event at the
Swissôtel was sold out,
and the proceeds of
nearly 8,000 euro were
donated to “Viennese
Schools” in the
El Agustino district.
(Austrian Embassy Lima)
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
among them the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki,
the Zurich Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy
of Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt/Main,
the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and the Helsinki
Polytechnic Stadia (Faculty of Culture and Services, Department of Pop and Jazz). Students and
teachers from the jazz department participated in
the Erasmus Programme “Conducting and music
for large jazz ensemble” in Cosenza (Calabria), together with counterparts from Aarhus and Esbjerg
(Denmark), Lille, Cyprus and Tromsø (Norway).
Following 86 applications from 33 countries, the
European Commission appointed KONSuni faculty member Elena Luptak as its new Erasmus
Ambassador. KONSuni’s Mobilis saxophone quartet contributed a musical performance to the 15th
anniversary celebrations of the Leonardo da Vinci
Programme in Brussels. KONSuni applied successfully to participate in the EU project EduMEMA –
Middle European Music Academy; the department
of early music was the first to launch collaboration activities with partners from Istanbul, Košice,
Prague, Poprad (Slovakia) and Larnaca (Cyprus).
The Sports Office (Municipal Department 51)
made Vienna a focus for international sports audiences by hosting the Maccabi Games in 2011. The
successful bid for the games brought the biggest
Jewish sporting event worldwide to Vienna: more
than 2000 athletes from 40 counties participated
in the Games’ 19 competitions.
The American Football World Championship took
place in Graz, Linz and Vienna, with the final
game won by the US team, playing in front of an
audience of 20,000 in Vienna’s Prater stadium.
I
I
Salzburg, Kremsmünster, Linz, Pasching and
Vienna were the venues of the fistball world championship 2011, in which 116 players from twelve
nations participated. The games were seen by
30,000 spectators at the venues and by hundreds
of thousands of TV viewers. The men’s European
volleyball championship EuroVolley 2011 was cohosted by the Czech Republic and Austria, with
games played at Karlovy Vary, Prague, Innsbruck
and Vienna. Out of 16 national teams who qualified
for the tournament, Serbia won the title, defeating Italy and Poland in sell-out final matches at
Vienna’s Stadthalle centre. A four-cities football
tournament for Under 14 teams took place in Berlin, Paris, Zagreb and Vienna.
Municipal Department 55 (MA 55 – Community
Service) informed visitors from the Russian online
magazine Euromag about the services it provides
and the electronic technologies used in administration. Journalists were particularly interested in
an application form which is available on the city’s
website wien.at and can be retrieved via smartphone. Department head Peter Kozel was invited
to Hamburg, where he spoke about telephone
services in public administration. MA 55 organised neighbourhood festivities to mark European
Neighbourhood Day on 27 May, which is dedicated
to social cohesion.
The Vienna Schools (Municipal Department 56)
welcomed a delegation of pre-school and school
education experts from Ljubljana for a tour of the
Gertrude Fröhlich-Sandner Campus.
e
an
n
ati n e i e
Viennese balls have been held at international
venues for more than 30 years with the support of
the City of Vienna’s Press and Information Service
(MA 53, acronym PID). In 2011, 24 balls and one
concert took place in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York,
Noordwijk, Prague, Ottawa, Basel, Munich, Berlin,
Brussels, Athens, Boston, Sofia, Bucharest, Johannesburg, Moscow, Opatija, Rome, Lisbon, London,
Seoul and – for the first time – in Lima, Antalya
and Aşgabat.
Two years ago, PID established a one-stop contact
point for international media, and experience
since then has shown that continuity in cooperation and marketing activities makes sense. Media
enquiries addressed to PID doubled in number
from the previous year’s level and covered a wide
2
C IVI I
C I
The “Fledermaus” orchestra also gave a performance at the City Hall of Lima. Among the audience were
(from left) City Council Member Professor Elisabeth Vitouch, Professor Peter Vitouch, Ambassador
Dr. Andreas Melán, Patricia Melán, Lima’s City Councillor for Culture and Education Pedro Pablo Alayza
and Sylvia Spannring from MA 53. (Austrian Embassy Lima)
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
Extensive reports on Austria and Vienna appeared in the Turkish press
on the occasion of the Izmir technology trade fair. (PID/Gassner)
range of topics, from culture and sports to children and housing issues. Many journalists visited
Vienna for on-site research, others were supported
by e-mail or telephone. These included newspeople
from major publications such as Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Japanese daily with a circulation
of six million in its home country. PID also organised visits to Vienna for journalists in the run-up
to major events abroad, such as an exhibition in
Izmir, where City Councillor Dr. Michael Ludwig
represented Vienna. The exhibition was covered
in 100 reports published by 70 different media.
Synergies with the Foreign Press Association and
the Federal Press Service were used, and PID also
supported experts visiting Vienna.
PID also assisted the energy ministry of Turkmenistan in commissioning a new energy supply masterplan that will introduce alternatives to
natural gas. The contract was awarded to a Viennese consulting company. After Vienna’s Director
General of Urban Planning, Development and Construction, Dr. Kurt Puchinger, had led an urban
planning symposium in Yerevan, a one-week urban planning seminar for Armenian urban planners was held in Vienna with support from the
OSCE. PID identified the birthplaces of architect
Friedrich Ohmann and Islam scholar Muhammad
Asad in Lviv.
The 12th European Newspaper Congress brought
together some 500 editors, graphic artists and
newspaper makers for discussions of the general
theme “Apps, Tablets, iPad – new friends or new
foes”.
The Vienna Film Commission functions as the
central contact point for all film shoots in the city,
providing free support services for national and
ienna i
I
i i n
Film shoot for
“Music is in the air”, produced for the 2012 New
Year’s Concert by
Breisach Medienwerkstatt
GmbH. The musicians are
performing in front of the
Empress Maria Theresia
monument, with Vienna’s
Museum of Art History in
the background. (VFC)
In autumn, the international media world met
at IFRA Expo, a communication platform for the
press and media industry and its suppliers. Parallel
to the trade fair, which took place at Messe Wien,
the 63rd World Congress of Newspapers and the
18th World Forum of Chief Editors took place. The
Erasmus EuroMedia Awards, which honour outstanding media products that critically reflect the
history, development and values of Europe, were
presented for the 16th time. Little Alien, a documentary from Vienna about the lives of young asylum seekers, was selected from a field of 43 media
products from 11 countries as the recipient of the
main award. Further awards were won by Dutch,
Norwegian, German and US media.
2
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
In 2011 the European Office hosted visits by foreign delegations, pursued education cooperation
projects together with partners from several
European countries and worked to promote the
study of the languages spoken in Austria’s neighbouring countries, including Hungarian, Czech
and Slovak. To assist in the internationalisation
of Vienna as a business location, bilingual schools
and language initiatives for English, French, Italian and Spanish were also supported.
In the year under report, the Vienna Film Commission supported 57 international productions
with shoots in Vienna, including projects from
Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, Canada, the
US, Israel and the Republic of Korea.
The Comenius Regio school cooperation project
UniARTE (University, Arts & Education) brought
students from universities in Germany and Austria to schools, where they led creative workshops
in the arts and culture field. An exhibition of the
products of these arts classes under the title “Vienna on the Ruhr” concluded the project. Another
Comenius Regio project entitled “Stay on Track” addressed the issue of school drop-outs and truancy
in the vocational education field. Together with
project partners from Antwerp, strategies were developed to prevent and counteract these problems.
ienna
a
ati n
The European Office of the Vienna Board of Education is in charge of international project and
contacts there; it initiates and coordinates major cross-border cooperation projects which aim
to improve the economic and social situation in
the participating regions with the help of EU cofunding. Stuart Simpson was appointed head of
the European Office.
2
I
international film and TV productions of documentaries and feature films, students’ films and
commercials. It assists film-makers in obtaining
permits for film shoots and finding suitable locations and service partners in the industry. At
the international level, the Vienna Film Commission works to promote Vienna as a location for
film shoots and production with a view to achieving long-term positive effects for the local film
industry.
The Vienna Film Commission presented Vienna at
film trade shows held in conjunction with the 2011
international film festivals in Berlin and Cannes,
at the TV trade show MIPCOM in Cannes and at the
Locations Trade Show in Los Angeles.
Board of Education
President Dr. Susanne
Brandsteidl and Dr. Günter
Haider, Director of BIFIE,
an education institute in
Salzburg, at a PISA
conference (Vienna Board
of Education)
I
Schooling, work and language are the areas of
cooperation in the EdTWIN projects supported
by the European Fund for Regional Development.
Children and young people from six to 19 years
participated in encounter projects and acquired
skills in the language of a neighbouring country.
The CentroSchooling project promotes school partnerships to enable young people to get to know the
school systems of neighbouring countries. In 2011,
750 Viennese pupils participated in the project.
Some 400 took part in CentroVOC, in which secondary and vocational schools developed educational concepts and cooperated in practice firms.
Under the CentroLING project, native speakers of
Austria’s neighbouring languages taught Austrian
pupils. An exhibition entitled “A European Region
– People in CENTROPE” opened in the spring in
Eisenstadt, capital of the province of Burgenland.
Supported by CENTRAL EUROPE, the project ETstruct aims at building networks between vocational and other schools and labour market institutions to facilitate quicker responses to new trends
in the economy and changes in the job landscape.
Moreover, qualified young workers are to be deployed in the participating regions as an important
addition to the regional human resources pool. The
Vienna Board of Education acted as lead partner
in the project, cooperating with partners from
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schwerin (Ger-
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
many), Hranice (Slovakia), Karviná, Bydgoszcz
and Wałbrzych (Poland), Kranj, Kocevje and Novo
Mesto (Slovenia), Modena and the Veneto (Italy)
and Zakarpattya (Ukraine). The Vienna Business
Agency also participated in the project.
ta t
ien
a etin
Vienna’s seasonal open-air events, which draw audiences totalling about three million every year,
are organised by Stadt Wien Marketing GmbH.
The best-known of these events are the “Wiener
Eistraum” ice-skating rink in front of City Hall
in winter, the open-air film festival in the same
location in summer, and the New Year’s Eve celebrations in the city centre. Stadt Wien Marketing
GmbH also organises annual competitions with
awards for the best wines from Vienna, a festival
of culinary treats in one of Vienna’s parks and the
participation of the Vienna Region at trade fairs,
as well as a number of sports events.
inan e
n
i ti itie
i
ai
an
ienna
Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner was elected president of the Verband der öffentlichen Wirtschaft
und Gemeinwirtschaft Österreichs (VÖWG, Austrian Association of Public and Community Enterprises), an interest group representing public enterprises that provide services of general interest
in the fields of infrastructure, education, healthcare, culture and social services. VÖWG currently
has 128 members and represents Austria in the
CEEP.
Masibambane College is a school with 850 pupils in Orange Farm (South Africa) which Vienna
has been supporting in cooperation with private
organisations since 1996. The College’s marimba
band, in which ten youngsters aged nine to 14
play, came on a tour to Vienna in 2011, including
a performance at City Hall. Deputy Mayor Renate
Brauner opened the first South Africa Festival organised at the Museumsquartier cultural centre,
and met with the Deputy Mayor of Hungary’s capital Budapest, Dr. Gábor Bagdy, on 8 July.
for the OSCE, the Wassenaar Arrangement office,
the European Space Policy Institute, the Southeast
European Energy Community, the European Fundamental Rights Agency, the Vienna Centre for
Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, the Council of
Europe liaison office and the diplomatic missions
of developing countries.
Visiting representatives of banks, rating agencies
and financial service institutions from Germany,
Switzerland and the Netherlands were informed
about the financial situation and administration of
Vienna, as were international delegations from the
Republic of Korea, Yerevan, several EU institutions
and from the École Nationale d’Administration
(ENA) in Strasbourg. Two employees of the municipal administration of Paris worked temporarily
with MA 5 in the context of bilateral cooperation
between the two cities.
Deputy Mayor Renate
Brauner and Mandla
Mandela at the South
Africa Festival
(Harri Mannsberger/PID)
Wolfgang Müller MBA,
Deputy Director of the
Chief Executive Office and
head of the MD-OS unit,
with the Director of MA 27,
Martin Pospischill (r.) and
the acting Director of the
newly formed MA 23,
Wolfgang Bartsch (l.)
(Schaub-Walzer PID)
Along with the Austrian federal government,
Municipal Department 5 (Financial Affairs) cofinanced 50% of the rent expenses of OPEC, and
Vienna also contributed towards the asbestos
clean-up of the Vienna International Centre. Cofinancing to the extent of 35% was also provided
2
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
Professor Walter Nettig at
the opening of the first
Viennese Ball in Aşgabat
(BSBeauf)
I
I
ised under RECOM SK-AT and RECOM HU-AT to
facilitate networking and cross-border knowledge
transfer. PR activities included the production of a
project film in three language versions which was
shown at various events and disseminated via different channels. The project film is aimed at the
general public; it informs people about the objectives and activities of the programme, explains
why cross-border activities are important and encourages potential project applicants to propose
cross-border projects.
Vienna is a member of the Network of European
Regions using Space Technology (NEREUS).
Activities focused on the analysis and utilisation
of earth observation data and how the network can
be used to this end.
Annual data exchanges with the Office of Economic and Cultural Affairs in Taipei were continued,
and harmonised cross-border geodata were supplied to CENTROPE Statistics.
The Department for European Affairs (MA 27) is
Vienna’s central administrative unit in charge of
EU relations and also oversees the Vienna House in
Brussels. (For more detailed information about EU
relations, as well as organisations and networks at
the EU level, see the relevant chapters.). The newly
created Municipal Department for Economic Affairs, Labour and Statistics (MA 23) began exercising its functions in the three fields under one roof.
A project to further intensify cross-border
activities, optimise bilateral cooperation in border
regions and contribute to quality assurance in a
coordinated and sustainable regional policy was
implemented under the title RECOM (Regional Cooperation Management) and received co-financing
under the European Programme for Cross-Border
cooperation Austria-Slovakia (AT-SK) and AustriaHungary (AT-HU). The project involves assistance
for networks, consultancy services and support for
project design and implementation and targeted
public relations work. The project is part of all
three ETC (European Territorial Cooperation) Programmes, with Vienna participating as a project
partner in RECOM SK-AT and RECOM HU-AT. In
this context, a major multilateral conference was
held in Vienna in 2011. Under the banner “Green
Jobs – New Jobs”, it provided a platform for exchanges about sustainable work issues across all
three programme areas. Events were also organ-
0
e ia n
nte nati na
t e it
n i
ai
ienna
Professor Walter Nettig, Vienna’s Special Envoy
for International Economic Affairs, participated
in numerous high-level meetings, receptions and
other events, met with the media and generally
represented Vienna’s business community in Austria and abroad. His conversation partners included leaders of international and Austrian business
enterprises, investors, government officials and
dignitaries.
On the fringes of the Viennese ball in Tokyo, which
H.I.H. Princess Takamado graced with her presence, Professor Nettig met for conversations with
representatives of Tokai University and Japan Arts.
Turkmenistan celebrated its first Viennese Ball in
the magnificent Mukam Palace in Aşgabat, home
to the country’s National Centre of Culture. The
guests of honour at the event included several
members of the Turkmen government. For the
third time at a bilateral event, the Johann Strauss
Ensemble played at the ball. The Turkmen-Austrian symphony orchestra “Galkynysh” (“re-birth”)
also gave a performance. Professor Nettig also
toured several US cities; speaking to American
businesspeople, he presented Vienna as a city with
outstanding quality of life.
ienna
ine
en
The number of international business groups that
launched new establishments in Vienna rose to
113 in 2010, a 15% increase over the previous year.
All in all, since 2004 the Vienna Business Agency
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Presentation of newly setup international business
establishments and relocations to Vienna: Deputy
Mayor Renate Brauner
with Dr. René Siegl,
Managing Director of ABA
Invest in Austria (l.) and
Gerhard Hirczi, Managing
Director of the VBA
(Harri Mannsberger/PID)
(VBA) and Austrian Business Agency (ABA) have
assisted more than 650 international companies
in establishing a presence in Vienna, triggering
investments of 470 million euro and creating 5,500
jobs. In recent years, most of the companies have
been coming from Germany, Russia and the Czech
Republic.
of current urban development and construction
projects was organised together with Wien Holding and its urban development subsidiary WSE
(Wiener Stadtentwicklungsgesellschaft) at the Expo Real trade show in Munich. In Russia, the VBA
participated in trade shows in Novosibirsk and
Kaluga to present Vienna as a business location.
Fulfilling VBA’s core function – to present and
promote Vienna abroad as an attractive location
for international businesses – the agency’s project
teams participated in international presentations,
trade shows, conferences and cross-border cooperation projects to foster Vienna’s further development as an up-to-date business hub in Central
Europe. Focus activities were carried out in the
target destinations China, Germany, Russia and
the US in 2011.
VBA also continued its participation in “SME days”,
a series of meetings in Germany targeting companies with annual sales revenues of € 10 million and
above. The purpose of these meetings is to provide
a forum for contacts between businesses and business-related service providers, with Austria and
Vienna being presented as an ideal springboard
from which to penetrate the Central and Eastern
European markets. The SME meetings were held
in Leipzig, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt/Main
and Friedrichshafen in 2011. Cross-border events
in the fields of life sciences and ICT and on the
EU Services Directive took place in the context
of the CENTROPE Region, and peer workshops
were organised in continuation of VBA’s exchanges with the regions Øresund, Upper Rhine and
Maas-Rhine.
The international services unit of VBA participated in the trade fair Interplastica in Moscow. A
focus area of activity in 2011, as in previous years,
was the gaming industry; in this context, VBA
was present at the Games Developer Conference
in San Francisco and the gaming trade fair L3 in
Los Angeles. Vienna’s life sciences initiative LISAVienna was presented at the BIO 2011 International
Convention in Washington, D.C., and at the corresponding European event, BIO Europe 2011 in
Düsseldorf. At several other life sciences events in
Dubai, Milan, Stuttgart, Shanghai and Frankfurt/
Main, the VBA brought together visitors and Austrian players in the life sciences field at trade show
booths and partnering meetings. A presentation
The VBA’s Europe Team serves as a contact point
for all businesses headquartered in Vienna for
questions concerning internationalisation and the
European Union. In 2011 the focus was on creative
industries, business and education and services for
migrants’ enterprises, with numerous information
events being held for the target business segment
in the course of the year. As in previous years, the
1
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Media Days in Munich, the New TV Congress in
Hamburg and the Berlinale Film Festival.
The VBA welcomed international visitors from
Stockholm, Zurich, Göttingen and other cities, and
its Brussels and Tokyo offices contributed to the
agency’s international activities.
The Expat Center at
Schmerlingplatz
(VBA/Gerhard Weinkiern)
VBA’s Enterprise Europe Network participated in
several projects which were co-financed by the EU.
The Mingo Services unit of VBA assists would-be
entrepreneurs and small start-up businesses, providing consultancy and skill-building services. As
part of its mandate to strengthen Vienna’s local
economy, the Mingo team took part in the Global
Entrepreneurship Week in Rotterdam. At the 2011
Open Days in Brussels, Mingo Services was designated as a best practice model for sustainable
support of founders and micro businesses. Seven
companies from the IT cluster participated in “Futur en Seine”, one of the world’s leading digital festivals, in Paris. More than 400 activities addressed
the themes life, music, design and communication.
The VBA subsidiary ZIT, Vienna’s technology agency, organised information events for
international audiences in cooperation with partner organisations and programmes for visiting
expert delegations from abroad. ZIT also joined a
delegation of major players in the academic field
in Vienna for a visit to the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) in Brno to advance
networking efforts in fields such as nanotechnology and molecular veterinary medicine. Networking and knowledge transfer among more than 70
European cities was at the heart of the multi-year
EU project “PLACES – Cities of Scientific Culture”
in which ZIT participated together with the Austrian ScienceCenter network. Representatives of
150 IT companies from across Europe attended
the International B2B Software Days, a conference
that underlined Vienna’s position as a centre for
ICT industries, which employ 65,000 people in the
city. ZIT participated at “Science in Dialogue” in
Cologne, the biggest science communication conference in German-speaking Europe, and in the
2
at ente
Seminars, workshops and other events for key staff
of international business groups were organised
on a regular basis at the Expat Center at Schmerlingplatz, a service centre which the VBA launched
in 2010 for international companies and their
high-level employees on assignment to Vienna. Designed to meet the latest international standards,
the Expat Center is organised as a one-stop shop
where new arrivals and their families can get all
the information needed to cope with everyday life
in Vienna, tailored to their specific needs.
e at e
Founded in 2003, the VBA subsidiary “departure”
is dedicated to promoting and providing services
to enterprises from the creative industries sector. Since its inception, “departure” has paid out
a total of more than 22 million euro in grants to
altogether 356 enterprises, triggering private investments of nearly 90 million euro and helping to
create and/or secure 1,500 jobs in the high-skills
segment.
Subsidies are disbursed under four different programmes. One of them is “departure experts”,
which assists companies in undertakings that result in stronger growth and acquisition of knowledge by the company. In 2011, “departure” supported the architectural firm SOLID Architecture
and The Next Enterprise and assisted fashion
designer Petar Petrov and the fashion label Doychinoff in developing international marketing and
distribution networks.
Launches of new labels and initiatives, such as the
“Popfest” at Karlsplatz and the showcase club festival Waves Vienna testify to the upward trend of
Vienna’s music scene. Under the heading “Focus
music – new sounds in the music industry”, subsidies in an amount of 809,641 euro were provided
for companies engaged in the commercialisation
and distribution of music. The beneficiary projects
included newly launched industry magazines, an
innovative music streaming application for mobile
C IVI I
phones, a novel keyboard based on optical fibre,
sheet music display software for musicians, a mobile ticketing system and even a music-focused dementia therapy. “departure” also supported the recital series Lied Lab, which combined the classical
tradition of the Lied recital with modern visuals.
Lieder by Gustav Mahler, whose 100th birthday anniversary was celebrated in 2011, were performed
by outstanding artists, including Angelika Kirchschlager, Wolfgang Holzmair and Christian Fennesz, on five evenings at RadioKulturhaus, the
concert venue of Austrian public radio. The performances were complemented by experimental
visuals from leading Austrian artists, including
LUMA.LAUNISCH and Victoria Coeln. The festival
was documented on the unique DVD set “Gustav
Mahler Lied Collector’s Edition”.
The gallery project “curated by_vienna” took place
for the third time in 2011. Together with galleries
in Vienna, international curators developed special exhibitions that highlight points of contact
between the curators’ respective home countries
and Vienna. In 2011, these included Latvia and
Lithuania. Training programmes for young entrepreneurs in the creative industries were held by
international industry insiders, focusing on architecture, design, fashion and multimedia.
The programme “design> neue strategien”, which
“departure” implemented in cooperation with
Vienna’s Museum of Applied Art (MAK), was
continued with a view to applied research. The
objective was to redefine the coffeehouse as a
culturally and socially important hub of the 21st
century city. Exhibitions and lectures, workshops
and presentations were organised as part of the
project, which was run as an open design laboratory with audience participation. The international
visitors attending the design lab were Antenna
Design (New York), Andrea Branzi (Milan) and
raumlaborberlin (Berlin). Together with them and
guided by Viennese architect and designer Gregor
Eichinger, participants developed ideas and proposals for the future of the coffeehouse which were
subsequently integrated in the design experiment
– a coffeehouse prototype with pilot operation in
the MAK building.
“departure” was a partner of Vienna Design Week
and presented leading designers to big audiences
in a series of lectures at Vienna’s art-house cinema
Künstlerhaus-Kino, where Sophie Lovell, Jerszy
Seymour and the Doshi Levin collective focused
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
on the theme of “change” in their talks. An expert
speed-dating event facilitated quick and easy exchanges between creative industries players and
experts from the pool of “departure”. The “festival
for fashion & photography” in early summer presented the best newcomers and most interesting
established designers and photographers, and
fashion projects were showcased at the “departure
fashion night” which formed part of the festival.
“departure” participated in expert meetings, lectures and other events in the creative industries
field in Brussels, Luxembourg and Rotterdam and
visited the ARCO Madrid, the Armory Show in New
York, the Venice art Biennale, Art Basel, Design
Miami, Art Brussels, the Salone Internazionale del
Mobile in Milan, the Gallery Weekend in Berlin and
Art Dubai.
ien
in
Wien Holding is the organisational umbrella for
all business and culture enterprises of the City of
Vienna. These include the Stadthalle Group (sports
and events centre), Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (theatres: Raimund-Theater, Ronacher and Theater an
der Wien), the House of Music, the Jewish Museum,
the Mozart House Vienna, KunstHausWien (gallery and exhibition space) and Wien Ticket, making Wien Holding one of Europe’s biggest culture
and entertainment groups, which benefits the local economy, the labour market and the tourism
industry. Many of the productions of Vereinigte
Bühnen are big export hits.
The official re-opening of Vienna’s Jewish Museum
was celebrated in October, when Austrian President Dr. Heinz Fischer and Deputy Mayor Renate
Brauner attached the traditional mezuzah to the
I
I
I
“departure” supported
international marketing
and distribution structures
of the label Doychinoff
and the fashion designer
Petar Petrov.
(Mladen Penev)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
The KunstHaus Wien
art and exhibition space,
which was designed
by artist Friedensreich
Hundertwasser,
celebrated its
20 th anniversary in 2011.
(Alex Halada PID)
Peter Hanke, managing
director of Wien Holding,
Monika Unterholzner from
the management of the
Vienna port operations
(Hafen Wien), Mohammad
Hamad Omran Alshamsi,
Ambassador of the United
Arab Emirates, and
Dr. Rashid Aleem, Director
of the General Seaports
and the Customs & Free
Zone, at the signing of an
agreement between the
ports of Sharjah and
Vienna. (Eva Kelety)
I
I
visitors in the past five years. KunstHaus Wien,
home to the world’s only permanent Friedensreich Hundertwasser exhibition, celebrated the
20th anniversary of its opening; since 1991, it has
shown 60 temporary exhibitions in addition to
the permanent one dedicated to Austrian painter
Hundertwasser.
portal of the museum building. Over the last 18
years, the Jewish Museum showed 180 exhibitions
which attracted 1.3 million visitors. The first special exhibition after the temporary closure, entitled “Bigger Than Life. 100 Years of Hollywood: A
Jewish Experience” was opened by City Councillor
for Cultural Affairs Dr. Andreas Mailath-Pokorny.
2011 brought the 255th anniversary of the birth
of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and “his” Mozart
House celebrated the fifth anniversary of its opening. The Mozart House is the only building in which
Mozart lived in Vienna which has survived until
now. He composed the opera Le Nozze di Figaro
in his apartment there, which has seen 700,000
More than 700,000 passengers have used the Twin
City Liner boat shuttle service between Vienna
and Bratislava since it was first launched in summer 2006. Vienna’s port facilities are also gaining
importance as an international handling and logistics hub. Located at a distance of 2,000 km from
the Black Sea and 1,500 km from the North Sea,
the port handles more than 12 million tonnes of
goods every year on its 3.5 million m² premises.
In the year under report, a cooperation agreement
was concluded with the port of the emirate Sharjah
(United Arab Emirates). The City of Vienna signed
the charter “Connecting with waterways: a Capital Choice”, a multilateral agreement that seeks to
enhance the role of inland waterways and ports,
and participated in the leading European logistics
trade show in Munich.
t ate ie
an e
n
ie
The Wien Holding subsidiary TINA VIENNA is
the City of Vienna’s service provider in the field
of urban and environmental technologies. TINA
VIENNA collects and stores Vienna’s know-how in
this field and supports other local governments
and administrative entities in Austria and abroad
in applying this know-how to meet their specific
local needs.
Within this mandate, TINA VIENNA organised
and/or supported many events to promote the
international transfer of Vienna’s know-how
and exchanges concerning all areas of urban
technologies and strategies. These included symposia and other events in Aranđelovac and Belgrade, at the Showcase event of the Austrian Economic Chamber in Izmir, at the Business Forum
in Baku and in Vienna. Vienna’s “Smart City Wien”
project, to which TINA VIENNA contributes project
management and coordination services, was presented at conferences in Alpbach, Munich, Frankfurt/Main, Kraków, Sofia, Essen and Belgrade.
TINA VIENNA prepared information packages,
organised visitors’ programmes and gave presentations for delegations from China, the USA, the
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
emirate Sharjah (UAE), Brazil, Poland, Egypt and
other countries. The World Bank commissioned a
kick-off event, symposium and excursions for the
Urban Partnership Program which the World Bank
carries out in cooperation with Austria. The exhibition “Vienna Know-How: Urban Technologies and
Strategies” was shown in Bucharest, at the 80 th
Izmir International Fair, at the Business Forum
Baku, the REAL VIENNA trade show and in the
lobby of the Therme Wien spa.
TINA VIENNA contributed to activities in conjunction with the EU Strategy for the Danube Region, supported the manager of the Pan-European
Transport Corridor VII and was active within the
ARGE Donauländer (Working Community of the
Danube Regions) group. A mobility workshop of
the Donauhanse network took place in Odessa,
and CUPA symposia (CUPA: Cooperative Urban
Planning Approaches) were held in Lviv and
Kraków. TINA VIENNA acted as project manager
of “arch4579”, an EU project for the joint development of an assessment procedure for buildings
from the period 1945–1979 in Brno and Vienna,
and was a project partner in “EMPIRIC – Enhancing multimodal platforms, inland waterways and
railway services integration in Central Europe”
and “CENTROPE Capacity, Infrastructure Needs
Assessment Tool INAT”. Vienna’s port administration Wiener Hafen received management assistance from TINA VIENNA for its project “INWAPO
– Upgrading of Inland Waterways and Sea Ports”.
The Best Practices Hub Vienna, which is the
European partner of the Best Practices and Local
Leadership Programme of UN-HABITAT, is integrated with TINA VIENNA and serves to promote
the exchange of information and know-how on
sustainable settlement policies. In the year under
report, a call for applications for the Dubai Award
2012 was issued, potential applicants were contacted, and ÖkoKauf Wien was supported in connection with the presentation ceremony for the
2011 Award.
TINA VIENNA has established a presence in the
United Arab Emirates via its local subsidiary United TINA, founded to participate in tenders for urban development projects. Work continued in 2011
on a cooperation project with the Viennese company Meixner Vermessung in Abu Dhabi, where the
two companies have been contracted to carry out
a land survey and create a land register modelled
on the one in Vienna.
ienna
i
ti itie
ien ne ie
Wien Energie GmbH continued activities in several
European countries and sought to promote renewable energy sources. Targeting the growth potential of these international markets, the City
of Vienna’s energy utility worked to further diversify its operations and ensure its competitive
standing. Wien Energie bought a 13 per cent stake
in Verbund Innkraft GmbH, a subsidiary of Austrian electricity provider Verbund which runs 13
power plants (total installed capacity: 312 MW)
along the river Inn in Bavaria. In Romania, Wien
Energie operates 31 small hydropower plants with
a total installed capacity of some 19 MW. In cooperation with Austrian and international partners, Wien Energie worked on several wind farm
projects in Poland in 2011; the total energy output
of these projects will be about 250 MW. The group
also operates 24 wind turbines in Levél, Hungary
(Györ-Moson-Sopron region) that supply electricity to 20,000 households. Together with Austrian partners, Wien Energie purchased a stake in
Energy Eastern Europe Hydro Power GmbH in
2006, which has since then acquired 23 licences
for the construction and operation of small hydropower plants in Macedonia, Montenegro and
Bosnia-Hercegovina.
ien ne ie e nw
e
i t i t eatin
Fernwärme experts gave presentations on “Energy-efficient housing and living: the principle of
remote heating and remote cooling” at the Vienna Days in Baku and on “Best practice to combat
At the urban technology
exhibition in Bucharest
(from left):
Dr. Ionel Ionita, Director of
the City Museum;
Ambassador Dr. Michael
Schwarzinger; TINA
Vienna’s Managing
Director Alexandra Vogl
MSc; City Councillor
Christian Oxonitsch;
Bucharest’s Director of
Culture, Education and
Tourism Emanuel
Papagheorghiu (TINA
VIENNA/Sorin Toma)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
climate change in urban areas” at the Intelligent
Cities Expo in Hamburg. A series of international
delegations, among them groups from Argentina,
Jordan, Peru and Palestine, visited the world’s
most advanced waste-to-energy plant at Spittelau. Experts from Hong Kong gathered information about the use of waste heat from waste incinerators, and representatives of the Swiss district
heating association came to Vienna to discuss the
use of waste heat as an energy source for cooling
systems in an urban setting.
Wien Energie Fernwärme continued its membership of the German Energieeffizienzverband
für Wärme, Kälte und KWK (German Energy
Efficiency Association for Heating, Cooling and
Co-Generation) and participated in EuroHeat &
Power, the European district heating and cooling association; moreover, Fernwärme played an
active role in the European Committee for Standardization (CEN).
ne ie
t
Energiecomfort Energie- und Gebäudemanagement GmbH continued its international activities
in Slovakia, Germany and Hungary. The policy of
international expansion, which has been at the
centre of Energiecomfort’s strategy since 2002,
was vigorously pursued in 2011.
District heating plant in
Nové Zámky, southern
Slovakia (Energiecomfort)
As one of the leading energy utilities in Slovakia,
Energiecomfort generates about 500 GWh of heat
per year, covering the needs of more than 50,000
households and numerous other customers. About
20 per cent of the heat is generated in eco-friendly
biomass (woodchip) plants. Additionally, the Ener-
I
I
giecomfort group provided facility management
services for about 25,000 apartments in seven cities. With its four modern customer service centres,
Energiecomfort has successfully set new standards of quality and customer-friendliness in the
Slovakian building management market.
Energiecomfort holds a 49 per cent stake (acquired in 2004) in the local district heating utility
Bytkomfort s.r.o. at Nové Zámky, which supplies
heat to about 11,400 households and 46 business
customers. A gas-fuelled 4.6 MW heat-power cogeneration plant provides all of the city’s hot water in summer, in addition to feeding 33,000 MWhours of electricity into the national power grid
all year round. Management services are provided
for some 5,400 apartments. An eco-friendly 6 MW
biomass power plant was built in 2011, which reduces natural gas consumption by 3 million m³
p.a., as well as avoiding 6,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year. Energiecomfort’s Bratislava subsidiary Bytkomfort-BA a.s., which manages 3,150
apartments in the Slovakian capital, opened a new
customer service centre in 2011.
In Prešov in eastern Slovakia, Energiecomfort also
owns a stake (55 per cent) in the local district heating utility Spravbytkomfort a.s., providing heat
for some 23,000 apartments and 90 businesses,
as well as management services for 9,600 apartments. 2011 saw the opening of an 8 MW biomass
thermal power plant, the second of this type now
operating in Prešov. As a consequence, CO2 emission reductions reached a level of 19,000 tonnes
p.a. Spravbytkomfort a.s. was also able to attract
2,700 new customers. The local 50 per cent subsidiary of Energiecomfort in Trnava, TT-Komfort
s.r.o., which launched operations in October 2008,
supplied heat energy for 16,000 households and
acted as facility manager for approx. 180,600 m²
of floor space, in addition to providing management services for 6,650 apartments. TT-Komfort
also serviced public roads. A 55 kW photovoltaic
plant for peak load power started operating on a
pilot basis in 2011.
In Oberstaufen, Bavaria, Energiecomfort added
a modern, ecologically and economically viable
ORC power plant (Organic Rankine cycle) to the
existing 8.4 MW biomass heat generation facility.
Operations were also successfully launched at a
new photovoltaic plant there in 2011. Its 1,045 m²
of solar panels generate 153.6 KW of eco-friendly
solar power. In Köszegi in the Hungarian region of
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Vas, large-scale repair and improvement work was
carried out on the heat distribution network of the
local subsidiary Köszegi Távhöszolgáltató Kft to
optimise efficient heat distribution.
ien ne ie t
net e e t i it netw
Wien Energie Stromnetz is a member of GEODE,
a European network of about 500 small and
medium-sized power and gas distributors representing a combined customer base of 100 million customers. Stromnetz served on the GEODE
working groups Intelligent Electrical Network and
Energy Efficiency in 2011, helping to prepare position papers for presentation to EU institutions.
Topical issues in 2011 were “smart metering”
and demand-side management. In the context of
the International Electrotechnical Commission,
Stromnetz contributed to two working groups of
the Technical Committee “Systems aspects of electrical energy supply”, one on high-voltage systems
and transmission and the other on medium- and
low-voltage distribution, as well as to a working
group on the mechanical and thermal effects of
short-circuit currents. Stromnetz staff visited good
practice projects in the fields of “smart metering”
and “smart grids” in Friedrichshafen, Hong Kong
and Singapore. Stromnetz participated in Smart
Life, a benchmarking exercise that aims to generate data about the asset management of European
network operators; the resulting broad data base
can help to maintain high-quality power supply
from older network facilities.
iene inien
i t an
t
The human resources unit of Wiener Linien GmbH
& CoKG, the City of Vienna’s public transport enterprise, attended a conference in Hannover which
discussed health management in transport operations under the motto “Shift work does not have
to make you ill”. Transport providers from Switzerland, Germany and Austria met in Karlsruhe
for discussions about flexible staff deployment in
local rail and non-rail public transport. The Austrian city of Graz, for example, uses some employees from its workshops as drivers at peak periods.
Another strategy is the so-called “dual reserve”,
i.e. some staff members are trained to drive both
buses and trams and can be flexibly deployed as
needed. A meeting hosted by the German public
transport association Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen in Nuremberg discussed “The
changing world of work – recruitment, employment, careers” in the context of the ongoing wider
demographic changes.
The communication unit served as contact point
for the news media and supported international
journalists in their work. In 2011, international
publications ran 185 articles on Wiener Linien,
and four journalists from foreign media travelled
to Vienna for interviews relating to Wiener Linien,
the main topics being the night-time underground
rail service, the share of public transport in the
modal split and the ticket inspection regime. Moreover, the social media launch of Wiener Linien – a
pioneering event – attracted much media attention. The operations and customer service unit of
Wiener Linien invited underground rail and light
rail providers from Germany, Amsterdam and Copenhagen to a meeting in Vienna.
At the 11th meeting of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), the underground
rail operations unit took over the chair of the Security Commission, and subsequently participated
in the UITP board meeting in Milan. The tram
operations unit was elected vice chair of the UITP
Light Rail Committee at a meeting in Naples, and
the bus operations unit served on the UITP’s Bus
Committee. Wiener Linien also cooperated with
the UITP-EuroTeam concerning the European
Commission’s upcoming green paper on land
transport security. The rail operations management and training unit participated in meetings
organised by German transport providers, and
Wiener Linien staff attended an international
meeting held in Jerusalem.
Delegations from Melbourne and Düsseldorf visited Vienna to gather information on various aspects
of the tram network operation. The scheduling unit
At the general assembly
of the International
Association of Public
Transport (UITP) in Dubai
(Wr. Linien)
C IVI I
Vienna’s underground rail
line U1 on a stretch of
overground track near the
UN Office Vienna and the
VIC conference centre
(Wiener Linien)
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
participated in a meeting in Amsterdam to
learn about HASTUS, a
computer software program for the preparation of timetables and
shift rosters. “Appreciative supervision of drivers” and “Optimising
shifts and duty rosters”
were the topics on the
agenda of a meeting in
Stuttgart. The legal, IT
and joint services unit
participated in meetings of the Transport
Committee of CEEP
(European Centre of
Employers and Enterprises providing Public Services) in Vienna and
Brussels and discussed passengers’ rights, the
EU regulation on public service obligations, subsidies and transport infrastructure (TEN-T) with
EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas.
Austria’s legal provisions on energy tax rebates
were amended by the Public Finance Act. Previously (since 2002), production and service companies – such as Wiener Linien – had been able to
claim rebates on energy taxes if their net production output exceeded a certain threshold. The new
amendment changed this, allowing the rebate only
for production companies in future, and stating
further that this would be subject to approval by
the European Commission. What this means for
Wiener Linien is that a substantial amount of energy tax rebates would be lost. An argument can
be made – based, among other things, on previous ECJ decisions in this context – that the new
legal situation constitutes a government subsidy
in favour of production companies; based on this
argument, Wiener Linien filed a complaint with
the European Commission and contacted Compe-
A train run by Wiener
Lokalbahnen Cargo (WLC)
I
I
tition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia Amann on
the matter.
The finance and tendering unit of Wiener Linien
participated in a Donauhanse workshop on mobility which took place during the Vienna Days
in Odessa. An event on “Company management
and control in local public passenger transport –
instruments and case studies” was organised in
Fulda (Germany), and the vehicle engineering unit
participated in a meeting of the UITP Metro Committee in Madrid. Wiener Linien experts also sat
on several committee meetings of the German Association of Transport Providers. The construction
and facility management unit pursued manifold
international activities in relation to its core competences, including participation in international
conferences, tours of construction sites and
production facilities, and training courses. The
planning, construction and project management
unit welcomed delegations from all over the world,
and the rail engineering and construction unit was
much in demand as a source of information in the
fields of life-cycle cost, innovative IT solutions and
measuring/analysis technology. Wiener Linien cooperated with the Vienna University of Technology
and the Austrian Research Centers (ARC) Seibersdorf on R&D projects. The technical testing unit,
construction and civil engineering unit, machinery and electrical engineering unit and the traction power and rectifier unit also continued their
networking activities as internationally recognised
centres of competence.
iene
a a nen
Wiener Lokalbahnen AG (WLB) was internationally active primarily in rail cargo transport, which
has been continuously growing in volume since
2002. The operations in this field were transferred
to Wiener Lokalbahnen Cargo GmbH (WLC), a
wholly owned subsidiary of WLB, in 2007. In the
year under report, WLC organised about 3,600 national and international freight trains with a total
cargo volume of over three million tonnes, leaving
from or going to the ports of Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Duisburg, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Koper and
Neuss on the Rhine, as in previous years. The main
focus areas of WLC’s business are Southeast Europe and Germany, with points of departure and
destinations of non-overseas shipments in Austria’s neighbouring countries. In Austria, these
trains are handled in Enns, Krems, Linz, Salzburg,
Graz and Vienna. WLC received a security certificate for Germany and is fully licensed to run cargo
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
transports on the public rail systems of Austria,
Hungary and Germany.
WLC participated in the international transport
trade fair “transport logistic 2011” in Munich and
continued its membership of the European Rail
Freight Association and the International Rail
Transport Committee.
e tatt n
ien
ne a e i e
Staff from Bestattung Wien GmbH (funeral services) and Friedhöfe Wien GmbH (cemetery management) went on a working visit to the European
Parliament in Brussels, where talks focused on
how to simplify the international Agreement on
the Transfer of Corpses. Bestattung Wien was appointed to represent Austria on the board of the
European Federation of Funeral Services (EFES).
Discussions also continued on the envisaged standardisation of rules for cremation and crematoria.
ienna
ent
ti n
n
wa
The international activities of the Vienna Employment Promotion Fund include expert meetings at
home and abroad, presentations and participation
at international conferences, as well as a successful employment initiative in cooperation with Austria’s neighbouring countries to the east.
The Fund’s “Vienna’s training guarantee” strategy
for young people was presented to visitors from
Turkey; experts from Finland and Spain visited
to learn about gender mainstreaming policies in
Vienna. Two Swedish delegations were informed
about employment initiatives targeting migrants.
Visitors to “waff” also included experts from the
European Social Fund (ESF) from SchleswigHolstein, who gathered information about crossborder labour market policies targeting young
people, and education planners from NorthrhineWestphalia, whose main focus of interest was government support for enterprises.
The Fund contributed to programme development
at the ESF, participated in a EUROCITIES task
force, and “waff” delegates went on a study tour
to Canada together with Municipal Department 13
and Vienna’s youth club wienXtra.
ea t an
ia
i
The annual German-Austrian geriatrics conference, which has grown into the leading German-
language event on geriatrics and gerontology in
recent years, was held at Messe Wien under the
title “Autonomy in old age”.
Numerous delegations visited Municipal Department 24 (MA 24 – Health Care and Social Welfare
Planning) to learn about Vienna’s social policies.
The city’s demand-oriented minimum social support policy was presented at an expert conference
in Basel. Representing all Austrian provinces, MA
24 participated in meetings of the EU’s Economic
and Social Committee in Brussels and Kraków.
The Municipal Department for Social Welfare, Social and Public Health Law (MA 40) participated
in the 19th European Social Services Conference in
Warsaw. MA 40 staff presented current best-practice projects in workshops at the conference, whose
theme in 2011 was “Building an Active and Caring
Society: Innovation, Participation, Community”.
Vienna’s model of minimum social support was
presented jointly by MA 24 and MA 40 experts
at the 38th working meeting of welfare and social
services officials from major cities in Germany,
which took place in Berlin. During a visit to Karlsruhe, MA 40 staff met with local officials from the
welfare and youth services and the city’s job centre
to discuss labour market integration measures for
young adults.
ienna
ita
iati n
The Vienna Hospitals Association (KAV), one of Europe’s biggest healthcare institutions, runs twelve
City Councillor for Health
and Social Policy Sonja
Wehsely hands over the
key to a new intensive
care ambulance to
Dr. Rainer Gottwald MBA,
head of the Ambulance
and Patient Transport
Services (MA 70).
(Schaub-Walzer/PID)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
nity hospitals’ service and procurement association, giving Austrian public healthcare institutions
access to joint cross-border procurement. In this
context, a meeting was held in Fulda.
Vienna’s General Hospital
is the largest institution of
its kind in Europe.
(KAV/Herwig Popelka)
hospitals, eleven geriatric centres and several vocational schools. In addition to welcoming national
and international delegations, KAV also regularly
receives staff from other hospitals for internships.
In 2011, staff from clinics in Hannover and Wiesbaden, the Philadelphia children’s clinic, Praia hospital (Cape Verde) and nursing schools in Bratislava and Wertheim were welcomed at various KAV
institutions, in addition to political dignitaries and
other visitors from Sweden, Switzerland, Estonia,
Ukraine and the Czech city of Uherské Hradišté.
KAV contributed to the Vienna Open Medical Institute, a project which it launched in cooperation
with the American-Austrian Foundation, the Medical Association in Vienna, the Austrian Academy
of Sciences, the Medical University of Vienna and
the Vienna School of Clinical Research to help
position Vienna as a leading centre of postgraduate studies. The project brought more than 100
physicians from countries such as Moldova, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia and Qatar to Vienna,
where they worked for one month in a clinical
department. KAV’s teaching institutions offered
international study programmes, one example
being international internships in radio diagnostics at the school for paramedical technical staff
at Vienna’s General Hospital (AKH). KAV schools
organised study tours to Prague, Venray (Netherlands) and other destinations.
KAV staff also travelled abroad for exchanges with
foreign experts: KAV Director General Dr. Wilhelm
Marhold attended a medical congress in Berlin,
staff from various departments participated in
the quality forum in Munich, and members of the
IT unit travelled to SAPPHIRE+SAPTechEd in Madrid. The quality management unit participated in
a conference in Göttingen, and the strategic procurement department joined the German commu-
0
Representatives of the socio-medical centre Sophienspital, the management of the geriatric
centres and delegates from the Geriatriezentrum
am Wienerwald and the Otto Wagner Hospital attended meetings and conferences in several cities
in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, as well as
Zurich, Portorož in Slovenia, Plzeň, Guangzhou
and Denver. Staff from the hospitals Donauspital
and Rudolfstiftung and the Gersthof orthopaedic
clinic visited Bamberg, Copenhagen, Barcelona,
the Lucerne cantonal hospital, a trauma conference in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, and Beijing. Delegates
from Vienna’s General Hospital (AKH) participated in meetings in Germany and Switzerland, and
Wilhelminenspital staff travelled to international
congresses in Taipei, Dubai, Mumbai, Salvador,
Debrecen, Beirut, Moscow, Tucson, Beijing and
Davos and continued the hospital’s development
cooperation project for emergency surgery in Cape
Verde; an association named Cosmas was founded
to support this project.
The exchange programme “HOPE – Hospitals for
Europe” was continued in 2011 under the theme
“Better health – a shared challenge for hospitals
and primary health care”. The pan-European final
conference took place in Turku. As a member of
the European Hospital and Healthcare Employers’ Association (HOSPEEM), KAV participated in
working group meetings with the European Federation of Public Service Unions. Director General
Dr. Wilhelm Marhold was appointed as the new
spokesman for Austria. KAV is also a member of
CEEP (European Centre of Employers and Enterprises providing Public Services), and a KAV employee went to Brussels for half a year to take up
a directorship.
ienna ea t
ti n
Delegates from Vienna participated in the annual
conference of the Healthy Cities Network of the
World Health Organisation (WHO), which brought
together representatives of the network’s 72 member cities from 30 countries in Liège. The Viennese
delegation was headed by the Deputy Speaker
of the Vienna Provincial Parliament, Marianne
Klicka, who joined the mayors of Ankara und Liverpool in a panel discussion about health promotion
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Representatives of the
WHO’s Healthy Cities
Network meet at Liège,
Belgium. (WHO)
policy at the local level. The Viennese delegation
presented the project “Feeling well in the 15th district”, which targets the population of Vienna’s 15th
district, analysing and trying to influence all factors that have a bearing on people’s health status
and well-being. The Vienna Health Promotion representatives were elected to the advisory committee of the Healthy Cities Network and participated
in a meeting of the committee in Manchester.
Implementation of Vienna’s action plan to promote
physical exercise among the elderly continued
apace. This was done through the project PASEO,
which received co-funding from the European
Union and involved sports associations, educational institutions and senior citizens’ advocacy
organisations as partners. Vienna Health Promotion officials also participated in the EU project
“STOPHOT – Hot towns for the elderly – Reducing the vulnerability of elderly residents to urban
heat” by attending workshops, giving expert interviews and disseminating study results via the City
of Vienna’s communication channels. The “Healthy
districts” project was presented in Leipzig, and
students from Switzerland visited Vienna to learn
about health promotion strategies and policies
here. An expert meeting was held with a delegation from the Netherlands.
ienna
ia
a grouping of social services directors whose annual conference was held in Warsaw, where the
350 conference participants discussed solidarity in society in 23 workshops. The European
Network of Social Authorities met in Klagenfurt
(Carinthia) and Vienna for discussions focusing
on social inclusion and preventive action against
social problems. The European Union of Supported
Employment, a non-governmental advocacy group
for the rights of people with major disabilities, met
in Copenhagen, and the European Federation of
National Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA) organised a meeting in Pisa
about homelessness and support for migrants who
return to their home countries. The Gothenburg
model of assistance for the homeless was studied
by FSW experts on a fact-finding mission there.
FSW participated in the EUROCITIES task force
and attended EUROCITIES Social Affairs Forums
on employment, health inequalities, housing and
The participants in the EU
project SPES, in which the
Vienna Social Fund is lead
partner, meet at the
Czech University of
Technology (from left):
Erika Hoinig, head of the
Floridsdorf daycare centre
(Wiener Pflege- und
Betreuungs GmbH),
Professor Olga
Štěpánková, Department
Head at the Prague
University of Technology,
Dr. Alexander Wöhrer
from the University of
Applied Sciences in
St. Pölten, Friederike Grill,
occupational therapist at
the Donaufeld daycare
centre (Wiener Pflegeund Betreuungs GmbH),
Christine Petioky MA,
head of communication,
international networking
and promotional programmes at the Vienna
Social Fund, and Lenka
Vyslouzilová and Miroslav
Uller from the Prague
University of Technology
(Daniel Novak)
n
The Vienna Social Fund (Fonds Soziales Wien,
FSW) engaged in a wide range of activities, was
a popular contact point for delegations and participated in a series of projects and networks.
The latter included the European Social Network,
1
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
homelessness, education and inclusion, migration
and integration and the inclusion of the Romani
ethnic group. In addition to EU projects, FSW also
participated in “Vitalis – Vulnérabilités en contexte”; in this project, home visits were made to
elderly people and to migrants to learn how to deal
with unclear situations in a solution-oriented manner. The research results were presented in Paris.
The unit in charge of assistance to the homeless
visited counterpart institutions in Munich, and
Deputy Speaker of the Vienna Provincial Parliament Marianne Klicka and senior citizens’ advocate Dr. Angelika Rosenberger-Spitzy met with
representatives of the ZWAR (“Zwischen Arbeit
und Ruhestand” – “Between work and retirement”)
network in Gelsenkirchen; 144 ZWARs in Germany
help people cope with the transition from working life to retirement. The FSW unit in charge of
shared apartments for people with disabilities visited the support organisation Lebenshilfe and the
Evangelische Diakonie (Protestant social service
organisation) in Hamburg. FSW also engaged in
contacts with the Council for Marginalised Groups
in Copenhagen.
FSW participated in an interdisciplinary international symposium on legal data processing in
Salzburg and a conference on “Self-determined
old age” in Hannover, as well as a seminar on the
training of disabled war veterans in Sarajevo. At a
conference in Skopje, FSW contributed a presentation on modern management of social services. A
bilateral working group on social questions met in
The Substance Abuse and
Drug Policy Coordination
Office presents mobile
social work in the public
space at a meeting in
Munich.
(Suchthilfe Wien GmbH)
2
I
I
Svetlogorsk in the Russian region of Kaliningrad
to discuss innovative care approaches. Senior citizens’ advocates from all regions of Austria met in
Brixen, and the first senior citizens’ fair took place
in Moscow. A German conference on assistance for
the homeless was held in Leipzig, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
was discussed in Vienna at a meeting of experts
from German-speaking Europe.
FSW welcomed many delegations from different
cities and levels of administration in the Republic
of Moldova including Tiraspol, as well as visitors
from the UK, the Netherlands and France, and
from the cities of Brussels, Kiev, Moscow, Prague,
Sarajevo, Skopje, Szeged and Tallinn.
tan e
inati n
e an
i
Michael Dressel MA, head of Vienna’s Substance
Abuse and Drug Policy Coordination Office (Suchtund Drogenkoordination, SDW) represented
Austria’s federal provinces in the EU Council’s
Horizontal Drugs Group, which focused especially on novel psychoactive substances. Coordinated countermeasures are essential, especially
in view of the substantial mail-order trade in these
drugs. Another major issue was the use of drugs
in prisons, where very different therapeutical approaches and standards are in place. When prison
inmates are released without prior preparation,
the consequences may pose special challenges
to the services for drug addicts. SDW contributed
to the work of EFUS (European Forum for Urban
Security), a platform for exchange among more
than 300 European cities and towns in the area
of crime prevention. EFUS works to support cities in developing local drugs policy cooperation
projects and partnerships; to this end, activities
were pursued in all relevant areas, such as youth
work, police and judiciary, drugs, migration and integration, violence against women and minorities,
neighbourhood management and mediation. EFUS
prepared guidelines in the various fields with a
view to having them included in pan-European
drugs policies.
SDW participated in a meeting held in Seeon, Bavaria, to discuss “Family as the focus of preventive action”, and gave a presentation on “Early intervention in party settings” at a symposium in
Munich. The Hamburg substance abuse therapy
days 2011 investigated current knowledge about
C IVI I
self-healing and its consequences for treatment
and prevention. Hamburg was also the venue of
the International Addiction Prevention Forum.
The German Addiction Congress in Frankfurt/
Main discussed new findings from basic and applied research and presented new approaches in
treatment and rehabilitation, as well as recent
trends in health and substance abuse policy. SDW
cooperated with Hamburg University in a research
study on the prevention of gambling addiction. In
Munich, SDW staff presented Vienna’s policy programme for mobile social work in the public space,
which includes projects in the fields of labour market policy, help for young drug addicts, streetwork
and low-threshold institutions.
SDW welcomed a delegation from Chernivtsi and
organised its programme of visits to the institutions dedicated to prevention and therapy of addiction in Vienna. In the context of an ESF project
entitled “Experiences exchange and good practice distribution in quality management of services for the drug users”, which has been running
since 2009, SDW staff attended an international
expert workshop in Prague. Czech experts paid
a return visit to Vienna, where SDW hosted their
programme of excursions to the relevant institutions here.
The European Forum for Urban Security, in
which 300 regional and local authorities from
17 European countries are grouped, met for
several days in Vienna. The mission of the Forum
is to help fight crime, and the Vienna conference
focused on drugs policy.
i e
t e ea t
ae
i i ne
The Office of the Healthcare Commissioner participated in a workshop and in the preparation
of a study entitled “Inequalities and multiple
discrimination in access to health”, which was
organised by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) on behalf of the
EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency. A presentation
about the patient indemnity fund was given at the
Medical University of Vienna in the context of the
post-graduate Master’s programme in insurance
medicine which is offered there, as well as at the
universities of Basel and Tübingen. The fund has
been established to help patients who have suffered harm, but whose damage claims would be
hard to prove in court and carry a high litigation
risk. If it is difficult to prove wrongdoing or show
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
who is at fault, or if rare, yet severe complications
have resulted in damage to the patient’s health,
compensation payments can be made from the patient indemnity fund to spare the patient lengthy
lawsuits, which may drag on for years.
eti e ent an
ae
e
Delegations from Japan, including visitors from Tokyo and Hiroshima, and from Beijing and Finland
visited the Rossau, Maria Jacobi, Türkenschanze
and Wieden retirement and care homes.
nte ati n
te ti n an
en
an e
e
n
e
e
Vienna joined the Austrian Chapter of Transparency International (TI). The anti-corruption watchdog’s ranking of 178 states, which was published
in December, saw Austria in 16th place. The City
of Vienna first committed itself to comprehensive
anti-corruption policies in 2004.
The catalogue “Open data for Vienna” (www.data.
wien.gv.at) won Vienna an award in Brussels for
its transparent design, inclusion of social media
and provision of a discussion forum.
Municipal Department 14 (MA 14 – Automated Data Processing, Information and Communications
Technologies) received many requests for speakers at events in Austria and abroad. These included
presentations on e-government in Moscow and
St. Petersburg and about Vienna’s geographic information system ViennaGIS at an IT conference in
Hannover. MA 14 staff also met with colleagues in
Brussels, with ESRI users from Germany in Munich
and went on training programmes together with
European Computer Emergency Response Teams
in Dublin. A meeting of institutional users of Fabsoft products took place in Augsburg, and MA 14
staff also joined the delegation to Baku during the
Vienna Days there. A meeting of Servicedesk users
was organised in Vienna, and a Polish delegation
was welcomed here on a fact-finding mission concerning software development processes.
The Municipal Department for Integration and
Diversity (MA 17) continued its intensive exchanges at the European level and its participation in international networks. The members of the
OPENCities network met for their annual conference in the city of Nitra, a historic bishop’s seat, to
discuss international migration and competition
I
I
I
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
Dominik Sandner from MA
17 speaks about diversity
to participants in the
Diplomatic Academy’s
special course on Africa.
(Bernhard Bouzek)
The Women’s Dialogue
Forum for the COMPRESS
partner cities:
Dr. Marion Gebhart, head
of MA 57; Commissioner
for Women’s Health
Professor Beate WimmerPuchinger; Ursula Bauer,
head of the gender mainstreaming unit at MD-OS,
City Council Member
Nurten Yilmaz, Silvia
Friedrich, deputy head of
MD-EUI, and Deputy
Equal Opportunities
Advisor Elisabeth Assmair
(Compress)
I
I
At the Forum for International and European Research on Immigration, MA 17 gave a presentation
about Vienna’s integration and diversity monitoring activities at the invitation of the Italian region
of Valle d’Aosta. A contribution on the same topic
was presented at an international expert meeting
on “Migration – bridges and diversity for employment” at the invitation of the city of Schwerin
(Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), and MA 17 participated in a panel discussion about the Romani people in Europe which was organised by the Austrian
Culture Forum in Paris. Similarly, a conference
was hosted in Budapest by the Austrian Culture
Forum and the Danube Institute of Andrássy University to discuss “Romani strategy – realities and
perspectives”; MA 17 contributed a presentation
on Romani in Vienna.
policy. MA 17 also attended a meeting of CLIP, the
Network of European Cities for Local Integration
Policies for Migrants, in Frankfurt/Main, whose
main theme was diversity management as a part
of cities’ human resources management and in the
context of community services. A meeting in Istanbul focused primarily on intercultural and intergroup relations. The European Coalition of Cities
Against Racism met for its annual conference in
Ghent. MA 17 attended a conference held in Berlin
which provided an expert forum for discussion of
the international Migrant Integration Policy Index
under the banner “Migration – Integration – Social
Mobility. Politics of Incorporation in Europe and
North America”. MA 17 staff also participated in a
meeting in Chorley (Lancashire) that considered
ways to help migrants to demonstrate the value of
their language skills.
The head of Municipal Department 35 (MA 35 –
Immigration, Citizenship and Registry Offices),
Beatrix Hornschall, participated in the annual
Metropolis Conference, which took place in the
Azores in 2011. Metropolis is the biggest international network of migration experts worldwide.
In Vienna, MA 35 organised information events
for international organisations with offices here,
presenting and explaining Austrian legislation
concerning rights of residence and establishment
and citizenship regulations.
As in previous years, the Municipal Department
for the Promotion and Coordination of Women’s
Issues (MA 57) welcomed several groups of
international visitors to Vienna. Delegations (and
discussion topics) included: the European Institute
for Equality Issues, Lithuania, Albanian ministries
(gender mainstreaming), the Chinese province of
Jiangsu (women’s policies in Austria), the State
Committee for Family, Women and Children of
Azerbaijan (Women’s Bus, Daughters’ Day), the
Presidium of the Belgrade Social Centres (cooperation in FemCities), and the Autonomous Region
of Andalusia (supporting girls in job and career
decisions). Symposia and other meetings were organised in Vienna, including a meeting of the EU
project group “Women’s Activeness in Social Life”
with participants from Romania, Turkey, the Netherlands and Sweden; talks with Finnish experts focused on labour market questions and support for
women in the workplace; a group of singers from
Minsk was given a tour of the exhibition “Women’s
paths through City Hall”; participants of the EU
twinning project “Promoting Gender Equality in
Working Life” met for discussions in Vienna, and
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
City Councillor Sandra
Frauenberger (centre)
with apprenticeship
manager Jennifer
Schneider (second row)
and apprentices
(Alexandra Kromus PID)
a dialogue forum on “Women’s interests as a focus of successful cities” also took place here. The
women’s helpline unit of MA 57 joined the association of women’s shelters in Vienna in organising an
expert conference on “Sexualised violence: definition, differentiation and professional approaches
for action” with Austrian and European lecturers
and workshop leaders.
Together with Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague
and the universities of Leiden and Delft, MA 57
worked on a research project that compares the
effects of prostitution policies in the Netherlands,
Austria and Sweden. This project, which is also
co-financed by MA 57, aims at taking an unbiased
look at political action and legal measures concerning prostitution and will analyse their consequences from a neutral perspective. Moreover, MA 57
participated in several EU projects.
In Vienna, MA 57 participated in an interregional
conference on the EU Strategy for the Danube Region, a conference on traumatic stress at universities, a labour market conference held at Laudon
Palace and a symposium on “rainbow families”, i.e.
children being brought up by same-sex couples.
Municipal Department 62 (Elections and Specific
Legal Affairs) welcomed an intern from Berlin’s
municipal department for internal issues and
sports.
Two-week training visits to Dublin were organised
for 46 office administration apprentices by the
apprentice management unit in cooperation with
the vocational school for the administrative professions. Participants had to qualify for participation
both at work and in terms of school performance.
The training visits also served to prepare the participants for exams for the Cambridge Business
English Certificate and Cambridge Key English
Test. Before travelling to Ireland, the apprentices
prepared for the visit by taking an intensive course
in business English.
Apprentices also participated in Leonardo da Vinci
exchange projects; candidates for the exchanges
were selected on the basis of excellent school
grades and workplace records, and successful participants earned credits. Ten young employees of
the City of Vienna spent three weeks on internships at the municipal administration of Munich.
nti i i inati n nit
ie t e
a e e
The activities of the Anti-discrimination Unit for
Same-Sex Lifestyles (WASt) focused on homophobia, transphobia and violence. On May 17, the
International Day against Homophobia, City Councillor Sandra Frauenberger opened several events
which were attended, among others, by expert
visitors from Berlin. With activities such as the
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
“queer town talks”, educational work with young
people and support for relevant advocacy groups
and associations, WASt worked to confront tendencies towards growing homophobic violence which
are being noticed across Europe.
bourg, Paris, Rome and Vienna curated an exhibition entitled “MUTATIONS III. Public Images –
Private Views” which was shown in all the partner
cities, with the Carré Rotondes in Luxembourg as
the final stop.
The annual international conference organised
by WASt was attended by 160 experts who discussed the topic of rainbow families – children
being brought up by same-sex couples. A panel of
international experts discussed “queer perspectives in local politics”, and WASt participated in
an expert conference on the taboos surrounding
domestic violence in LGBT partnerships, which
took place in Frankfurt/Main, as well as in an
international symposium dedicated to “Migration
and PROvocative teaching” at Danube University
Krems. “LGBT and Human Rights” was the topic
of a panel discussion at the Ludwig Boltzmann
Institute for Human Rights, which was organised
in the context of an international human rights
training programme. International guests visited
Vienna City Hall in the run-up to the Rainbow Parade, and a rainbow flag was flown there on Christopher Street Day. The Red Ribbon was raised on
City Hall to mark World Aids Day on December 1.
An art show under the title “Beauty Contest”
was organised in conjunction with the Austrian
Cultural Forum New York, where it was opened
by Ambassador Martin Eichtinger, Director General for Cultural Policy of the Austrian Foreign
Ministry. The exhibition, which features works
by 20 international artists who reflect critically
on contemporary global society’s obsession and
fascination with physical appearance, travelled to
Vienna after its run in New York and is on show at
MUSA Vienna until June 2012. The list of visitors
to the show included Austrian President Dr. Heinz
Fischer.
t a
ai
an
ien e
José Carreras was awarded the City of Vienna’s
Gold Medal of Honour. The star tenor, who was
born in Barcelona in 1946, has performed frequently in Vienna, including appearances on the
stages of the State Opera, the Musikverein and
Konzerthaus concert halls and “Christmas in
Vienna”. The decoration was presented by City
Councillor Dr. Andreas Mailath-Pokorny. Pop and
jazz singer Bill Ramsey, an American by birth,
and guitarist and Grammy winner James Burton from Louisiana were awarded the “Goldene
Rathausmann”, a golden miniature replica of the
iron standard-bearer figure that guards Vienna
City Hall.
Vienna joined the Enlarged Partial Agreement
(EPA) on Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe,
an important instrument for cultural exchange
and tourism. Following joint efforts by the Federal Ministry of Culture, the Foreign Ministry, the
Association of Austrian Cities and Towns and the
provinces of Carinthia, Vorarlberg and Vienna,
Austria became a founding member of the EPA as
of year-end 2011 and took a seat on the governing
board. Three of the designated Cultural Routes
run across Austria; in Vienna the largest local
Providing promotion, support and funding for
Viennese arts projects abroad is an important area of activity of the Cultural Affairs Department
(MA 7). Years of fruitful cooperation with the city
of Odessa culminated in 2011 when the Black Sea
port city hosted Viennese Culture Days (see also
the chapter “Target destinations”).
On the occasion of the “European month of photography”, the cities of Berlin, Bratislava, Luxem-
City Councillor Dr. Andreas Mailath-Pokorny opens the exhibition
“Bigger Than Life. 100 Years of Hollywood: A Jewish Experience” at
Vienna's Jewish Museum. (Schaub-Walzer PID)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Young artists from Israel,
Russia, Azerbaijan,
Ukraine, BosniaHercegovina, Hungary
and Austria meet for the
sixth time at the annual
“Kreativfestival”, a festival
of music and dance,
in Vienna.
(Mikhael Yaroshevsky)
cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) is part of the European
Cemeteries Route. Vienna’s accession to the Agreement will substantially impact cultural exchange
activities and tourism.
The Vienna Festival staged 41 productions from
23 countries, including Greenland, Mali, Kazakhstan and Colombia. The kick-off event for the festival, which is held annually in May and June, was a
choir competition with choirs from Salzburg, Graz
and Gumpoldskirchen, held in front of City Hall
on 13 May.
The same location saw a choir festival in December, with 90 choirs from 14 countries – including,
for the first time, one from Belarus – performing
advent songs in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
Municipal Department 8 (MA 8 – City Archives)
continued to engage in international know-how
transfer and welcomed visitors from the state archives of Kosovo, the Republic of Korea and the
Turkish Ministry of Health and Social Security.
Together with the Association for the History of
Vienna and the Institute for Austrian History Studies, MA 8 organised an international conference
on “City halls as multifunctional spaces of representation, party-building and secrecy”. MA 8 experts participated in the International Scientific
Symposium in Dubrovnik and a meeting of the
International Council on Archives in Edinburgh
and presented a paper at a conference dedicated to “Vienna during the Great War” in Oxford.
International information exchanges took place at
further meetings in Bremen, Toledo and Lisbon.
The Vienna City Library (MA 9) organised an international meeting together with Vienna’s House
of Literature on “The politics of goodness. On the
100 th birthday of Fritz Hochwälder” and an expert meeting as part of the series “TheaterzettelSammlungen” (“Playbill Collections”) together
with the Don Juan Archiv Wien, at which speakers from Moscow’s Central Theatre Museum gave a
presentation. Experts from the University of Münster attended a reading about author and sculptor
Curt Stenvert. Speakers from Wuppertal, Murnau
(Bavaria), Szeged and other cities participated in
a symposium which took place in Vienna to mark
the 110 th birthday of writer and dramatist Ödön
von Horváth. Academic speakers from Istanbul,
Cluj-Napoca, Ljubljana, Sofia and Budapest gave a
systematic overview of Austrian cultural policies.
The Vienna City Library contributed to exhibitions in several cities in Germany and to the show
“Vienna 1900. Style and Identity” in New York’s
Belvedere Palace
(Upper Belvedere) was
built in the 18th century.
The State Treaty which
re-established Austrian
national sovereignty was
signed here in 1955.
Today, the palace is
home to art collections
ranging from medieval
to contemporary art.
(Vienna Tourist Board)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
Neue Galerie. MA 9 staff attended conferences in
Oxford, Luxembourg and Dublin. International
visitors from Germany, Russia, Belgium, Japan,
the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, the UK and
Luxembourg visited museums, libraries and universities in Vienna.
A film festival dedicated to Scandinavian and Baltic films was hosted at the adult education institution VHS Urania. The festival opened with the
Lithuanian movie Artimos Sviesos, which was
celebrating its Austrian premiere.
ien
An exhibition entitled
“Vienna: Art and Design.
Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann,
Loos” on show at the
National Gallery of Victoria
in Melbourne, Australia
(Wien Museum)
e
Gustav Klimt’s famous portrait of Emilie Flöge
and other prominent works of art from Wien Museum were presented at the National Gallery of
Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, in an exhibition
entitled “Vienna: Art and Design. Klimt, Schiele,
Hoffmann, Loos”. With some 50 works of art on
loan from Vienna, Wien Museum was the leading
international contributor to the exhibition, which
also included such highlights as Schiele’s “Sun
Flower” and “The artist’s room at Neulengbach”,
Richard Gerstl’s portrait of Arnold Schönberg,
drawings by Klimt, Schiele and Otto Wagner, as
well as paintings by Carl Moll. More than 170,000
visitors saw “Die Ernst Jandl Show”, an exhibition
about writer and performing artist Ernst Jandl,
which was made possible through cooperation between Wien Museum, the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Theory of Biography, and
the Austrian National Library, and was on show
in Vienna, Munich and Berlin. “The prophet – The
world of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach” was the first
major exhibition presenting the painter and life
I
I
reform advocate (1851-1913) in Austria; it was organised in cooperation with Villa Stuck, Munich.
During a visit to Austria by the Turkish President
Abdullah Gül, Turkey’s First Lady Hayrünnisa Gül
and her Austrian counterpart Margit Fischer visited a Wien Museum exhibition which presented the
original medieval drawings for the construction
of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. These detailed plans
and sketches, which the master builders and stonemasons used as the basis for their work on Vienna’s biggest cathedral, are an outstanding testimony to the art of building in the Gothic period and
were inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World
Register of Documentary Heritage in 2005. The
“Working group of historical museums”, a forum to
which some 20 directors of museums in Germany,
Switzerland and Austria belong, met in Vienna.
Potential cooperation projects were discussed
with the Korean National Museum in Seoul and
the Moravian Museum in Brno, as well as on the
occasion of a state visit by Federal President
Dr. Heinz Fischer to Singapore. Wien Museum
Director Dr. Wolfgang Kos attended two meetings
with representatives of the city museums of Copenhagen and Barcelona. The rich museum landscape of the Ruhr region was the destination of the
second trip abroad by the Association of Friends
of Wien Museum. Wien Museum staff participated in meetings, conferences and trade fairs, and
curators travelled to exhibitions and museums
whose themes – and particularly how they present
them – are of particular interest to Wien Museum.
Loaning important objects to major museums
abroad has been one way of honing the international profile of Wien Museum. In the year under
report, Wien Museum holdings appeared in exhibitions in Lisbon, Dresden, Nuremberg, Weimar,
Munich, Berlin, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille, Emden (Lower Saxony), Cluny (Burgundy),
Ghent, New York, Liverpool, Trento (Italy), Hamburg, Shanghai und in the Louvre in Paris.
Wien Museum owns an outstanding collection of
works by Gustav Klimt which will be shown in its
entirety for the first time in 2012 to mark the 150th
anniversary of the artist’s birth. The Wien Museum
holdings include some 400 drawings by Klimt, the
largest collection of its kind anywhere, including
drafts and sketches from all stages of Klimt’s creative process, as well as absolute masterpieces. As
all the drawings will be on show in 2012, visitors
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
will be able to study the works in their thematic
context. In preparation for the Klimt year 2012,
advertising activities abroad were organised and
journalists supported in on-site research.
an e e
ent an
te ti n ne
an
i
t
i ate
a ti i ati n
Migration was the theme of the photo exhibition
OPENCities Faces, which was opened in Vienna
by Deputy Mayor Maria Vassilakou after having
been on show in Düsseldorf, Belfast, Madrid and
Sofia. The OPENCities network, in which several
Viennese institutions participate along with nine
other cities, has developed the OPENcities Monitor, a benchmark consisting of 70 indicators that
measure the openness of a city. Its objective is to
show the connection between a city’s openness to
migration and its economic success. Study results
were communicated to DG Regio.
The Austrian Institute for Spatial Planning organised a conference under the banner “Urban
Development 2050”, which was hosted by the
Urania adult education institution. Among the
participants who discussed public participation
as an opportunity for democracy were the Prime
Minister of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, and Vienna’s Deputy
Mayor Maria Vassilakou.
A group of 25 NGO representatives from Slovakia
and the Czech Republic visited the offices of the
Green Party at Vienna City Hall to gather information about urban planning, including the master-
plan for high-rise buildings and the major policy
objectives of Vienna’s current Social DemocraticGreen coalition government. The visitors were
also given a tour of urban development hotspots,
including a building complex designed by Zaha
Hadid in the Spittelau neighbourhood.
Baden-Württemberg’s
Prime Minister Winfried
Kretschmann on his first
visit to Deputy Mayor
Maria Vassilakou
(Schaub-Walzer PID)
Municipal Department 18 (Urban Development
and Planning) welcomed 43 international delegations with a combined strength of 929 visitors
from many different cities, including Daegu, Seoul
and Taipei.
Deputy Mayor Maria Vassilakou attended a conference of the Velo-City network in Seville, where
she represented Vienna as a network member. Measures to promote cycling were on the
agenda of a meeting in Munich, and the exhibition “UNESCO World Cultural Heritage
Vienna” was on
show at the Aust r i a n C u lt u ra l
Forum in Bratislava. MA 18 gave
a presentation
on “Free space:
integration – the
unknown and the
public space” for
the University of
Applied Sciences
i n O s n a b r üc k ,
District Councillor Manfred Itzinger from the Wieden
district (centre, with cap) leads a group of visitors from
Slovakian and Czech NGOs on a tour of Vienna’s urban
development zones, including the construction site for
the new central rail station. (Gerhard Jordan)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Visitors to Lviv in front of
the new stadium which is
under construction for the
European Football
Championship, with
Volkmar Pamer of MA 21B
(front left) and Andreas
Wenninger MAS, head of
the Lviv office of OeAD
and science attaché (far
right). (Volkmar Pamer)
where it was made available via a video conference
link – the first time that this technology was used
in this context. In Karlsruhe, MA 18 staff spoke
about GIS in Vienna’s municipal administration
and the department was also present at the Vienna Days in Odessa and Baku. A delegation visited London to gather information about planning
for pedestrians there and invited the NGO Walk
21 to a conference on the same topic in Vienna.
A delegation from the
Republic of Korea visits
the Planungswerkstatt
exhibition centre
with Cornelia Prinz from
MA 21B (l.) and Eva
Prochazka from MA 18.
(MA 18)
0
MA 18 participated in the EUROCITIES forums
on economic development and mobility, was a
partner in the CENTROPE Capacity project (see
the chapter on “Bilateral Relations”) and participated in these EU projects: Catch-MR, SoNorA,
SETA, PUMA, UrbanAPIPro 2012+ and two bilateral transport programmes with Slovakia (see the
“European Union” chapter).
Municipal Department 19 (MA 19 – Architecture
and Urban Design) carried out two projects with
Czech partners (see the chapter on “Bilateral
relations”).
Municipal Department 21 A (District Planning and
Land Use Central West) organised a programme
for expert visitors from Turin, including lectures
on zoning and land use planning, an overview of
the urban development zones Erdberger Mais,
Aspanggründe and St. Marx, and a tour of the development zone Gasometer–St. Marx. Expert talks
with visitors from the property administration enterprise of the state of Lower Saxony focused on
academic institutions. (www.wien.gv.at/stadtentwicklung/flaechenwidmung/index.html)
Members of Municipal Department 21 B (District
Planning and Land Use South and Northeast) were
invited to give presentations in Dresden and Copenhagen, where they reported on the ongoing
projects in the Atzgersdorf Nord neighbourhood
together with the Department of Geography of
Vienna University. In Oslo, Vienna participated in
the EUROPEAN competition for planning spaces.
Two so-called Implementation Labs took place
as part of the project CUPA (Co-operative Urban
Planning Approaches), which MA 21 B conducted in cooperation with TINA Vienna. A meeting
in Lviv discussed the new stadium built for the
European Football Championship 2012 and its future use. In Kraków, experts considered whether
a proposed new canal would be effective in preventing flooding of the Vistula, and how the area
reserved for its construction might be used in the
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
interim. The workshop and its results were best
practice examples of an urban development strategy that is both forward-looking and sustainable.
The EU project URBACT-REDIS (Restructuring
Districts into Science Quarters), in which MA 21 B
was a partner, was concluded in Magdeburg with
the presentation of the book Creating knowledge
hotspots in the city.
A delegation from Bosnia-Hercegovina visited
Municipal Department 28 (Road Management
and Construction) in the context of a project management training course; department head Bernhard Engleder participated in an expert meeting
on “ITS for Urban Mobility” in Brussels, where he
spoke about the traffic telematics project AnachB.
Mr. Engleder also presented ITS Vienna Region,
the traffic management project of Lower Austria,
Burgenland and Vienna, during a visit to Orlando.
Urban planners, GIS experts and companies from
German-speaking Europe met in Berlin at a forum
for cities that use digital applications, where Municipal Department 41 (Surveyors) gave a presentation on Vienna’s activities in the field under the
title “Ambition versus reality – practical applications of Vienna’s 3D city model”.
The Czech association Auto*Mat, which explores
the potential for alternative transport solutions for
Prague, visited Municipal Department 46 (MA 46
– Traffic Management and Organisation) to learn
about the cycling infrastructure in Vienna. The
Hungarian daily newspaper Metropol (circulation
in Budapest: 275,000 copies) interviewed MA 46
staff about cycling in Vienna.
The traffic safety unit of MA 46 and the “Planning
and traffic safety” working group of the Austrian research association for road and rail transport participated in the trilateral German/
Austrian/Swiss information meeting in Cologne.
These meetings are held annually to discuss the
latest findings in transport and road research.
n i n ent
The Municipal Department for Environmental
Protection (MA 22) was active in several EUROCITIES working groups, participated in a series of
EU projects and was much in demand as a contact
point for visiting delegations from abroad. Experts
from Finland, Denmark and Japan came to Vienna
to learn about the ecological procurement pro-
gramme Ökokauf and the Vienna EcoBusinessPlan,
an instrument for “greening” of the local economy.
Visitors from Shanghai were interested in air quality monitoring in Vienna.
The EcoBusinessPlan is Vienna’s ecological service package for business enterprises. Launched
in 1998 by MA 22, it helps companies implement
eco-friendly measures which also reduce the cost
of running the business operations. To date, more
than 800 business operations have availed themselves of the consultancy services offered under
the EcoBusinessPlan. In addition to significant savings on operating costs, the measures have also
reduced final energy consumption by 745 GWh.
The savings on the companies’ energy bills alone
amounted to 46 million euro. International EcoBusinessPlan activities in 2011 included networking at the European level in EUROCITIES and the
EU’s SME support programme ECAP, as well as
cooperation in two bilateral projects.
Awards are presented
every year to Viennese
enterprises for ecological
innovation projects in the
context of the city’s
EcoBusinessPlan.
City Councillor Ulli Sima
(centre) and (to her right)
Karin BüchlKrammerstätter, head of
the Municipal Department
for Environmental
Protection, presenting the
awards to the 2011
winners. (MA 22)
The project “Energy Information Service Package
for Businesses” was launched as an Austro-Hungarian cross-border cooperation project to address
energy issues. The project objective is to transfer
know-how from Vienna’s EcoBusinessPlan to Györ.
Another bilateral project which was co-financed by
the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) involved
the Serbian city of Novi Sad. The EcoBusinessPlan
assisted with its expertise in developing a similar programme (“Ecoprofit Novi Sad”) in Serbia’s
second-largest city. To date, the concept of the
EcoBusinessPlan has been “exported” (in chronological order) to Györ, 24 cities in the Adriatic region, Athens, Chennai, Durrës, Cork County (Ire-
1
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
March by switching off the decorative illumination on Vienna City Hall for an hour.
The “Viennese Garden” in
the Adriatic town of Cervia
(MA 42)
land), to another six cities in India (together with
UNIDO), and (since 2009) to Sheffield.
The eco-friendly public procurement programme
ÖkoKauf Wien received the Dubai International
Award for Best Practices in Improving the Living Environment. The Dubai Award is presented
biennially by UN-Habitat and the Emirate of Dubai. The European Commission also commended
ÖkoKauf Wien as one of the three most resourcesaving programmes. Under the programme,
which has been in place for more than ten years,
ecological criteria are considered when the city
buys goods and services, saving 30,000 tonnes of
CO2 emissions and 17 million euro every year. The
Federal Court of Audit also praised Vienna’s ecofriendly policies in its audit report on sustainable
development.
The “inselinfo”
information centre on the
Danube Island (MA 45/
Kozuh Schneeberger)
MA 22 was able to obtain funds for several projects
from the EU’s Rural Development Programme.
Vienna joined in worldwide symbolic climate
protection activities marking Earth Hour on 26
The Vienna Waterworks (Municipal Department
31 – MA 31) organised a meeting of the Governing
Assembly of the International Water Association
(IWA) in Vienna, which was attended by delegates
from 50 countries. More than 400 representatives
of water supply utilities and international experts
met at the general meeting of the International
Association of Water Supply Companies in the
Danube River Catchment Area (IAWD) to discuss
groundwater issues. A Water Festival was celebrated at Vienna’s Stadtpark, where a raffle and
a wheel of fortune helped raise 7,000 euro for two
water treatment plants for public institutions in
Chernobyl. To date, 12 of these plants, each with
a treatment capacity of 1,500 litres of water per
hour, have been installed in the Chernobyl region.
The Parks and Gardens Department (MA 42) participated in the FLORA 2011 garden exhibition in
Olomouc. The show is held annually and is the biggest event of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe, and the one with the longest tradition. From
May to September, beds of flowers from Vienna
graced the Italian town of Cervia. Moreover, MA
42 contributed expert presentations to Germany’s
Federal Garden Show and to the conference of gardens administration directors in Koblenz. MA 42
staff also participated in a meeting of the Swiss
association of garden authorities in Solothurn.
A delegation from the Republic of Korea came to
Vienna to see the city’s parks and gardens, as did
TV crews from Slovenia and Russia. In spring, the
Amics d’Austria association from Barcelona visited the Stadtpark in Vienna. A new park in Aspern
was named after Danish composer Hans Christian
Lumbye, and an event focusing on Portugal was
organised at the Kagran training gardens; a Chinese festival took place at the Hirschstetten flower
gardens.
Municipal Department 45 (MA 45 – Water Management) welcomed visitors interested in flood
protection, conservation of natural bodies of water,
rehabilitation of near-natural aquatic and riparian
habitats and recreational use of natural bodies of
water. In addition to tours, international visitors
were also invited to the “Inselinfo” building, an
information centre on the Danube Island which
provided the setting for receptions, presentations
and expert meetings.
2
C IVI I
The state-of-the-art waste treatment facilities of
Municipal Department 48 (MA 48 – Waste Management, Street Cleaning and Vehicle Fleet) were
a popular destination for visitors from Austria and
abroad, as they have indeed been for many years
now. Presentations and tours of the facilities resulted in lively exchanges concerning street cleaning, waste collection, waste separation, recycling
and disposal. In the year under report, MA 48 welcomed 66 international delegations which brought
838 visitors to Vienna. The international visitors
came from 51 countries, including Azerbaijan,
Egypt, India, Iran, Peru, Sri Lanka, South Africa,
Thailand and Vietnam. Together with 30 groups of
Austrian visitors, 1,360 experts and policy-makers
came to visit MA 48. Staff of the Wiener Kommunal Umweltschutzprojekt GesmbH welcomed 80
international delegations for tours of the Pfaffenau
waste incinerator.
A conference on waste management took place
in the spring at the initiative of the International
Solid Waste Association (ISWA). More than 130
experts from 27 nations met in Vienna to discuss
waste avoidance, reuse and recycling and other
waste-related issues. Austrian high-tech waste
treatment technology was a focus of interest for
experts from European countries and from Brazil, Pakistan, Egypt, Oman and the Republic of Korea, who came to Vienna in the autumn to learn
about the Pfaffenau and Spittelau waste-to-energy
plants, the Simmeringer Haide waste treatment
facility, the biogas plant and the Rautenweg landfill. ISWA experts also went on a tour of Vienna’s
waste drop-off points, waste collection centres and
separation and used-material treatment facilities.
The ISWA World Annual Congress 2011 took place
in Daegu, Republic of Korea, under the motto
“Waste to Green” and focused in particular on
how waste management can contribute to low
carbon strategies. With 600 participants from 57
countries, the congress had a very good turnout.
Members of ISWA Austria contributed six presentations to the event.
MA 48 department head Josef Thon spoke about
his department’s international know-how transfer
activities at a conference organised by the development policy NGO Südwind under the title “Is the
world drowning in waste?” at Vienna City Hall.
Journalists from Azerbaijan and Turkey gathered
information about urban technologies, and China’s
state broadcasting agency China Central Televi-
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
sion (CCTV) produced a documentary about waste
separation in Vienna. MA 48 contributed a presentation on waste management to the Vienna Days in
Baku and reported on the city’s experiences with
the problem of dog excrement at an expert meeting held in Berlin (“Poo-free Berlin”). There was
enormous media interest in the Viennese approach
to a solution.
I
I
I
MA 48 department head
Josef Thon with City
Council Member Susanne
Bluma and the Ghanaian
journalist Mike Anane
at Vienna City Hall during
the conference “Is the
world drowning in waste?”
(MD-EUI)
The management company of Vienna’s main
sewage treatment plant, ebswien, received the
European Commission’s EMAS Award 2011 in
Wieliczka near Kraków. EMAS is the most demanding eco-management and audit system worldwide.
Operations at the ebswien treatment plant, which
cleans about 7,000 litres of water per second, have
been certified for quality, work safety and ecofriendliness since 2007.
The head of Municipal Department 49 (MA 49 –
Forestry Office and Urban Agriculture), Andreas
Januskovecz, opened an exhibition on the Danube
Forestry Director
Andreas Januskovecz
(centre) with
EuroTeensCamp
participants (MA 49)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
Grape harvesting at the
Cobenzl Winery (MA 49)
Delta Biosphere Reserve in Romania, which was on
show in the Lobau National Park Centre during the
summer. The number of visitors to the Lobau wetlands increased once again. Boat trips around the
area, which covers Vienna’s share of the Danube
Wetlands National Park, were a favourite activity.
The annual Neighbour Days, which have been
organised there since 2007, were again a living
expression of the close and fruitful cooperation
between Vienna and the neighbouring regions
and countries. Schoolchildren from Slovakia and
the Czech Republic went on excursions through
the National Park to learn interesting facts about
the wetland ecosystems. The National Park Camp
of the Lobau Forestry Office served as venue for a
meeting of 110 schoolchildren from 15 European
countries who engaged in discussions about
the future of democracy. The motto of the 2011
EuroTeensCamp was “Young, Green, European”.
Representatives of the Danube Basin nations gathered at the Lobau National Park Centre to discuss
the development of eco-tourism along the river
at a meeting hosted by the Danube conservation
zones network Danubeparks and “Die Donau”,
an international tourism advertising network.
International visitors, including journalists from
Italy, groups of schoolchildren and students, as
well as forestry experts from all over the world,
went on tours of forests, to the forestry education
centre Waldschule Ottakring, the water protection
zones and the Cobenzl Winery run by MA 49.
“The forest is more than the sum of its trees!”
was the motto under which the International
Year of Forests was celebrated in 2011. Following
up on this, a number of high-level Austrian and
international organisations decided to focus on
the health impact of forests in the coming years.
In this vein, a meeting was held at Reichenau in
the Rax massif to discuss how being in the forest
affects human health. The Forestry Office team
led visitors on an excursion in and around Kaiserbrunn in Lower Austria, where extensive forest areas have been designated as groundwater
protection zones. These are managed by Vienna’s
Forestry Office in a conservative, eco-friendly
manner to secure the supply of clean spring water to the city.
Wines from the City of Vienna’s winery (Weingut Cobenzl) were sold at home and abroad, with
the main export markets Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and the US accounting for almost
10% of total revenues. To maintain relations with
international partners and establish new contacts, Weingut Cobenzl participated in ProWein,
an international trade show in Düsseldorf, and in
the Viennese Ball in Prague; wine tasting sessions
were held in Budapest, Kraków, Moscow, Opatija
and Hamburg.
The international activities of Vienna’s wastewater
management organisation Wien Kanal mainly involved exchanges with the sewer system manage-
C IVI I
ments of other major European cities. International
visitors to Vienna were interested in learning
about current engineering projects, and Wien
Kanal hosted a workshop on process benchmarking for experts from Germany and Switzerland.
Delegates from Munich were informed about the
sewer management operations, and the 4th expert
exchange with Zurich was dedicated to a two-day
workshop on as-is analysis of sewers, resource allocation, cleaning and inspection of special structures and hydrodynamic charting. Expert visitors
from the Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar came
to Vienna to discuss cesspit and septic tank clearance. Students from the Universidad Nacional
Agraria de la Molina in the Peruvian capital Lima
and students from Tirana visited the construction
site at Aspern where a new main sewer is being
built for an urban development zone. Visitors were
particularly keen on learning about the technical
and organisational aspects involved in managing
major sewer construction projects, and animated
discussions focused on engineering/design, tendering processes and on-site monitoring and inspection, to name but a few areas of interest.
Wien Kanal met with counterpart institutions
in Munich and Mainz and participated in the 3rd
international expert meeting on “Media and PR
work for wastewater operations”, as well as in a
workshop entitled “Aquabench – process benchmarking for sewer operations and pumping stations”. At the Vienna Days in Baku, Wien Kanal
gave an overview presentation on sewage management in Vienna and met with representatives of
Baku’s sewage management company Tamiz Shahar to discuss potential solutions to wastewater
problems in Azerbaijan’s capital.
i e
n i n enta
te ti n
More than 200,000 inhabitants of Vienna have so
far signed a petition against the nuclear power station at Mochovce, Slovakia. The City of Vienna filed
a complaint against the European Commission on
the grounds that the EC has withheld documents
relating to blocks 3 and 4 of the Mochovce plant,
and has argued that Slovakia and the power plant
operators acted in violation of the Aarhus Convention (Convention on Access to Information, Public
Participation in Decision-making and Access to
Justice in Environmental Matters).
The Ombuds Office participated in the project eMAT, which aims at improving Austro-Slovakian
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
cooperation in cross-border environmental impact
studies, ensuring open and transparent, as well
as efficient, processes. The Ombuds Office also
continued its conversations with Czech representatives concerning the ongoing environmental impact study on the proposed addition of two new
reactors to the controversial nuclear power plant
at Temelín.
As Vienna’s representative body concerning nuclear power policy, the Ombuds Office also participated in bilateral meetings with nuclear power
experts from Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Switzerland and the Czech Republic
and used the information from these meetings to
prepare Vienna’s policy positions with respect to
developments that are relevant to the city. Efforts
were made to improve transnational cooperation
in radiation early warning systems. Many NGOs
participated in an anti-nuclear-power summit in
April, which adopted a 10-point resolution with
a roadmap for nuclear phase-out in Europe. An
expert talk took place at the Altes AKH campus
under the heading “25 years after Chernobyl and
one month after Fukushima”.
The Vienna Ombuds Office for Environmental
Protection and its counterparts from Austria’s
provinces joined the Federal Environmental Authority in an expert workshop on “Sustainable use
of bio-energy sources in Austria”, which took place
at Vienna City Hall. The meeting, which brought
together more than 50 international experts, discussed the decisions and strategies which will be
needed for the sustainable use of national bio-energy potentials despite the growing pressure on
agriculture and forestry in Austria.
I
I
I
City Councillor Ulli Sima
(l.) and Dr. Andrea
Schnattinger, head of the
Ombuds Office for
Environmental Protection,
at an anti-nuclear power
event at Vienna City Hall
(Christian Houdek PID)
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
in
enewa
in
n t
ti n an
an
City Councillor Dr. Michael Ludwig and the Speaker of the Moscow Duma, Vladimir Platonov, opened
the 2011 Moscow Charity Ball at Vienna City Hall.
Among the musical highlights of the evening
was a performance by the Bolshoi Theatre. Since
2007 the Moscow charity balls have raised about
160,000 euro, which have been used to finance social projects in both cities.
The Secretary General of the Austrian-Chinese
Society, Hongbin Kaminski, was awarded the
Gold Medal of Honour for her services to the City
of Vienna; born in Harbin, China, she has organised more than 100 exhibitions over a period of 25
years, initiated six district partnerships and has
played an important role in the integration of Chinese immigrants in Austrian society.
City Councillor
Dr. Michael Ludwig and
the Secretary General of
the Austrian-Chinese
Society, Hongbin Kaminski
(Alex Halada/PID)
An international meeting was held in Innsbruck to
coordinate activities to protect birds against colliding with glass surfaces. The development of study
designs and experience gathered with UV-coated
glass were also discussed.
i e
The cat home of the
Berlin animal shelter
(Tierschutz Berlin)
ni a
te ti n
The Ombuds Office for Animal Protection participated in an expert meeting in Bad Boll, Germany,
which discussed the general theme “The dignity
of animals” from philosophical, religious, veterinarian and legal perspectives. At a conference
on habitat enrichment for animals kept in captivity, which took place in Portland (Oregon), the
Ombuds Office contributed a presentation on
how parrots, a highly intelligent bird species, behave in captivity. Members of the Ombuds Office also visited animal protection institutions
in the UK and the animal shelter in Berlin,
which takes in more
than 12,000 animals
per year, with a view to
using the information
gathered there in the
planning process for a
competence centre for
animal protection that
is to be established in
Vienna.
Two groups of architects and construction engineers from Finland visited Municipal Department
25 (Urban Renewal and Assessment in Matters of
Housing Construction and Promotion) to discuss
low-energy buildings and the passive-house standard. The neighbourhood urban renewal team for
Vienna’s 12 th district travelled to Hamburg for
exchanges concerning a range of urban renewal
topics, such as demographic change, intercultural housing and how to make neighbourhoods
more attractive, rehabilitation of big housing complexes, residents’ protest against neighbourhood
rehabilitation measures, and the emergence and
promotion of new ways of living. The delegation
was headed by City Councillor Dr. Michael Ludwig.
Municipal Department 37 (Building Inspection)
received visitors from the Czech Republic, Sweden, Thailand and Mongolia who were interested
in how requests for building permits are processed in Vienna and what is being done to prevent corruption.
iene
nen
a ini t ati n
i
in
Stadt Wien – Wiener Wohnen is the City of Vienna’s enterprise in charge of the day-to-day administration and management, including repair and
renovation, of public housing in the city. Wiener
Wohnen is the biggest entity of its kind in Europe,
managing some 220,000 apartments, 6,000 business premises and garage and parking facilities
C IVI I
C I
C
IV
IC
C
IV
I
I
I
for more than 47,000 vehicles. Extensive descriptions (“Hofbeschreibungen”) are available online
for each housing complex.
In the year under report, Wiener Wohnen welcomed visitors from housing cooperatives and
housing management organisations from the
western Ruhr region (Duisburg, Mulheim, Oberhausen). Discussions revolved around current
projects, tenancy regulations, lease terms and
technical questions, and the visitors also met
with staff from Wohnpartner, the neighbourhood
service installed in public housing complexes in
Vienna. The European Investment Bank (EIB)
awarded loans to Wiener Wohnen, to be used in
good practice projects. The existing good relations
were continued with visits by EIB staff to Vienna
to gather information on ongoing neighbourhood
rehabilitation and energy efficiency projects here.
w
n n
wien
itin
The “wohnfonds_wien” fund for housing construction and urban renewal was present at
the International Wood Construction Forum in
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to which it
contributed a presentation on “Wood construction in Vienna”, and participated in an architectural tour to Basel, Weil am Rhein and Mülhausen.
“wohnfonds_wien” staff visited housing projects
in Munich and participated in an international
conference about thermal insulation of large-volume buildings in Graz. The fund also welcomed
delegations from Russia, Hungary, Denmark,
Switzerland and Armenia. Information about
facade renovations was provided to Radio Sofia,
and students from the University of Technology
in Delft visited to learn about “soft” urban renewal
processes.
n e en ent
an ea t
i e
rights and equal treatment integral components
of political decision-making and administrative
processes.
ati na
a et
A strategy conference on the local implementation
of human rights was co-organised by the European
Fundamental Rights Agency and the City of Vienna. Conference participants from Aarhus, Athens,
Budapest, London, Mannheim, Rotterdam, Västra
Götaland, Utrecht, Uszka (Hungary), Turin and
Vienna discussed how human rights can be promoted and implemented at the local level, focusing inter alia on the key role of local governments
as service providers. Concrete strategies were
prepared at the conference to make fundamental
e a t ent
The Auditing Department continued its well-established contacts and collaboration with the counterpart authorities in Paris and Zagreb. Questions
relating to the preparation of annual accounts and
to ongoing monitoring versus ex-post audits were
discussed with officials from Paris. During a visit
to Municipal Department 48, problems in relation
to littering in public areas were discussed. Auditing Department Director Dr. Peter Pollak and his
deputy Albert Schön were invited to Zagreb. The
working meeting there focused on the organisation of the Zagreb auditing authority and an overview of recent audits, as well as questions relating
to internal auditing, financial controlling and the
political context of public auditing in Zagreb. n
Housing, office buildings
and the headquarters of
national and international
companies at Wienerberg
City (Rupert Christanell/
MA 18)
Parisian visitors at the
Auditing Department:
Department head
Dr. Peter Pollak MBA and
assistant Michaela Binder
(left) with Director General
Marie-Ange du Mesnil du
Buisson and assistant
Isabelle Duchefdelaville
(right) (MKA)
D
Local drinking water
supply in Laos
(Red Cross)
evelo
an h
ent coo eration
anitarian ai
Development cooperation and humanitarian aid
fall within the remit of the Chief Executive Office’s Group for European and International Affairs
(MD-EUI).
In 2011, projects were supported under the general
heading of “Human rights in development cooperation” in the following countries: Albania (prevention of violence, literacy training for Romani
women), Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (education),
Benin (protection against child trafficking), Laos
(drinking water), Namibia (workers’ rights), Nepal
(education, literacy), Pakistan (social inclusion),
Rwanda (children’s rights), Turkey (women’s
rights), Ukraine (prevention and treatment of HIV
infections), Vietnam (prevention and treatment of
leprosy). Assistance was also provided for health
projects in the camps of Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, and for the rebuilding of schools and healthcare infrastructure after the floods in Pakistan.
Hospital and office furniture from one recently
demolished wing of the Rudolfstiftung hospital
was made available to the public administration
of Sibiu. The foundation “Austria pro Romania”
organised the lorry transport of the goods; 15
volunteers from “Team Austria” loaded the goods
together with ten inmates on day release from the
Simmering prison.
An information event about development policy in
the Republic of Namibia was organised by MD-EUI
at the seat of the provincial government of Lower
Austria in St. Pölten. In this context, a photo ex-
V
C
I
I
I
I
hibition under the title “Women in Namibia” was
shown in cooperation with the Austrian-Namibian
Society.
At the annual development policy expert meeting
at Vienna City Hall, discussions in 2011 focused
on waste-related issues, waste avoidance and recycling. Waste volumes and concomitant problems
are on the rise in developing countries as a result
of urbanisation and changing lifestyles. On the
one hand, waste poses threats to human health;
on the other, millions of people depend on waste
collection, sorting and resale for their livelihood.
Although organic materials still account for some
70 per cent of the total waste volume in developing
countries, inorganic waste volumes are growing
globally. Journalist and environmentalist Mike
Anane from Ghana gave a presentation about the
illegal exports of electronic scrap to his home country. Discarded PCs and hospital waste end up on
open dumps in Ghana, where they are taken apart
by children in search of saleable metals. The exposure to lead, cadmium and other toxic materials
results in massive damage to the child workers’
health, aggravated by the fact that they do not
wear any protective clothing.
As part of MD-EUI’s humanitarian aid activities, a
bus was donated to the association Confinis cf. The
vehicle, which is specially adapted for the needs of
people with disabilities, is used in the regions of
Briceni, Edinet and Rascani in the northern part of
Moldova for transporting people in need of medical
treatments or care.
A refuse collection vehicle was given to the Serbian town of Knjaževac whose energetic local government is working hard to professionalise waste
collection and make a contribution towards protecting the environment. Replacing the open truck
formerly used, the new vehicle now enables the
community to collect household rubbish cleanly
and efficiently.
Books and educational games were provided for
the German School in Kiev and the German-language kindergarten via the Austrian Embassy in
Kiev. The Procurement Department (MA 54) supplied 20 desks and 30 chairs for the primary school
in Stejărişu, Transylvania as a contribution to poverty alleviation in the region.
The City of Vienna co-funded the transport of humanitarian goods, especially technical medical
Lydia Ladurner, First Secretary of the Austrian Embassy, at the diplomatic bazaar in Addis Ababa. The
proceeds of the bazaar were donated in aid of 30 projects in Ethiopia. (Austrian Embassy Addis Ababa)
equipment, which Viennese NGOs were able to
provide for Bosnia-Hercegovina, Moldova, Serbia,
Slovakia, Romania and the Ukraine. MD-EUI supported the assignment of a surgeon to Kenya who
carried out urgently needed cleft palate operations
on children there.
The Executive Group for Organisation, Safety
and Security provided funds to bring water, food
and medical supplies to famine victims in East
Africa. n
Nebojsa Mitic (left) with
Wolfgang Laumann of MA
48 und Bernhard Bouzek
at the handover of a
refuse collection vehicle
to the Serbian town of
Knjaževac (MD-EUI)
E
ro ean
nion
The flags of the
CENTROPE states are
part of a travelling
exhibition on EU projects
(MA 27)
Overarching responsibility for EU matters lies
with the Municipal Department for European Affairs (MA 27).
An exhibition mounted by MA 27 and featuring EU
projects in Vienna toured the city. On display were
the 30 most prominent projects of the current
funding period, 15 of which are urban projects
and 15 are projects implemented in cooperation
with the CENTROPE Region. The 25 million euro
allocated by the EU from 2007 to 2013 will have
to be supplemented with a national contribution
of at least 50%.
e i e
ene a inte e t
e i e n e i n
The European Commission published the Draft Directive on Public Service Concessions which are
not yet governed by European public procurement
law. Subjecting these services to the public procurement directives would undermine the relatively flexible types of economic activity prevailing
in the context of public service concessions. For a
contract value from five million euro upwards the
0
Draft Directive provides for a compulsory tender
process at the European level. This would affect
a considerable number of Austrian municipalities
that have issued service concessions, including
ones for services of general interest.
The following points in the Draft Directive must be
classified as critical: a) Major operational risk. The
demand that the concessionaire assume the major
operational risk is not covered by the case law of
the European Court of Justice. The Court will take
the presence of a service concession for granted,
even if the activity in question does not involve a
major operational risk. b) “Quasi in-house” procurement. The Draft Directive seeks to define “quasi inhouse” conditions in more restrictive terms. For
the first time, the draft contains a 90% (turnover)
limit. This may well be in line with the previous
case law of the European Court of Justice, but it
appears too restrictive in the context of service
concessions. c) Publication of health and social
services tenders. The health and social services
sector is, in principle, exempt from the present
draft which nevertheless provides for obligatory
announcement of contracts from five million euro
I
upwards. This could be interpreted as another
attempt by the Commission to add this sector to
those subject to public procurement law.
ew tate ai
e a
in t e i e
ene a
inte e t
nia a a e
Evaluation of the Monti-Kroes package was
continued in 2011. Under the aegis of Municipal
Department 27, Vienna was involved in the consultations of the European Commission, submitted
an opinion to the Federal Ministry of Justice and
crafted a joint statement of opinion of the Austrian
Federal Provinces, which was subsequently sent
to the EC Vice-President Joaquín Almunia Amann.
In December, a new state-aid package consisting
of a total of four documents was presented for services of general economic interest (SGEIs).
e i e
ene a inte e t in ene a
An agreed statement of opinion, in which the main
demands of the Austrian Federal Provinces were
laid down, was submitted to the Federal Ministry
of Economic Affairs, Family and Youth and to the
Federal Chancellery.
a it a ew
In December, the European Commission published
a Communication on a Quality Framework for Services of General Interest in Europe. According to
the EC, the framework covers three spheres of activity: 1. Enhancing clarity and legal certainty on
how EU rules apply to services of general economic
interest; 2. Ensuring access to essential services
and 3. Promoting quality, especially in the field
of social services. This Quality Framework chiefly
refers to the reform proposals submitted by the
Commission in December on EU state aid and
public procurement law (including public service
concessions). What should be seen as critical is the
intention of the Commission to submit a proposal
for the obligatory opening of markets for domestic
passenger transport before the end of 2012. Even
though this Communication is primarily intended
for the railway sector, developments and initiatives
will have to be closely observed.
ean ea
ntee in
The European Union acknowledged the “role of
voluntary activities in contributing to economic
and social cohesion” and proclaimed 2011 the
European Year of Volunteering. The idea was to
create favourable conditions for volunteering in
the EU; the objectives were to work towards an
enabling environment for volunteering in the EU,
to empower organisers of voluntary activities to
improve the quality of such activities, to recognise
voluntary activities, and to raise awareness of the
value and importance of volunteering.
With three million people working 15 million hours
a week on a voluntary basis, Austria is among the
European leaders in terms of voluntary work. The
Year of Volunteering was formally opened by Federal President Dr. Heinz Fischer in Salzburg; at a
kick-off event in January, more than 100 voluntary organisations from all parts of Austria presented themselves at Vienna City Hall. In Vienna,
the Wiener Hilfswerk social service NGO and the
volunteer forum coordinate the large number of
organisations and opportunities for people to get
involved; information is provided on the start page
of the city’s official website www.wien.gv.at.
t ate
t e an
Activists and policymakers in the European
Year of Volunteering in
Vienna (from left):
Martin Oberbauer of the
social services provider
Wiener Hilfswerk,
member of the Retirement
Homes managing board
Ursula Frey, Dr. Angelika
Rosenberger-Spitzy from
the Vienna Social Fund,
Second Deputy Speaker
of the Provincial
Parliament Marianne
Klicka, Mother Superior
Monika Pinaz MBA of the
Vienna Social Fund,
Director Dr. Roland
Paukner of the Vienna
Hospitals Association
(Schaub-Walzer/PID)
e e i n
In June, the European Union Strategy for the
Danube Region (EUSDR) was signed under the
Hungarian Council Presidency. Modelled on the
example of the Baltic Region, this is the second
macro-regional strategy to move from the preparatory stage to the stage of implementation.
The macro-region comprises Germany, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, BosniaHercegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine and Austria. The objective of this large-scale strategy is to improve
the cross-sectoral coordination of the actors, programmes and activities concerned and hence to
add value to the overall development.
The EUSDR comprises eleven priority areas summarised under four pillars: connecting the Danube
1
I
structures, cooperation with the relevant interested stakeholders, involvement in disseminating and
publicising results and monitoring and/or reporting to the EC, gives Vienna the opportunity to have
its interests considered. In July, the constitutive
meeting of the transnational steering group at
Vienna City Hall started off the implementation
process.
Aerial view of the Danube
and Danube Island, looking north-west towards
Klosterneuburg (WTV)
Region, protecting the environment, building prosperity and strengthening the Danube Region.
The European Commission retains responsibility
for coordinating the implementation; at the national level, the so-called National Contact Points
(Federal Chancellery and Federal Ministry for
European and International Affairs) remain in
charge of coordinating tasks; in Vienna, responsibility lies with City Councillor Dr. Michael Ludwig,
Planning Director Dr. Kurt Puchinger and the Executive Group for Construction and Technology,
Urban Planning Group. Austria is in charge of the
following areas: “Improving mobility and multimodality of inland waterways” (Federal Ministry for
Transport, Innovation and Technology/Via Donau),
“Investing in people and skills” (Federal Ministry
of Labour, Social Affairs and Consumer Protection/
Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture)
and “Stepping up institutional capacity and cooperation” (City of Vienna/Slovenia). Further information is available at www.donauraumstrategie.at.
Owing to its all-out commitment from the very
start of the project, Vienna is in charge of coordinating the tenth priority area together with Slovenia. The range of tasks extends from exchanging know-how among all the administrative levels
engaged in cooperation, via solving administrative
problems, fostering civil society, strengthening
urban and regional networks through knowledge
transfer in the fields of technology and strategy,
cooperation among conurbations and/or cooperation in cross-border regions, to optimising the use
of and recourse to financial resources. Being in
charge of the transnational coordination of priority area 10, which covers the setting up of working
2
Apart from playing this key role, Vienna intends
to respond to the thematic foci defined in the
Danube Region process to date by launching or
participating in concrete projects in the various
priority areas by way of interested departments
and/or enterprises of the City of Vienna. Vienna
further underlined its commitment by organising a joint conference of the City of Vienna, the
Working Community of the Danube Region and
the Assembly of European Regions (AER) entitled
“Implementing the EU Strategy for the Danube Region” and by participating in the Austrian summit
“EU Strategy for the Danube Region – new impetus for Austria”. Moreover, the City of Vienna was
actively involved in various conferences related
to the Danube Region, including the 5th European
Conference of the Danube Cities and Regions in
Belgrade. Lastly, Vienna’s Municipal Council Committee for European and International Affairs acknowledged the “Declaration regarding the Role
of Vienna in Implementing the EU Strategy for the
Danube Region”.
Germany and Hungary set up the Young Citizens
Danube Network which had its first meeting in Budapest, convening a large number of young people
from the countries bordering the Danube.
n in
inte nati na
e ati n
In the current funding period (2007–2013), Vienna
is in charge of two EU assistance programmes in
the capacity of managing authority (CENTRAL
EUROPE, European Territorial Cooperation ETC
Slovakia-Austria); three bilateral programmes
(ETC Slovakia-Austria, Austria-Czech Republic,
Austria-Hungary) are supported by Vienna in its
capacity of Regional Coordination Office.
In the spring, the Municipal Department for
European Affairs (MA 27) and the funding agency
EU-Förderagentur GmbH published a special issue
in the Universum series on the Austrian-Slovak
projects, which was circulated to 150,000 households in the eastern region of Austria and in west-
I
n in
ro ra
e vol
ro ra
es
ective
e in
Vienna s share in
total
total
C
otal
EFRD-Quote 85:15
ern Slovakia. The projects presented were EdTWIN
(school twinning projects) from the educational
sector, DIAPLANT and RASGENAS (projects of
Vienna University and the Comenius University of
Bratislava) from the health sector and Twin City
Rail (upgrading to twin track and electrification
of the rail link via Marchegg) from the transport
sector.
e ti e
e
e ati n
In the current funding period (2007–2013), the
resources available to the Province of Vienna
for cross-border projects from the EFRD amount
to roughly 41.9 million euro. Up to 85% of the
amounts spent on cross-border projects are being
covered from EU funds.
For all the regions involved taken together, the
EFDR is contributing almost 250 million euro
to the volume of the three cross-border funding
programmes. Together with national co-funding
this adds up to somewhat more than 300 million
euro, which are available for bilateral cross-border
projects in which Vienna has the chance to become
involved.
e ti e
a ia
t ia
ana in a t it
Up to the end of 2011, the bilateral monitoring
committee had approved a total of 78 projects with
a total volume of 70.9 million euro (of which 50.5
million euro from the EFDR). In 2011, 11 project
applications were approved, including five applications from lead partners from Vienna.
By the end of the year, 64 subsidy contracts had
been concluded with lead partners, which corresponds to a commitment of approximately 70% of
the EFDR funds available for the programme.
e ti e
e i na
inati n i e
To date, the appropriations from EFDR funds already approved for the three programmes amount
to approximately 29.8 million euro, accounting for
71% of Vienna’s EFDR funds of 41.9 million euro
budgeted for the current funding period. By the
end of 2011, 81 projects with Viennese involvement
had been approved.
e ti e
t an nati na
e ati n
With a team of 17 at the international Technical
Secretariat in Vienna, the City of Vienna acts as
managing authority under the CENTRAL EUROPE
transnational programme with a total budget
of 300 million euro (about 231.3 million euro
of which are EFRD project funds). Four calls for
project proposals had been issued by the end of
2011. After the fourth and last call in October, the
total number of projects submitted amounted to
136.
e e te
e t
at
Twelve partners from seven metropolitan regions
cooperate under this INTERREG IVC project which
addresses the challenges posed by passenger
transport between metropolis and surrounding region. Berlin-Brandenburg acts as lead partner and
the Municipal Department for Urban Development
and Planning (MA 18) participates in the project
on behalf of Vienna.
The Municipal Department for the Promotion and
Co-ordination of Women’s Issues (MA 57) co-funds
three of these projects. The Daphne project “Breaking the Taboo II” addresses violence against older
women. The emphasis of “Protect II” is on information processing and knowledge transfer designed
to support professional groups in the police force,
in the fields of law and justice and in social services for women with a view to improving risk assessment and security management when working
with girls and women facing a high risk of violence,
but also on disseminating information about EU
initiatives and measures. “WAVE NET”, the third
I
project, is run by the NGO
Women Against Violence.
As in WAVE NET I to III,
activities extend from updating the WAVE database and
website (both contact points
for consultancy facilities and
victims of violence) to evaluating EU country situations
as regards violence against
women. A number of events
took place in Vienna.
The LIFE projects aims
at preserving and reestablishing natural
habitats in the
Bisamberg area.
(Christian Houdek PID)
The Municipal Department
for Education, Out-of-School
Activities for Children and
Young People (MA 13) is
involved in the JUMIGG anti-violence project
through the Multicultural Network Vienna and together with European partners.
The acronym DEWALOP stands for DEveloping
WAter LOss Prevention – developing methods for
minimising losses from water pipes. This is a research project run by the municipal waterworks
of Vienna and Bratislava. The components for the
required robot have been purchased, and the prototype is now being tested at the pipe store of the
Vienna Waterworks. Work is under way on an overall concept for the rehabilitation of joint sockets.
ienna
ia
n
ia
e t
For years now, the Vienna Social Fund has repeatedly participated in EU projects, such as SPES –
Support Patients through E-Services Solutions. On
the way to becoming a Central European eHealth
Region, research institutes, universities and local
authorities in Košice, Brno, Ferrara and Vienna
have entered into a cooperation, under which
Vienna is in charge of “Technologies for Dementia
Sufferers”. The “Housing First” project addresses
the option of moving the homeless individual or
household directly from the streets or homeless
shelters into their own apartment; ten towns are
involved in the evaluation as test towns or peers.
How can immigration contribute to a city’s success? This question is looked at from various angles by the OPENCities project, in which a considerable number of Viennese institutions is involved.
Under the heading “New Ways to Social Inclusion”,
people with disabilities, family members and professionals active in institutions serving people
with disabilities from several European countries
gathered at training courses in the Czech region
of Central Bohemia and the region of Ostholstein
in Germany.
t in ti n
For ten years, WienXtra has been the Vienna regional centre for this programme, which offers
young people a chance to gather international
experience. The responsible national agency is
hosted by the Intercultural Centre.
The EU project LARS – “Breaking the taboo of domestic violence in lesbian partnerships” was concluded by Vienna’s Anti-Discrimination Unit for
Same-Sex Lifestyles (WASt) in cooperation with
organisations in Great Britain, Sweden, Germany
and the Netherlands.
i a e
e t
The inclusion of Bisamberg in the “Natura 2000”
Protected Area System, which is aimed at preserving endangered habitats, animal and plant species, enabled the implementation of a LIFE nature
project under which subsidies were provided for
urgent maintenance and management measures.
The project was concluded in 2011.
The objective of NATURA 2000 is to preserve flora,
fauna and habitats worthy of protection. The programme is based on two EU nature conservation
directives. In Austria, nature conservation falls
within the remit of the Federal Provinces. The Municipal Department for Environmental Protection
(MA 22) acts as advisory body, ensuring coordinated approaches by the provincial governments.
Vienna’s project partners in PRO 2013+ are the
Federal Province of Lower Austria and the regions
of South Moravia (administrative headquarters in
Brno) and Vysočina (administrative headquarters
in Jihlava). An analysis of networks and potentials
is essential for improving the forthcoming cooperation, as well as being a prerequisite for defining
the areas of bilateral cooperation.
The PUMA project for sustainable mobility
planning in cities and regions is a so-called “Alpine Space Programme”, with Munich acting as
lead partner. The Municipal Department for Urban
I
Development and Planning (MA18) participates
on behalf of Vienna; the other project partners
are Venice and Turin. Environment and health as
well as citizen participation in designing and implementing transport models are among the wide
range of issues addressed.
Under this project, support is provided for the
development of a transport corridor connecting
Vienna with the Adriatic Sea and linking up the
territories in between. The Municipal Department
for Urban Development and Planning (MA 18) is in
charge of drafting the transport model.
The “South-North Axis” (SoNorA) project is designed to achieve progress in the political and
conceptual planning of an efficient intermodal
transport network between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas. Lead partner is the Veneto; the Municipal
Department for Urban Development and Planning
(MA 18) participates on behalf of Vienna.
an
The first URBACT Summer University took place
in Kraków. Under the newly assumed Polish Presidency, contracting of the second call for proposals
under the URBACT II Programme was concluded.
In response to the third call for proposals, project
proposals from 19 possible thematic networks can
be submitted until March 2012. The 51st Network
Meeting of the German-Austrian URBAN II Network took place in Pforzheim.
an
an i e
i
e entati n
Making progress in developing the methodological spectrum is among the core tasks of the GIS
staff unit at the Municipal Department for Urban
Development and Planning (MA 18), which is the
reason for participating in this project together
with seven other partners.
t
The mounting pressure of urban development
and increased visitor volumes in urban recreational areas resulting from urbanisation call for
forward-looking projects in the field of green space
planning. This is what the Municipal Department
for Forestry and Urban Agriculture (MA 49) in its
capacity as project partner is trying to achieve in
the Danube wetlands, and Bratislava in the Lesser
Carpathians. New green space concepts were put
on display at the Faculty of Architecture of the
Slovak University of Technology and at the visitor
centre of the Lobau National Park. The problemsolving approaches were the outcome of a student
contest. PR activities mainly consist in the publication of urbANNAtur – a popular science brochure
– and the bilingual website www.urbannatur.eu.
an i ana e ent t ate
This EU project is about integrating soil protection
measures into the planning of urban construction
schemes. A soil management strategy put in place
for European municipalities is designed to permit
the assessment, sustainable planning and control
of the quantitative and qualitative impact of construction on the soil as part of local and regional
planning. Vienna is joined in the project by partners from Germany, Poland, Italy, Slovenia and
Slovakia.
A “Strategic Environmental Assessment Manual”
was compiled in the year under review. In this
manual soil is described as a protected natural resource, and the way it is taken into consideration
is traced through all the stages of an environmental review. In Vienna, four areas of urban development were assessed for the possible application of
the proposed measures. For the required classification of soil data, Vienna’s current soil data were
calculated, firstly on the basis of the soil valuation
data and secondly by the research institute in
Schönbrunn on the basis of the project algorithms
from the internal EDP system of the Vienna City
Administration. The resulting plans show the ecological quality of Vienna’s natural soils. An expert
meeting on cross-fertilisation was held in Milan.
t ian
a
an
t
e
t ian
n a ian an
t
e
The Municipal Department for Urban Development
and Planning (MA 18) is involved in developing a
cross-border transport model to be set up for the
Vienna-Bratislava-Györ region. n
An exhibition on new
green space concepts
was mounted by the
Faculty of Architecture of
the Slovak University of
Technology and shown at
the visitor centre of the
Lobau National Park as
part of the UrbANNatur
project. (MA 49/Alexander
Mrkvicka)
I
nternational
or anisations
nite
ati n
The 50 th session of the United Nations Office for
Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) was held in Vienna. UNOOSA promotes international cooperation
in the field and maintains a register of all objects
launched into outer space. In conjunction with
the conference a panel discussion on the future
of manned spaceflight was held at Vienna City
Hall: participants included Deputy Speaker of the
Vienna Provincial Parliament Marianne Klicka,
Director-General of the UN Office at Vienna Yuri
V. Fedotov and UNOOSA Director Dr. Mazlan binti
Othman of Malaysia.
The first Monday in October each year is World
Habitat Day, with events held around the world to
raise awareness of urban development issues. In
the year under review, 55 per cent of the Austrian
population lived in one of the country’s 73 towns
and cities with over 10,000 inhabitants. “Smart cities – sustainable, mobile, resilient, attractive and
tolerant” is a concept that aims to harmonise the
various aspects of urban life. The theme chosen
Ambassadors and other
representatives from
Cuba, the Comoros
Islands, Mauritius,
Myanmar, Nepal, the
Solomon Islands, Sri
Lanka, Swaziland, São
Tomé and Príncipe, the
CTBTO and the Austrian
Foreign Ministry with host
Regina Wiala-Zimm/
MD-EUI (r.) (CTBTO)
by the UN for World Habitat Day 2011 was “Cities
and Climate Change”. In 2011, 19 Austrian towns
and cities received funding approval from the Climate Fund. The official World Habitat Day Global
Celebration was hosted by Mexico.
Government officials from developing countries
were among the delegates who were invited to
Vienna for the Science and Technology Conference of the CTBTO (Preparatory Commission for
the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization). The aim of supporting the trip was to
foster these nations’ interest in the Vienna-based
organisations and initiatives for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles. The foreign visitors gained
further impressions of Vienna during visits to City
Hall and a typical Viennese open-air restaurant.
In the summer, students from over 40 nations
again convened at the Vienna International Centre
to participate in the Vienna International Model
United Nations (VIMUN), a simulated United Nations conference especially for young people. As
I
I
I
I
The United Nations Office
in Vienna
(Rupert Christanell/MA 18)
always, the social highlight of the week-long event
was the official evening reception and dance at
Vienna City Hall.
The Austrian Competition Authority co-hosted a
Round Table on Competition Law in the Mediterranean Countries with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and
the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development), which celebrated its 50 th anniversary in 2011.
ienna e i e
i e
The Vienna Service Office at the Vienna International Centre organised excursions and guided
tours for UN staff to the Vienna Funeral Museum,
Wien Museum, the Cobenzl Winery, the Historic
Center of Vienna UNESCO World Heritage Site
and the Stonemasons’ Workshop at St. Stephen’s
Cathedral.
On the two Hospitality Afternoons held in the
spring and autumn, representatives of the Vienna Public Libraries and the Vienna Children’s Day
Care Centres answered questions and provided information. An Experts’ Day was also organised,
where staff of the Wien-Energie-Haus customer
advice centre gave a talk on “Energy-saving tips”.
Floral presents – tulips in the spring and poinsettias in the pre-Christmas season – were distribut-
ed to UN staff and enjoyed great popularity. At the
end of the year the City of Vienna again presented the UN Centre with a traditionally decorated
Viennese Christmas tree provided by the Municipal Department of Parks and Gardens.
2011 saw the first so-called “Talk Shops International” under the motto “Vienna meets UN”. The
aim of this platform for intercultural encounter is
to bring UN staff from the Vienna International
Centre together with local people to enable them
to get to know one another and exchange opinions
and experience.
Chief Architect Wolfgang
Zehetner guides visitors
on a tour in and around
St. Stephen’s Cathedral
(Martina Hudecsek)
I
I
I
I
The goal of all these activities was to help new arrivals from all over the world get acquainted with
Vienna and inform them about the many things
the city has to offer. The Service Office also advises
UN staff on all matters related to life in Austria.
nte nati na
te ti n t e an
i i n
e i e
t e
The International Commission for the Protection
of the Danube River with headquarters in Vienna
coordinates the river management efforts of 14
countries and the European Union. The Danube
has a catchment area of over 800,000 km2, covers
some ten per cent of continental Europe and is the
world’s most international river basin. 19 countries
share this territory, which drains into the Black
Sea via the Danube and its over 300 tributaries. 14
of these countries together with the European Union are members of the ICPDR, which was founded
in 1998. It serves its members as a platform for the
international coordination of protective measures,
which include flood prevention as well as sustainable river basin management.
The Presidency of the ICPDR rotates annually.
Ukraine held the Presidency in 2011. A meeting of
Signing of the agreement
for the establishment of
the Centre for Interfaith
Dialogue: Saudi-Arabian
Foreign Minister Prince
Saud Al-Faisal (left),
Spanish Foreign Minister
Trinidad Jiménez
(-12/2011) and Austrian
Vice Chancellor and
Foreign Minister
Dr. Michael Spindelegger
(Hopi Media)
heads of delegation took place at Ushgorod in April
where a memorandum of understanding on the
strengthening of Tisza river basin cooperation was
signed, the Tisza being the longest tributary of the
Danube. In the autumn, a detailed study of the
Danube Delta created the basis for a regional management plan which is now subsequently being developed. As always, the annual Ordinary Meeting
was held in Vienna. The ICPDR was represented
throughout the year at numerous events relating
to the EU Strategy for the Danube Region. Austria
will take over the Presidency in 2012.
ent e
nte ait
ia
e
In October, the Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia,
Spain and Austria signed the agreement establishing the “King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International
Centre for Interfaith and Intercultural Dialogue”
in Vienna. As an international body, membership
of the Centre is also open to other nations and its
establishment further consolidates Vienna’s position as the host city of numerous international
organisations. Speakers at the signing ceremony
emphasised the importance of interfaith dialogue
in overcoming conflicts and securing global peace.
The governing body is composed of up to twelve
I
I
I
I
representatives of the five major world religions:
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism. The Centre is housed in the Palais Sturany
on Schottenring.
e e
ent
n
nte nati na
OFID celebrated its 35th anniversary in the year under review; the organisation was set up in Algiers
in 1975 to foster social and economic progress in
the developing world through the provision of concessional financing for developing countries. The
celebrations kicked off with the exhibition “Look
Beyond”, which showed photographs, sculptures
and other objects by Saudi Arabian artists at the
Fund’s premises on Parkring.
OFID is active in 130 states all over Africa, Asia,
Latin America, the Caribbean, the Near and Middle East, and even in parts of Europe. 14 billion dollars have been spent to date on promoting sustainable development and building infrastructure such
as roads, schools and hospitals. OFID also offers
trade financing and support to private enterprises.
t e a ti itie
A large number of international organisations, institutions and NGOs have their headquarters in
Austria. They are of great political, economic and
cultural importance and make a major contribution to Vienna’s reputation as a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis.
Please follow the link for a comprehensive list:
http://www.wien.gv.at/politik/international/
organisationen.html
Vienna is aware of the international organisations’
political and economic importance for the city and
seeks close cooperation with the organisations
headquartered here.
To help newly arrived staff of United Nations
organisations and permanent representations and
their family members find their way around, the
City of Vienna organised an introductory course
over several months for this target group. Besides
beginners’ German classes, the new arrivals were
offered familiarisation trips to various council-run
services and information sessions on life in Vienna.
A similar course was also organised for members
of the French-speaking friendship society Amicale
des Femmes Francophones.
Welcome events were also held at regular intervals
for staff of international organisations and foreign
embassies. These included a sightseeing tour, a
guided tour followed by a reception at Vienna City
Hall and informative talks on the city’s healthcare
provision, waste management arrangements and
Internet services.
The exhibition on Vienna International Centre
continued its tour and was shown at the following
venues in 2011: Philadelphiabrücke branch library,
Donaustadt adult education centre, the central library, the Wiener Linien Erdberg customer service
centre, Brigittenau youth hostel and the Wien Energie Spitalgasse customer service centre.
n
i
Europe and Central Asia with the focus on sustainable energy policy and innovations were the
themes of the World Economic Forum held at the
Hofburg Congress Centre in June. Some 500 experts from the fields of politics, business, culture
and civil society attended. Besides regional events
like this one the Annual Meeting is held each year
in Davos. n
Secretary General
Dr. Suleiman J. Al-Herbish
(Johannes Herberstein/
OFID)
I
nternational ests
at Vienna City all
ril
Zbyšek Kaššai
Mayor of Znojmo
ril
Johannes Hahn
European Commissioner
for Regional Policy
ay
Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl
with CoR President
Dr. Mercedes Bresso from
Italy (media wien)
nte nati na
an ary
e r ary
e r ary
e r ary
e r ary
e t
e ei e
a
Andrej Ďurkovský
former Mayor of Bratislava
ay
Roman Onderka
Mayor of Brno
ay
Mercedes Bresso
President of the Committee of
the Regions (CoR)
ne
Grigol Vashadze
Minister of Foreign Affairs of
Georgia
ne
Bohuslav Sobotka
ČSSD Chairman, Czech Republic
Pawel Adamowicz
Mayor of Gdańsk
e te
er
Yuri V. Fedotov
Director-General of UNOV
Hau lung-Bin
Mayor of Taipei
e te
er
Milan Ftáčnik
Mayor of Bratislava
Bohuslav Svoboda
Mayor of Prague
ove
er
István Tarlós
Mayor of Budapest
Roberto Cosolini
Mayor of Trieste
ove
er
Grigory Rapota
Plenipotentiary Representative
of the President of the Russian
Federation to the Volga Federal
District;
State Secretary of the Union
State of Russia and Belarus
ece
er
Koce Trajanovski
Mayor of Skopje
arch
Ivo Gönner
Mayor of Ulm
arch
Milan Ftáčnik
Mayor of Bratislava
Opera Ball
arch
t e
Olexandr Popov
Mayor of Kiev
Job Cohen
former Mayor of Amsterdam
nt ie in t e it
Turkish President
Dr. Abdullah Gül signs the
Golden Book, accompanied by Turkey’s First
Lady Hayrünnisa Gül and
Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl
(Schaub-Walzer PID)
0
ienna
en
e r ary
Zoran Janković
Mayor of Ljubljana
arch
Georgi Parvanov
President of the Republic of
Bulgaria
ay
Abdullah Gül
President of the Republic of
Turkey
I
ea e
t e ienna
in ia
I
VI
CI
a ia ent
On the occasion of the Moscow Ball held at Vienna
City Hall, the Speaker of the Vienna Provincial Parliament, Professor Harry Kopietz, and Speaker of
the Moscow Municipal Duma, Vladimir Platonov,
discussed the continuation of the two regions’ excellent relations. Intensification of bilateral relations was discussed with the Georgian Minister
of Economy and Sustainable Development, Vera
Kobalia. The City Hall hosted a conference of the
parliaments of the European Union capital city regions; in their final declaration they called, among
other items, for adequate funding to be able to fulfil their tasks in social housing and historic city
preservation. Around 500 guests celebrated the
50 th Anniversary of the International Police Association (IPA) at City Hall; the IPA has more than
7,000 members in Vienna alone.
In September the “mirno more peace fleet” cast
off from the Danube Canal in the presence of the
Speaker of the Provincial Parliament, Professor
Harry Kopietz. Launched by private individuals
in 1994, the project enables traumatised and socially disadvantaged children to spend one week
on sailing boats off the Croatian coast learning to
be tolerant and peaceful in their interactions with
one another.
The Second Deputy Speaker of the Vienna Provincial Parliament, Marianne Klicka, inaugurated
the annual European Bar Presidents’ Conference,
which has been held in Vienna since 1973. The
fifth Ambassador Milton Wolf Seminar organised
by the American Foundation brought together
journalists and students. Speaker of the Provincial
Parliament Marianne Klicka furthermore received
a delegation from the Ukrainian Transcarpathian
Region and its capital Ushgorod, as well as rep-
resentatives of the “Viennese Club in Tokyo”. The
Hofburg imperial palace was the venue of the
World Policy Conference – the only series of conferences dealing with global governance and its
aspects –, whose participants were invited to a
formal dinner at City Hall.
Professor Harry Kopietz,
Speaker of the Vienna
Provincial Parliament,
with the Georgian Minister
of Economic Affairs
Vera Kobalia
(Schaub-Walzer PID)
The Eurasia Chamber Orchestra from Taiwan,
which sees itself as a bridge between the Far East
and Europe, gave a guest performance at the Main
Concert Hall of the Vienna Musikverein (Music
Society), the net proceeds of which were donated
to the Viennese Red Cross 50 th anniversary fund.
Further concerts were organised in Salzburg and
Trieste. At the invitation of the UNESCO working group on cultural diversity (ARGE) the Paros
Chamber Choir of Armenia performed in Vienna
several times. Under the auspices of the “Vienna
Dialogue”, secretaries-general of trade unions from
Central and Eastern Europe have been meeting in
Vienna for the past nine years. n
Second Deputy Speaker
of the Vienna Provincial
Parliament Marianne
Klicka with artists from
China at the opening of
the International Teenage
Art Festival
(Schaub-Walzer/PID)
1
V
The mayors of Istanbul
and Vienna,
Dr. Kadir Topbaş and
Dr. Michael Häupl,
signed a memorandum on
cooperation between the
two cities. (Istanbul
Metropolitan Municipality)
2
isits a roa
the ayor
e r ary
ay
ra e
Prague Opera Ball
y
ne
erlin
“Eine Stadt. Ein Buch.”
(“One City – One Book”)
Klaus Wowereit’s
10th anniversary in office
Istan l
Signing of a cooperation
agreement
ay
rno
Launching and naming
ceremony of ship “Videň”
ay
ratislava
World Ice Hockey
Championship final
e te
cto er
er
r ssels
15th anniversary
of the Vienna House
eneva a sanne
Meeting with Mayor Daniel
Brélaz/Lausanne
Vienna Science and Technology
Fund (WWTF)
fact-finding trip
V
ienna
e
ienna e resentative
ffices
e
In September, Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl and Governor of Burgenland Hans Niessl opened Burgenland’s representative office to the European Union
in the Vienna House, which has been in place for
15 years. The two provinces will now join forces to
promote their common interests.
Austria’s accession to the European Union in 1995
required the provinces to rapidly carve out a profile for themselves in Brussels. Already in September 1995, the Representative Office of the City of
Vienna to the EU opened its doors at Avenue de
Tervuren, and Vienna was profiled as an advocate
of a strong urban dimension in European policies.
The Office assisted in getting the go-ahead from
the European Commission (EC) to set up the TINA
Vienna office in the Austrian capital and managed
to obtain resources from the EU Structural Funds
under the URBAN initiative and objective 2 of the
regional policy. As part of its cross-border neighbourhood efforts, the Vienna House made a contribution to the founding of the CENTROPE European
region and succeeded in promoting Vienna as the
seat of the management agency for the CENTRAL
EUROPE regional cooperation programme, which
has funding of 250 million euro.
Services of public interest have been a constant
in the Vienna House’s activities, be it public transport, water, social and healthcare services or legislation on procurement, tendering and government
aid. This involves entering into alliances with other regions, cities and networks for a stronger position in negotiations with the EU. When in 2000 the
European Commission presented the first draft
regulation to liberalise markets for public passenger transport services by rail and road, Vienna
spearheaded the “Major Metropolises Group”, an
association of major European cities, to defend the
provision of integrated public transport services. A
resolution by the Viennese Mayor finally thwarted
plans for large-scale liberalisation.
In the past 15 years 85 people, some of them from
Central and Eastern European countries, have
completed a traineeship at the Vienna House. 151
groups of visitors and networkers have made their
way to the Representative Office, including guests
from the Diplomatic Academy, universities and
universities of applied sciences and schools, and
specialists from municipal administrative bodies.
315 special and cultural events have been organised. Every year 400 partner contacts, conference
notifications and the like have been communicated
to Vienna; added to this, research has been conducted on a number of topics.
The author and Austrian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Birgit Pointner gave a reading to
an audience of some 100 people from her book Hellwach
in Wien. Nachtgeschichten
(“Wide awake in Vienna. Nighttime stories”), in which she
tells stories about people who
work at night. Of the around
800,000 gainfully employed
persons in Vienna, a fifth work
night shifts.
Current and future issues include the implementation of the
EU Strategy for the Danube Region, strengthening of the urban dimension at European level, and the Europe 2020 strategy; energy efficiency matters
Governors Hans Niessl
and Dr. Michael Häupl
at the Vienna House
Brussels
(Moreau de Bellaing/WH)
Writer and journalist
Birgit Pointner and the
head of the Vienna
House Brussels,
Michaela Kauer MBA
(Julie de Bellaing/WH)
VI
The Vienna Music Film
Festival at Yebisu Garden
Place, Tokyo (VRO Tokyo)
IV
IC
in connection with EU targets to combat climate
change and the Smart Cities concept have also
gained importance. Social and healthcare services
are being showcased. The Brussels Representative
Office has, of course, maintained direct contact
with those organisations that are represented in
Brussels: AER, EUROCITIES and RegLeg.
The Office of the Vienna Business Agency, which
opened in Brussels in 1994, has focused on providing information and advice to businesses on a
number of topics at European level, ranging from
assistance programmes, research, innovation,
energy, the environment, SMEs and legislation
on state aid, to rendering support to businesses
in search of international cooperation partners
and lobbying. The Office organises seminars and
events for businesses as well as presentations to
advertise Vienna as a business location.
ienna e e entati e
i e
The Representative Office has been in place at
premises shared with the Austrian National Tourist Office since 1990. After relocation close to the
Austrian Embassy and its Commercial Section,
synergies can now be more readily exploited.
For the second time music lovers were invited to
enjoy the Vienna Music Film Festival at Yebisu Garden Place, which mirrored the classical perform-
ances shown on the big screen in front of Vienna
City Hall. One of the evenings featured Herbert von
Karajan. In the run-up the festival was advertised
by Japanese media and live concerts were also
staged. Austrian specialties were offered during
the festival and the Vienna Representative Office
intensively promoted the 2012 Klimt Anniversary
Year. Part of the sales proceeds were donated to
the earthquake-stricken region of Tōhoku.
The Vienna Tourist Board and Austrian Airlines
combined their destination campaign with the
Klimt Anniversary Year. 30,000 kissing photographs were collected on the campaign website
and used to create a mosaic in the design of “The
Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, which was displayed at Karajan Square in Tokyo. The entrants took part in a
prize draw with a chance to win a trip to Vienna.
Despite the earthquake disaster of March 2011, a
total of nearly 277,000 overnight stays by Japanese
guests were counted, which corresponds to a rise
of 4% over 2010.
“What does product design in Vienna look like
some 100 years after the heyday of the Wiener
Werkstätte?” – Five renowned Japanese media
were invited to Vienna where they explored this
question, immersing themselves in the world of
product design and modern thought at some leading design enterprises. This led to coverage in Japan’s biggest daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun
VI
about art and arts policy in Vienna; Elle Deco published a six-page article on cooperation between
young designers and traditional Viennese companies; the gourmet magazine Ryouri Okoku wrote
about Viennese wine, and a number of businesses
were showcased by the lifestyle magazine Pavone
on no less than 17 pages. A special item on Viennese culture was published by Otona-no OFF: eight
pages on Viennese companies plus a Vienna CD.
In cooperation with many Viennese companies, an
advertising campaign on the theme “Tradition is
modern” was run at the Hotel Imperial in Tokyo
and the guest house of the company Ueno Fine
Chemicals Industry in Osaka; VIPs, customers and
the press were greatly interested in the presentations. Against the background of royal table etiquette at the European courts, one of Japan’s most
renowned table-setting artists and Yomiuri Shimbun co-initiated an exhibition at the Takashimaya
department store in the Shinjuku district entitled
“The courtly table etiquette of Empresses Maria
Theresa and Elisabeth”. Assistance also came from
Schönbrunn Palace: a detailed scale model of its
exterior facades was unveiled to tens of thousands
of spectators. The exhibition will travel to Kyoto
and Osaka in 2012.
e ia iai n i e in ent a
an
t a t
e
a te n
For 15 years now, the media liaison offices in Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Ljubljana,
Kraków, Moscow, Prague, Sarajevo, Sofia and Zagreb have been at the service of the City of Vienna.
Operated by the communications agency COMPRESS on behalf of the City of Vienna’s Press and
Information Service, the media liaison offices have
conveyed communication priorities of the City of
Vienna in the target cities; they have served as
contact points for Vienna related matters and supported events, specialist delegations and projects
of the City of Vienna on site. The COMPRESS communications network furthermore provides upto-date coverage of events in the target cities and
countries and supports delegations to Vienna.
The year under report was characterised by a
number of elections in the region, and Vienna
too voted in a new municipal government in the
autumn of 2010. Hence 2011 was marked by the
presentation of Vienna’s new city government and
the forging of new contacts in the target cities.
The continuity and sustainability of the network’s
activities were ensured and further developed. The
European Strategy for the Danube Region was one
of the main focal points, involving nine of a total of
eleven target countries. The successful efforts of
the correspondent post in Opatija were increased
and intensified; another point of special interest
was the CENTROPE region. An image film on the
region was produced and aired by television stations. Cooperation between COMPRESS and the
Austrian embassies, Foreign Trade Commissions,
Cultural Fora and local decision-makers was again
intensified. Synergies created in the previous year
were implemented in a number of projects.
In the year under report, 9,450 positive news
items relating to Vienna appeared in the target
cities’ press, which means a 9.74% response rate
increase compared to the previous year. Vienna’s
communication themes were thus addressed in
around 2.53 items per day in each of the target
cities. Front-runners were environmental issues
(887 items with a 33.99% increase), urban development and transport (566 items with a 61.71%
increase), health and social affairs (549 items
with a 27.38% increase) and education, youth and
sport (291 items with a 38.57% increase), as well
as urban presentation and cooperation between
cities with 218 news items. Particular attention
was given to specialised themes such as Wiener
Linien (183 items), the Vienna Central Rail Station
(40 items), bicycle transport in Vienna (54 items),
Viennese wine (104 items) and Vienna’s top ranking in the Mercer Quality of Living survey with 124
news items. In the year under report, 63 groups of
journalists were welcomed to Vienna and reported
on a diverse range of themes. The Czech television
station ČT2 featured the modern “Sargfabrik”
housing project and the historic Werkbund estate,
as well as a number of arts and culture topics: the
21er-Haus (Modern Art Museum), urban art in
Vienna, the “Art Supermarket” and Fluc (Fluctuated Rooms art and music club). Three- to fiveminute television features were broadcast. Following their visits, the Slovenian Siol.net ran articles
on the art museums KunstHaus Wien and Hundertwasserhaus; Vienna’s largest open-air market, the
Naschmarkt; the interactive music museum Haus
der Musik; the Funeral Museum, and Vienna’s
Adventzauber Christmas market.
COMPRESS supported the City of Vienna in the
organisation of events in the network cities.
The liaison offices in the target cities welcomed
IV
IC
VI
IV
IC
respective chief executive offices and auditing departments to a variety of target group studies. In
the year under report, several training courses offered by Viennese institutions were successfully
promoted in the target cities.
Despite growing financial difficulties, most Eastern European cities again focused on renovation
and modernisation of their infrastructures, often
with co-financing from EU funding programmes.
In the course of preparing these projects, experts
from the partner cities exchanged experience with
their counterparts in Vienna on a regular basis.
Companies with know-how and expertise in the
field of urban technologies participated in this exchange of ideas. Trade fairs, seminars and conferences were also used as platforms.
Viennese Ball in Moscow
(Daniil Khalachyev)
21 delegations, and services were provided for
30 delegations in Vienna. Adding the press trips
above (63), a total of 114 delegations were assisted.
The members of Vienna’s coalition government
visited Bucharest, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Prague.
The district partnership between Vienna’s Alsergrund district and the Triaditza district of Sofia
was finalised.
Local decision-makers, media representatives
and opinion leaders were invited to participate
in smaller-scale networking events that were organised in the target cities. The theme of these
Viennese evenings was “Viennese sausages and
beer”. In Vienna, COMPRESS has organised the
Hörbiger Cultural Salons regularly since 2003. The
events, which take place several times a year, were
dedicated to photography, acting and the violin in
2011. Visitors from Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia
came to the Salons. COMPRESS assisted with the
organisation of the exhibition “Viennese know-how
– urban technologies and strategies” in Bucharest
and organised two dialogue forums in Vienna on
“Efficient personnel management” and “Women’s
interests”.
In 2011, a total of 76 event-driven studies (or a
46.2% increase compared to the previous year)
were thoroughly researched and prepared in the
run-up to projects. The topics ranged from biographies of relevant interview partners through
background information on the structures of the
In many partner cities, a very positive trend
for preparing extensive energy efficiency programmes was seen. In this context they took
their cue from Vienna’s high standards, aiming
at cooperation with Vienna. An extended range
of services for Viennese businesses was made
available at the website www.compresspr.at. In
2011, a total of 4,093 tenders for municipal infrastructure projects were published on the website.
This equals an 18.3% increase compared to the
previous year.
Published every Thursday, the international online magazine www.wieninternational.at has
provided information about Vienna and the surrounding region in German and English for five
years now. It covers current events, business, the
arts and media, as well as science topics. In 2011,
www.wieninternational.at ran a series on studying
in Europe, published commentaries by a number
of Dr. Bruno Kreisky’s companions to mark what
would have been the former Chancellor’s 100 th
birthday and also featured the Green Belt initiative, one of Europe’s most important nature reserves. In addition, the online magazine offers a
facts and figures section for each network city and
an overview of general and administrative information about Vienna in 13 languages. Since 2011,
the menu item “Wien International” has provided a
section on the CENTROPE region. It contains video
films produced by the City of Vienna and a host of
information about this Central European region. A
comprehensive calendar of events is available for
anyone who wishes to plan a customised tour to
one of the target cities, complemented by a slide
show with photographic impressions. The website
VI
IV
IC
Prague welcomes visitors from Vienna (from left): Jan Kalousek, chairman of the foreign relations committee of the Prague City Assembly; Michaela Zlamal, media spokesperson of City
Councillor Christian Oxonitsch; Christian Autengruber MA, First Secretary of Embassy; Gabriele Dienstl and Peter Levit, COMPRESS management; Martina Wurzer and Heinz
Vettermann, members of Vienna City Council; Michaela Moser of MA 53; Jan Krčmář, head of the Prague COMPRESS office (–1/2012); Ambassador Dr. Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff;
Ondřej Liška, chairman of the Czech Green Party; David Ellensohn, member of Vienna City Council; City Councillor Christian Oxonitsch (PID Hana Veštrovská Connor)
also runs competitions, mainly with theatre and
concert tickets and books as prizes. Since 2011,
www.wieninternational.at has been represented
on Facebook and has been joined by 450 friends so
far. The Facebook page posts weekly information
about the highlights of the latest edition and links
to current prize competitions. Visitors are invited
to participate in surveys to share their opinion
on articles and seasonal topics. Together with the
weekly issue ticker, which keeps registered users
posted about current events, the community on
Facebook has been growing steadily. Since July, up
to three articles from the weekly English language
edition have also been published on the Internet
platform of the City of Vienna, wien.at. From the
launch of the site in 2006 up to year-end 2011, 312
editions with a total of 2,860 articles were published on www.wieninternational.at.
The monthly print magazine Enjoy Vienna is published in German and English and has a circulation
of 115,000, of which 70,000 copies are distributed
at Vienna Airport. Enjoy Vienna focuses on the
city’s cultural and tourist hotspots. The combination of the two media – online and print – creates
multiplier effects and is thus especially effective in
establishing a positive image for Vienna.
A new option has been introduced allowing readers to register with www.wieninternational.at
and receive a free print subscription or an online
subscription in PDF format. This has led to a significant increase in subscribers. The cross-media
effect is particularly noticeable here and extends
well beyond Austria’s borders: Enjoy Vienna is
also distributed to a list of 10,000 VIPs in target
countries, and thanks to the English language
version www.wieninternational.at is not limited
to Austria. n
T
Vienna stages “Waltzing
classes – the next generation” at an upmarket
shopping centre in
Barcelona. (Xavi Torrent)
he Vienna
o rist oar
ien info
With 11,405,000 overnight stays, Vienna bested its
record 2010 result by five per cent. Visitors from
abroad accounted for 81.6 per cent (9,309,000) of
the total. The hotel/accommodation sector generated total net sales of 493 million euro, an increase
of 9.4 per cent over 2010 and also an all-time high.
nte nati na a
e ti in
After its successful launch in 2010, the strategy to
promote Vienna as a tourism destination through
spectacular live events in major European cities, combined with publicity campaigns, was
continued and extended in 2011. The public interest created by the live spectacles was used to
distribute information material from major local
travel agencies advertising travel packages to
Vienna. Media reports and coverage in web-based
social media helped further broaden the reach.
In Barcelona, the Vienna Tourist Board (VTB)
staged its advertising activities around “Waltzing
classes” – the next generation, an event hosted by
L’illa, an upmarket shopping centre that is visited
by some 18,000 shoppers on weekdays and up to
55,000 on Saturdays. The hotspot of the action
was a 32 m² interactive touch screen that served
as a truly innovative dance floor: using light signals to guide the dancers to the correct steps, it
also responded to their movements and speed.
Participants who posted photos or films of their
experience on facebook had a chance to win a trip
to Vienna for two. After the successful launch in
Barcelona, the “next generation” dancing classes
waltzed on to Prague and Zurich.
In Paris, metro passengers and passers-by at Gare
St. Lazare were stopped in their tracks by an extraordinary sight: hung in an impressively dense
VI
I
Reproductions of worldfamous paintings from
Viennese museums,
together with guided
tours, were offered at the
Paris metro station Saint
Lazare to entice Parisians
to take a trip to Vienna.
(Samy Telhaoui)
display on just 150 m² of exhibition space, reproductions of 28 world-famous paintings from Vienna’s museums were on show at the metro station,
among them Dürer’s “Young Hare” (Albertina),
Pieter Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel” (Kunsthistorisches Museum), a Picasso from the Museum
Moderner Kunst, a Schiele from Leopold Museum,
and – in anticipation of the Klimt Anniversary
Year 2012 – reproductions of several paintings by
Gustav Klimt, including “The Kiss” from the Belvedere. Free guided tours were offered through
this unusual exhibition.
In Warsaw, a building’s 3D transformation invited passers-by to come to Vienna. For two weeks,
views of Viennese sights were projected onto the
facade of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The impressive advertising effect, heightened by fitting
background music, was not lost on the crowds that
were drawn to the spectacle. Radio, online and social media campaigns complemented the event. A
similar production was staged in Italy at Milan’s
“Porta Garibaldi”. The busy square in front of this
ancient city gate is lined by bars, restaurants and
shops, and more than 650,000 passers-by saw the
display during its one-week run. At Piazza Venezia in Rome, the marketing spectacle ultimately
received more attention than local authorities
deemed permissible: the projection onto the facade
of Palazzo Venezia proved such a head-turner that
the Mayor of Rome’s office stopped it before the
end of the scheduled week-long display to avert
the risk of traffic accidents. Public safety was thus
preserved, but the campaign had still achieved its
goal: Vienna was the talk of the town in the Italian
capital.
“Enzis”, the signature outdoor furniture elements
of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, carried the Vienna
Impressive 3D projection
advertising on the facade
of the Polish Academy of
Sciences building in
Warsaw (Tomasz Rakoczy)
VI
I
“Enzis” on tour in The
Hague: outdoor furniture
with as many facets as
the city it comes from
(Van der Vaart Fotografie)
The chance to take a virtual stroll through the
park of Belvedere Palace
created quite a sensation
among passers-by in
Bucharest’s central nightlife and entertainment district. (Dumitru Codescu)
brand to the Netherlands in 2011 and made their
appearance at the “The Hague Festivals”. Accompanied by an extensive programme, which included a “silent disco” of DJ music via earphones, they
showed loungers that an “Enzi” is more than just
a piece of furniture, and that Vienna is the best
choice for your next holiday.
Being in Moscow or Bucharest ... and in Vienna,
all at the same time? The Vienna Tourist Board
ran an advertising event that made it possible. In
Moscow, visitors to the legendary GUM department store could see themselves strolling along
Graben, Vienna’s poshest shopping street. The
trompe l’oeil effect was made possible by novel
technology, premiered on this occasion, which
projects an image of people who are crossing a
pre-defined area onto a large screen – the latter,
of course, contributing the Viennese background.
In the case of Bucharest, the Belvedere Palace was
used as the backdrop. The new technology thus
generated the optical illusion that people were in
fact walking down Graben or posing for photos in
front of Belvedere Palace.
If you want to get yourself noticed in London,
you’d better come up with a good idea. But even
in the busy city on the Thames, all eyes were on
Vienna – or, to be more precise, on a 21 m high and
10 m wide wall in Trafalgar Square, right beside
Nelson’s column, where Vienna was presented
from a highly unusual perspective. Under the motto “Vertical Vienna – Vienna from a different angle”, eight “vertical acrobats” performed a choreographed sequence on the theme of Vienna through
the ages. Four aerobatics shows daily presented
Emperor Franz and Empress Sisi, flanked by
their guards and accompanied by marching music, a gravity-defying rendering of Gustav Klimt’s
“Kiss”, a café scene, the Opera Ball and nightlife
in modern-day Vienna – all in the vertical plane.
The BBC was present at the spectacle, multiplying the advertising effect with contestants from
its “Strictly Come Dancing” show, which attracts
millions of viewers, dancing down the wall. The
daily papers also picked up on the event with numerous reports. “Vertical Vienna” appeared in the
press as far afield as Australia, and the total reach
of the campaign amounted to 87.7 million contacts.
Telling Berliners about Vienna is a piece of cake
– especially when you use a gigantic slice of
Vienna’s famous “Sachertorte” chocolate cake to do
it. A three-sided building near Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm was “dressed up” in 35 x 15 metre mega billboards to look the part. To give it that delectable
real-life sheen, the original photo was taken ovenside, as it were, in the bakery of the Hotel Sacher
0
VI
I
Vertical Vienna: a gravitydefying aerobatics and
dance show presents
Viennese images to
Londoners. (Getty Images/
Dan Kitwood)
in Vienna, under the supervision and direction of
the head patissier. Conspicuous lettering on both
sides of the “cake slice” made sure that passers-by
would know just where the original Sachertorte is
waiting to be sampled. At certain intervals, a special machine produced white helium-based fluff
– rising along the sides of the “cake slice”, it posed
effectfully, though inedibly, as whipped cream topping. Promotional assistants dressed in traditional
waiters’ and waitresses’ outfits offered mini cake
cubes and information material on package tours
to Vienna issued by a major local travel agency.
Truly radiant advertising was deployed in Hamburg, where an oversize image presented the
Christmas illuminations on Graben, a central
street in Vienna’s pedestrian zone. A 10 x 10 m billboard showed the magnificent outdoor chandeliers. Radiating with the light of over 500 energyefficient LED lamps, the image re-created the flair
of Graben in December. Not easily overlooked
by day because of its sheer
size, the billboard turned into a spectacular eye-catcher
during the night hours.
Christmas makes
children’s eyes sparkle –
and so does the Vienna
Tourist Board with its
advertising images.
(Poster Network AG
Hamburg/Lars
Luttenberger)
Sweet, seductive, supersize: the “Sachertorte” building in Berlin whetting people’s appetite for a trip to Vienna
(Frank Winkelmann / AF-FIX Werbegesellschaft mbH)
1
VI
I
ew
a e a
t
an
t e a
e ti in
at
The “Vienna Journal
2012” is the first edition
in which the German and
English versions of the
publication are also
issued as an iPad app
(detail of the Beethoven
frieze, Secession, Vienna;
photo: Vienna Tourist
Board)
In traditional advertising, a total of 16.2 million
newspaper copies in seven counties carried ads.
Various types of outdoor advertising, from mega
billboards to backlit posters, were used in 23 cities
in 13 countries. Radio advertisements were run in
Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary,
Russia and in the US, and TV commercials aired in the Arab countries via the
Orbit Showtime Network, totalling 308
prime time broadcasts of 30-second
clips on the most popular TV stations.
Moreover, 22 buses in Madrid displayed advertisements for Vienna,
and an Austrian Airlines plane carried a message about Vienna’s Life
Ball to New York, Tokyo and Bangkok for a six-week period. The
Vienna Journal 2012 was published in six language versions in
the autumn and reached a total
circulation of 360,000 copies. Electronic versions for iPad were issued for the first
time in German and English.
n ine a ai n in
ia e ia e en e
nt ie
e
an i n
With 61 online advertising campaigns in 23
countries, complemented by search engine mar-
Vienna’s Klimt Year warmup in Australia with (from
left to right) Ambassador
Dr. Hannes Porias,
Australian Member of
Parliament Heidi Victoria,
Tourism Director Norbert
Kettner, National Gallery
of Victoria Director
Dr. Gerard Vaughan and
curator and writer
Professor Tim Bonyhady,
standing before Klimt’s
painting “Fritza Riedler”
(Janusz Molinski)
2
keting in 17 countries and search engine optimisation in four countries, the Vienna Tourist Board
ensured a strong presence on the World Wide Web.
By the end of 2011, some 360,000 fans were taking
an interest in its German and English Facebook
profiles, and videos of the Vienna Tourist Board
on YouTube had been clicked more than 280,000
times. Online and social media marketing highlights were an action entitled “Vienna is searching for the new Klimt” and a virtual tour through
the city during which users could discover Vienna
in the guise of Empress Sisi or Emperor Franz.
“WIENzi”, an online game with the “Enzi” furniture
elements, and six photo competitions rounded off
the activities.
i t
e
ne an
e ia e entati n in ew
a an
Vienna’s Gustav Klimt Anniversary Year 2012
played a role in virtually all advertising activities
of the Vienna Tourist Board. It was the main topic
at eleven press conferences with prominent keynote speakers which the VTB organised in six
European countries, the US, Australia and Japan;
additionally, 13 workshops were offered for the
tourism industry in nine European countries
and the Klimt theme was presented at major
international trade shows.
The Vienna Tourist Board also used major exhibitions by reputed cultural institutions to promote
the Klimt theme. To raise interest among US me-
VI
dia, Tourism Director Norbert Kettner invited
the press to a breakfast at Café Sabarsky in New
York’s Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition “Vienna 1900”, which opened there, set just
the right tone for the presentation of the Klimt
Anniversary Year highlights. Art treasures such
as Klimt’s portraits of Emilie Flöge and Fritza Riedler were on loan at the exhibition “Vienna: Art &
Design – Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos” shown
at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in
2011. The Klimt Year was also the theme of a gala
evening organised in Japan in cooperation with
the Austrian National Tourist Office.
ea
e ti in
a
a e
e ea
i it
Vienna and Berlin are both worth visiting – and
seen from overseas, just a stone’s throw away from
each other. So why not visit both on your trip to
Europe? The Vienna Tourist Board and Visit Berlin
joined forces to get this message across through
activities in São Paulo and Toronto.
e ati n wit
ta
a
eti e
ienna
A tasteful cooperation – in every sense of the word
– of two strong international brands was presented by the President of the Vienna Tourist Board,
Deputy Mayor Renate Brauner, and Tourism Director Norbert Kettner: Hans Staud, producer of fine
preserves, launched a special edition of his sweet
treats in jars whose metal caps were decorated
with a series of 47 Viennese art nouveau motifs.
nte nati na
n
e
e ia an t a e in
ienna
t
The media management unit of the Vienna Tourist
Board hosted visits by 828 journalists – 648 print
journalists, 36 TV and nine radio crews – from 37
countries in 2011, assisting them in their research
and organising visitor programmes for them. 49
press events were staged in 22 countries. Working
to maintain and build Vienna’s profile with the global travel industry, the market management visited 22 countries on 74 trips abroad. Altogether,
the team went to ten trade shows, 45 workshops
for foreign travel agencies and 37 special presentations; moreover, the VTB also organised the participation of industry players from Vienna in many
of these events. Furthermore, the team organised
26 product placements with partners from the consumer goods and services sectors in 19 countries,
and carried out eleven events aimed at retail cus-
I
tomers in seven countries. In
Vienna, the VTB assisted 3,143
representatives of travel agencies and tour operators from 23
countries.
wi e a e ti in w
wi e in e an
ienna a a
n e en e en e
The Vienna Convention Bureau (VCB) is the conference tourism arm of the
VTB and works globally
to bring conferences,
business meetings and incentive tours to Vienna. In 2011, the VCB presented
Vienna as a conference venue at 42 trade shows
and industry meetings and coordinated the participation of Viennese businesses in these events.
In Vienna, the VCB assisted 346 decision-makers
from the conference and incentive tourism industries
of 21 countries who visited
Vienna. The success of the
VCB’s activities is evidenced
by the fact that Vienna
was chosen as the venue
for 3,151 congresses and
business events in 2011,
a seven per cent increase
over 2010.
Data collected by the
International Congress
and Convention Association (ICCA) and the
Union of International
Associations (UIA) underline
Vienna’s standing as an international conference
venue. The 2010 global statistics of the ICCA, published last year, show Vienna as the top destination
for the sixth consecutive year, with Barcelona and
Paris taking second and third rank. In the UIA’s
ranking, Vienna came in fourth, bested only by
Singapore, Brussels and Paris.
With increasing emphasis on sustainability and
eco-friendly conference tourism, the VCB qualified
for the Austrian Eco-Label in 2011. As a licensee
of this national eco-label programme, it will not
only be able to help event organisers to make ecofriendly choices, but also to certify conferences as
“Green Meetings”. n
In its December 2011
edition, the French art
magazine “Dossier de
l’Art” sets the mood for
the Klimt Anniversary
Year 2012.
The Indian edition of the
travel magazine “Lonely
Planet” dedicates the
cover of its September
2011 edition to Vienna.
W
I
C
ien ro
cts at
WIEN PRODUCTS is an export initiative by the
Vienna Economic Chamber. For 16 years now it has
been providing support to Viennese companies
producing wares of the highest quality that have a
special connection with Vienna. In the year under
review, the WIEN PRODUCTS Service Center organised the following events in Austria and abroad
in close cooperation with the member companies:
Representatives of seven
companies that developed
new product designs for
the 6 th edition of the
WienProducts Collection,
with Brigitte Jank,
President of the Vienna
Economic Chamber (centre, second row)
(Bernhard Wolf)
In the spring, Austrian Weeks were held in 26
branches of the German Galeria Kaufhof chain
with in-house delicatessens, featuring the following WIEN PRODUCTS companies: Sacher cakes,
Confiserie Heindl chocolates, Staud’s Wien pickles
and preserves, Meinl am Graben coffee, tea and
preserves, Haas & Haas speciality teas, WienWein
wines, Manner confectionery and Schlumberger
sparkling wines.
The WIEN PRODUCTS Service Center presented
the Viennese fashion labels Florian, Mühlbauer,
Rosa Mosa and Rose Beck at the Designers and
Agents Show in New York. The four-day fashion
fair at the Chelsea Design Museum attracted over
3,000 visitors and allowed the designers to forge
initial contacts in the US market.
As a side event to the Milan Furniture Fair, the
Austrian Federal Economic Chamber and the
WIEN PRODUCTS Service Center jointly organised
a presentation for 27 Austrian furniture makers
and designers. The WIEN PRODUCTS members
Lobmeyr crystal and chandeliers, Wiener Silber
Manufactur silverware, Woka lamps and Augarten
porcelain were able to showcase their wares in a
separate display area.
I
As in previous years, WIEN PRODUCTS was again
represented on the Austrian Economic Chamber
group stand at the US East Coast’s major furniture
and design fair in New York. Over the four days of
the event the WIEN PRODUCTS companies Augarten, Lobmeyr, Lichterloh design, art & antiques,
Woka and Wiener Silber Manufactur exhibited
their products to a trade audience as well as to interested private individuals.
The luxury wedding fair at Vienna’s Semperdepot venue, an event held for the first time in 2011,
was used as a platform by seven WIEN PRODUCTS
companies. Augarten, Lobmeyr, Zur Schwäbischen
Jungfrau table- and bedlinen, Wiener Silber Manufactur, Jarosinski & Vaugoin silverware, Lobmeyr
and Gerstner Imperial Court Confectionery presented both their wedding list services and their
product ranges to visitors.
For the 6th WIEN PRODUCTS Collection, seven
companies developed new products by external designers that were unveiled during the 2011 Vienna
Design Week. Schullin jewellers, Skrein jewellers,
Heldwein jewellery, Wiener Silber Manufactur,
Woka, Lobmeyr and R. Horn’s Wien leatherware
all received positive feedback about their new
products.
At the Luxury Please luxury goods fair at the
Hofburg Palace, the WIEN PRODUCTS members
Woka, Lobmeyr, Zur Schwäbischen Jungfrau, Backhausen textiles and soft furnishings, Schau Schau
eyewear and Jarosinski & Vaugoin showcased
their wares to over 15,000 visitors. The group exhibit focused on the themes of quality, design and
craftsmanship.
2011 also saw another Austrian Federal Economic
Chamber group stand at the 100% Design show
in London, where the WIEN PRODUCTS Service
Center arranged for the participation of its members Augarten, NIN Design, Woka, Wiener Silber
Manufactur and Lichterloh. The four-day fair
drew in more than 19,000 trade visitors and 1,300
reporters.
In cooperation with the Vienna Representative
Office in Tokyo, B2B appointments were organised for the companies Augarten, Friedrich Otto
Schmidt home furnishings, Jarosinski & Vaugoin,
Zur Schwäbischen Jungfrau, Lobmeyr and Backhausen in Tokyo and Osaka. Appointments with
members of the press were also arranged. n
C
WienProducts
at the International
Contemporary Furniture
Fair ICFF in New York
(WKW)
D
Information booklet on the
district of Margareten
istrict artnershi s
an activities
t
ni i a
i ti t
a a eten
Margareten was the first of Vienna’s districts to
establish its own location management service,
an economic platform open to all businesses and
private individuals. A leaflet available in
German and English presents the benefits
and advantages this district offers. The
leaflet is distributed at business congresses, commercial agencies and pertinent events at home and abroad. Clearly
structured databases are also available.
t
ni i a
i ti t
e
a
District Chairman Thomas Blimlinger signed a memorandum of understanding on future cooperation
in the fields of art, culture, citizen
participation, transport and social
matters with Erzsébetváros, the
7th district of Budapest. Business-
Deputy District
Chairwoman Dorothea
Drlik with N. Morita,
who presented a handmade wooden train as a
gift during his visit
(BV Hietzing)
people from Budapest’s Király utca paid a return
visit to the traditional Neubaugasse flea market.
The Budapest Club, an NGO dedicated to enhancing district development, visited the Neubau District Council.
t
ni i a
i ti t
i
e in
The long-standing partnership between the Simoningplatz primary school and the Základní
škola in Pavlovská Street, Brno, was continued.
OVS Svetelskystrasse organised project days with
its partner schools in the Czech Republic and Hungary; teachers from Estonia and Slovenia gave lessons at KMS Enkplatz. Within the framework of the
Leonardo Da Vinci programme, Brehmstrasse primary school hosted teachers from Istanbul; Hoefftgasse primary school accommodated Erasmus students from Greece and Estonia. The musical and
creative arts schools KMS Enkplatz and Kraków
organised mutual exchange visits.
I
IC
I
C IVI I
District Chairwoman Andrea Kalchbrenner (left) with representatives of the district of Penzing and the new Mayor of Prague’s 6th district, Marie Kousalíková (in white coat),
accompanied by a delegation of the Prague government, in front of the Rudolfinum music auditorium and art gallery. (Ernestine Holzgruber-Hiller)
t
ni i a
i ti t
iet in
In May, the District Council Office staged a charity
concert for the victims of the Higashi Nihon (the
major earthquake disaster in the east of Japan)
featuring European classics along with Japanese
folk songs interpreted by artists from Japan. In
July, Hietzing welcomed a delegation of 33 representatives from the partner municipality of
Tanba-no-mori.
t
ni i a
i ti t
en in
A delegation headed by District Chairwoman Andrea Kalchbrenner paid a visit to her new counterpart in the partner district of Prague 6, Marie
Kousalíková. Apart from political talks, the visit
included a number of sightseeing tours.
t
ni i a
i ti t
tta in
The district’s cooperation with Barrio Villa Austria in Managua entered its 21st year; 600 school
uniforms, sports kits and toys were donated to
Escuela Ottakring. Following completion of the
road renewal project in the Barrio, a new project
for the refurbishment of nine residential blocks
was taken up. In the context of the cooperation with
the Nicaraguan city of San Pedro del Norte, Father
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez
read from his works in a
reading entitled “Touching heaven”; the Sal Band
provided the musical programme for the event in
the packed Akkonplatz
parish hall.
“Buenavista” – the magazine of
friendship between Ottakring
and Barrio Villa Austria
I
IC
Ambassador Shigeo
Iwatani presents a
certificate of honour
awarded by Japan’s
Foreign Ministry to
District Chairman
Heinz Lehner
(BV Floridsdorf)
I
C IVI I
t
ni i a
i ti t
e na
The district’s international activities focused on
intensifying friendly relations with Fuchu, a municipality with about 250,000 inhabitants within
the Tokyo Prefecture. As in previous years, 2011
witnessed a youth exchange with six youngsters
coming to live with Viennese host families for
about two weeks.
t
ni i a
i ti t
in
District Chairman Karl Homole paid a visit to Kiev
partner district Shevchenko on the occasion of the
20 th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. The
itinerary comprised the planting of a tree, the inauguration of a monument next to the district’s
music school and the opening of a district outpatient clinic. A return visit by a delegation headed by Homole’s counterpart Sergej Zimin was
welcomed with a programme including presentations on municipal housing construction and the
Viennese school system.
t
ni i a
i ti t
i
After the earthquake and tsunami the district
set up a donation account and organised a oneday fundraising event, which enabled District
Chairman Heinz Lehner to hand over the sum
of 17,183.83 euro to Ambassador Shigeo Iwatani.
The Japanese Foreign Minister honoured the
Floridsdorf District Chairman for his achievements
in the promotion of Japanese-Austrian relations. n
T
stae te
v at
he strian ssociation
of Cities an o ns
The Austrian Association of Cities and Towns
(Städtebund) represents 246 cities and towns
which account for 65 per cent of the population;
together with the Austrian Association of Municipalities, which comprises Austria’s smaller local
communities, Städtebund represents the interests
of local governments vis-à-vis the national government and the provinces (Article 115 (3) Federal
Constitution).
In the year under review, the international
activities of Städtebund were mainly focused on
the representation of general interests in various
European bodies. The key issues were services
of general interest and finance. Once again, the
urban dimension of spatial planning policy was
at the top of the agenda, especially with a view
to the upcoming EU programme period 2014+. In
this context the activities initiated in 2010 were
carried on and are reflected in the Austrian Spatial Development Concept. The results obtained
are to be turned to good account in the forthcoming negotiations for the EU programme period
2014–2020.
For the Committee of the Regions (CoR) Städtebund nominated the Mayor of Bregenz, Markus
Linhart, and the Mayor of Salzburg, Dr. Heinz
Schaden as members, and City Councillor Prof.
Elisabeth Vitouch as substitute. In the Congress of
Local and Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE)
Städtebund was represented by the Mayor of Wels,
Dr. Peter Koits as member and by the Mayor of
The Austrian Association
of Cities and Towns in
St. Pölten: Federal
President Dr. Heinz Fischer
with the mayors of
St. Pölten and Vienna,
Matthias Stadler (right)
and Dr. Michael Häupl,
European Commissioner
for Regional Policy
Dr. Johannes Hahn and
moderator Daniela Zeller
(St. Pölten/Vorlaufer)
n
Innsbruck, Christine Oppitz-Plörer, and City Councillor of Villach Hilde Schaumberger as substitutes. A conference of the ministers responsible
for regional and local issues was held in Kiev. The
Austrian delegation was headed by the President
of the Tyrolean Regional Parliament, Dr. Herwig
van Staa. On the basis of a strategy of twelve principles, the Austrian Städtebund cooperates with
the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Democratic
Governance on the “Label for Innovation and Good
Governance” for municipalities. The Baden-Württemberg Association of Rural Districts turned to
Städtebund for information on e-government and
on the “digital cities” initiative.
In tribute to the 25th anniversary of the city’s elevation to capital city of Lower Austria, the 2011
General Assembly of Städtetag was for the first
time held in St. Pölten under the motto “Strong Cities – Strong Regions: Clear-cut Tasks – Fair Funding”. In keeping with the prevailing tradition, the
formal opening at the festival hall in the cultural
district was attended by Federal President
Dr. Heinz Fischer. The keynote speech on European
urban policies was delivered by EU Commissioner Dr. Johannes Hahn. Administrative reform,
finance, integration and the organisation of caregiving were the topics addressed in the working
groups. The closing plenary session was devoted to
a discussion of “The Urban-Rural Myth: Opposites
– Approaches – Perspectives”. n
P
a
achver an
an or
artner of all ations
Ground-breaking
ceremony for the “PaNWohnpark” housing
complex with City
Councillor Dr. Michael
Ludwig (centre) and (to
his right, in shirtsleeves)
Leopoldstadt District
Chairman Gerhard Kubik
(PID)
PaN stands for “Partner of all Nations” and is the
umbrella organisation of more than 110 bilateral
friendship societies in Austria. Its main functions
are to act as an interest group and promote the
role of the bilateral societies in Austria’s political
and social landscape. PaN also conducts projects
on its own and organises conferences and other
meetings. PaN is led by its president Dr. Claus
Walter and operates under the auspices of Austrian Federal President Dr. Heinz
Fischer. The association has its seat
in Vienna, and its board members
are the governors of Austria’s nine
provinces.
City Councillor Dr. Michael
Ludwig at the namegiving ceremony for the
housing complex (PID)
0
Construction work started in 2011
on the housing complex “PaN Wohnpark” which will be dedicated to
intercultural life. It is being built
as part of one of Vienna’s biggest
urban development programmes,
which is under way on the premises
of a former rail station in the city’s
2nd district. Under construction on
the 75-hectare development zone
are housing projects, including
housing for people with specific needs (residences for students and the elderly, managed housing
with social services), office buildings and retail
space. The PaN Wohnpark will consist of three
buildings with 90 apartments; a World Café will
be established as a social meeting point. The
ground-breaking and name-giving ceremony was
performed in early October by City Councillor for
Housing Dr. Michael Ludwig and District Chairman Gerhard Kubik.
PaN and the City of Vienna organised a meeting at Vienna City Hall where bilateral friendship societies presented best practice models of
international humanitarian cooperation in the context of the European Year of Volunteering 2011.
These included a partnership of 45 years standing
to support vocational education in Burkina Faso;
care and re-integration work for former child soldiers in Uganda; disaster relief after the 11 March
catastrophe in Japan; projects in Cuban villages
under the motto “Cuba no está sola” (“Cuba is not
alone”); a project for early diagnosis and treatment
of diabetes in Fiji and the Austrian school in Pangtokha in eastern Bhutan.
The PaN Award of the Austrian Foreign Ministry
was presented to the Austrian-Chinese Society
by Foreign Minister Dr. Michael Spindelegger. In
2011 Austria and the People’s Republic of China
celebrated the 40 th anniversary of the start of bilateral diplomatic relations. n
W
elt
orl
of
n at
e eration
strians roa
The World Federation of Austrians Abroad (Auslandsösterreicher-Weltbund, AÖWB) is the umbrella organisation of nearly 200 associations of
Austrians living abroad. Founded in 1952, it has
been called the “10 th province” of Austria and
represents the interests of Austrians all over the
world – members and non-members – vis-à-vis the
national government and parliament, government
authorities and the business community. Most of
its member associations are located in Europe,
North and South America, Australia and East
Asia. Together they have about 10,000 individual
members. The President of the World Federation
is Gustav Chlestil, who lives in Ainring, Bavaria.
The World Federation operates under the auspices
of Foreign Minister Dr. Michael Spindelegger and
the governors of Austria’s nine provinces.
A meeting of the member associations’ presidents
took place in April to prepare the annual general
meeting of AÖWB, which is traditionally held in a
different Austrian province every year. In 2011,
Vienna was the venue of the AGM, which was attended by some 600 participants. Discussions focused in particular on parliamentary representation: about 500,000 Austrians live abroad, and no
more than 30,000 votes are required for a seat in
parliament, but only about 50,000 of the expats
are listed in the electoral register.
The exhibition “The 10 th
province” on display in the
municipal administration
building at Muthgasse
(Alex Halada PID)
The ceremonial opening and the concluding ball
of the meeting were hosted by Vienna City Hall,
as was a celebratory event in which Austrian President Dr. Heinz Fischer, Mayor Dr. Michael Häupl
and State Secretary Dr. Wolfgang Waldner participated. Peter Löscher MBA, the Villach-born CEO of
Siemens AG, was designated “Austrian abroad of
the year 2011”, and an exhibition on the “10th province” was opened by City Councillor Dr. Michael
Ludwig. n
1
I
achen
arh s
r o
ha i
is a a
ara
inrin
lan Islan s
l a I lia
l ania
l anian
l eria
l iers
l ere
l ach
lto i e
ster a
n al sia
n ara
ntalya
nt er
ran elovac
r entina
r enia
a at
thens
s r
stralia
yia a a
er ai an
ores
a oll
a en
rtte er
a eynha sen
a
a er
an o
an la esh
arcelona
arrio Villa stria
asel
at i
avaria
ee ster
ei in
eir t
elar s
elfast
el i
el ra e
enin
erlin
erne
h tan
ir in ha
och
o ot
or ea
osnia erce ovina
oston
ran en r
ratislava
ra il
re en
2
n e of co ntries
re ions an cities
re en
re erhaven
riceni
ri en
rno
r ssels
rovni
is r
rr s
ssel orf
in r h
inet
y t
isensta t
l
stino
en
nns
r s etv ros
s er
ssen
stonia
thio ia
charest
a est
enos ires
l aria
r enlan
r n y
r ina aso
y os c
C
Cala ria
Cana a
Cannes
Ca e o n
Ca e Ver e
Carinthia
Carn nt
Castile e n
Catalonia
Central ohe ia
C
Cervia
Chennai
Chernivtsi
Cherno yl
China eo le s e
Chi in
Chorley
Cl
a oca
Cl ny
Colo ne
Colo ia
Co oros Islan s
Con o e ocratic e
Co enha en
C r o a
Cor Co nty
Cosen a
Croatia
Crocetta el ontello
C a
Cy r s
C ech e lic
ae
a ar
avos
e recen
elft
en ar
enver
iet en ach
i on
res en
ai
lin
ra ec r lov
ranice
e
n ary
I
Illinois
In ia
In ian
Inns r c
Iran
Irelan
Ir ts
Israel
Istan l
Italy
I
I
errara
ii
in al Co nty
inlan
levolan
rance
ran f rt
tlan
a an
er sale
ian s
ihlava
ohannes r
n in
or an
ain
rie richshafen
ri li Vene ia i lia
ch
shi a
l a
lic of
ar isch arten irchen
a s
elsen irchen
eneva
enoa
eor ia
er any
lic of the
hana
hent
othen r
ttin en
ra
reat ritain see nite
reece
reenlan
an ho
ol s irchen
y r
y r oson o ron
alle aale
a
r
annover
ar in
ei el er
elsin i
essen
iroshi a
olly oo
on on
ail
ir
in o
aiser r nn
alinin ra
al ar
al a
arlovy Vary
arlsr he
arvin
ats shi a
a a hstan
a an
ehl
enya
iev
la enf rt
n a evac
o len
ocev e
o er
orea e ocratic eo le s e
orea e lic
o ice
osovo
s e i
ra
ran
re s
re s
yoto
nster
ancashire
aos
arnaca
atvia
a sanne
lic
I
ei en
ei i
e o lava
ev l
i e
ille
i a
in
is on
ith ania
iver ool
l ana
orthern Irelan
orth hine est halia
or ay
ov
y
ovi a
ovo esto
ovosi irs
ov i n
re er
erha sen
ersta fen
essa
lo o c
an
ati a
ran e ar
re on
res n
rlan o
rl ans
sa a
slo
sna r c
stholstein
strava
tta a
for
on on
os n eles
o isiana
o er stria
o er a ony
lin
cerne
i s r
e o r
viv
aas hine
aastricht
ace onia
a eira
a ri
a e r
ain
alaysia
ali
a o ols a
ana a
anchester
annhei
arche
arseille
a riti s
ec len r Vor o
el o rne
eta
e ico
i lov
ilan
ile tii ici
ins
ochovce
o ena
ol ova
on olia
ontene ro
osco
lha sen
lhei
ai
nich
nster
rna
yan ar
a istan
alestine
an to ha
aris
ern
aschin
er
for hei
hila el hia
irita
isa
le
olan
onta el a a
o ra
ortlan
ortoro
ort al
o na
ra e
raia
rato
re ov
e la
atar
ec City
ito
e ss on the hine
e or
ascani
echovot
e ens r
eichena
i a
oc for
o ania
o e
otter a
ssia
an a
icara a
icosia
itra
oor i
achsen nhalt
alva or
al r
a i ia
antes
a les
eiva
e al
etherlan s
an rancisco
anli rfa
an e ro el orte
o i el
o a lo
o o an r nci e
ara evo
a i ra ia
chles i olstein
ch echat
ch erin
cotlan
eeon
e ovia
ei ers orf
eo l
er ia
eville
han hai
har ah
heffiel
hevchen o
hin
i i
in a ore
intra
o e
lova
lova ia
lovenia
ofia
olo on Islan s
oloth rn
o th frica
o th oravia
o th yrol
ain
ri an a
te ri
toc hol
t eters r
t lten
tras o r
t tt art
vetlo ors
a ilan
e en
it erlan
y ney
c ecin
e e
o athely
ai ei
ai an
allinn
an a no ori
el viv afo
e el n
er e
hailan
he a e
hessaloni i
irana
iras ol
ho
o yo
ole o
o
ov
oronto
ranscar athia
rento
ria it a
rieste
rnava
ro s
in en
C
I
I
CI I
cson
nis
nisia
rin
r ey
r enistan
r
scany
yrol
an a
hers
ra i t
raine
l
nite ra
irates
nite in o of reat ritain an
orthern Irelan
er hine
nite tates of
erica
sh oro
s a
trecht
e istan
V
Valencia
Valle osta
Val ara so
Vanco ver
Vara in
Vas
V ster s
V st anlan s l n
V stra talan
Veneto
Venice
Venray
Victoria
Vietna
Villach
Villavicencio
Vilni s
Vo vo ina
Vol a e eral istrict
Vorarl er
Vyso ina
a r ych
ales
arsa
ashin ton C
eil a
hein
ei ar
els
erthei
ielic a
iel o ols a
ies a en
roc a
ertal
erevan
a re
a ar attya
an i ar
ara o a
no o
rich
City Council
(100 members)
Commissions
District Council Committees
District Councils
City Senate
Mayor
and 12 City Councillors *)
District Chairpersons
Mayor
Administrative Group
Integration, Women’s
Issues, Consumer Protection
and Personnel
Administrative Group
Finance, Economic Affairs
and Vienna Public Utilities
Administrative Group
Education, Youth,
Information and Sports
Administrative Group
Cultural Affairs and Science
Administrative Group
Public Health and Social
Affairs
Administrative Group
Urban Planning, Traffic &
Transport, Climate Protection,
Energy and Public Participation
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Municipal Departments
Municipal Departments
Municipal Departments
Municipal Departments
Municipal Departments
Municipal Departments
1 General Personnel Matters
5 Financial Affairs
10 Vienna Children's Day Care
Centres
7 Cultural Affairs
15 Public Health Services of
the City of Vienna
18 Urban Development and
Planning
2 Personnel Services
6 Accounting Services,
Duties and Charges
11 Youth and Family Welfare
Office
8 City Archives
24 Health Care and Social
Welfare Planning
19 Architecture and Urban
Design
23 Economic Affairs, Labour
and Statistics
13 Education, Out-of-School
Activities for Children and
Young People
9 Vienna City Library
40 Social Welfare, Social and
Public Health Law
20 Energy Planning
14 Automated Data Processing, Information and
Communications
Technologies
27 European Affairs
44 Municipal Swimming Pools
17 Integration and Diversity
68 Fire Services and Disaster
Relief
51 Sports Office
3 Occupational Safety and
Health
70 Ambulance and Patient
Transport Services
Enterprise pursuant to
Article 71 of the Vienna City
Statutes
21A District Planning and Land
Use Central West
21B District Planning and Land
Use South and Northeast
KAV Vienna Hospital
Association
26 Data Protection and
E-Government
53 Press and Information
Services
28 Road Management and
Construction
35 Immigration, Citizenship
and Registry Offices
55 Community Services
29 Bridge Construction and
Foundation Engineering
38 Food Safety Department
56 Vienna Schools
33 Public Lighting
54 Procurement
41 Surveyors
57 Promotion and Co-ordination of Women's Issues
46 Traffic Management and
Organisation
59 Market Authority
65 Legal Affairs: Traffic and
Transport
62 Elections and Specific
Legal Affairs
67 Supervision of On-Street
Parking
Legend:
Authority to give instructions
Authority to give instructions to officials with special assignments in the framework of their
Administrative Group
63 Commerce and Trade,
Legal Aspects of Food
Safety
Request for examination by the Mayor or an Executive City Councillor for matters pertaining
to his/her Administrative Group and/or decision by the City Council or Monitoring Committee
to carry out an examination
*) of whom 8 Executive City Councillors
94
Organisational chart edited by the
Executive Group for Construction and Technology, Management Systems Unit
As per: January 1, 2012
City Council Committees
(Monitoring Committee)
Auditing Department
Administrative Group
Environment
Administrative Group
Housing, Housing
Construction and Urban
Renewal
Chief Executive Office
Executive City Councillor
Executive City Councillor
Chief Executive Director
Municipal Departments
22 Environmental Protection
31 Vienna Waterworks
Municipal Departments
25 Urban Renewal and
Assessment in Matters of
Housing Construction and
Promotion
34 Building and Facility
Management
Executive Office of the Mayor
Co-ordination of Climate
Protection Measures
Strategic Energy Policy
Personnel Office of the Vienna
Public Utilities
Executive Group
for Legal Affairs
36 Inspection of Business
Establishments, Electrical
and Gas Equipment, Fire
Prevention and Official
Authorisation of Events
37 Building Inspection
42 Parks and Gardens
39 Research Centre,
Laboratory and Certification
Services
Executive Group
for Personnel and
Internal Auditing
Executive Group
for Organisation, Safety and
Security
Special
assignments
for the 1st and 8th Districts
Director General of Urban Planning, for the 2nd District
Development and Construction
for the 3rd District
Group Director of the Finance
Administration Group
for the 4th and 5th Districts
th
48 Waste Management, Street
Cleaning and Vehicle Fleet
49 Forestry Office and Urban
Agriculture
50 Housing Promotion and
Arbitration Board for Legal
Housing Matters
64 Legal Affairs: Construction,
Energy, Railways, Traffic
and Aviation
69 Real Estate Management
Executive Group
for Construction and
Technology
Executive Group
for European and
International Affairs
Enterprise pursuant to
Article 71 of the Vienna City
Statutes
Vienna Ombuds-Office for
Environmental Protection
for the 10th District
Safety Spokespersons
of Personnel and Internal
Auditing
for the 11th District
for the 12th District
Independent Officer for
Occupational Safety and Health
for Legal Affairs
of Organisation, Safety and
Security
for the 13th and 14th Districts
Equal Opportunities
Commission
for the 15th District
Equal Opportunities Advisors
th
for the 16 District
of Education, Youth, Family and
Sports
for Financial Management in the
Administrative Group for Public
Health and Social Affairs
Equal Opportunities
Contact Persons
th
for the 17 District
for the 18th District
for the 19th District
for the 20th District
st
Special appellate
authorities
Independent Administrative
Tribunal
of Decentralisation
for the 21 District
Duties Appeals Commission
of the Apprenticeship
Programme of the City of Vienna
for the 22nd District
Supreme Building Authority
for the 23rd District
Provincial Agricultural Senate
for Matters Pertaining to
Electronic File Management, the
Services Directive, Industrial and
Food Law
for the Co-ordination of the Cooperation of the Enterprise "City
of Vienna - Housing in Vienna"
with all Municipal Departments
Climate Protection Co-ordinator
Group Directors
Vienna Waste Water
Management
Office of the Healthcare
Commissioner
of International Relations
Building Construction Group
Enterprise pursuant to
Article 71 of the Vienna City
Statutes
Vienna Children's and Youth
Ombuds-Office
Ombuds Office for Animal
Protection
Housing in Vienna
60 Veterinary Board and
Animal Protection
Special bodies
not subject to directions
for the 9th District
for Real Estate Strategies
58 Water Rights
th
for the 6 and 7 Districts
Executive Directors
Directors
45 Water Management
Municipal
District Offices
Public Works Group
Urban Planning Group
Official Procedures and Public
Procurement Group
Environmental Technology
Group
Project Directors
for all tasks within the sphere of
competence of the City of Vienna
regarding the implementation of
Vienna’s Urban Lakeside
“Seestadt Aspern”
for the optimisation of workflow
management and process
organisation in Municipal
Department 35
for the restructuring of parking
management in Vienna
Public Tendering Monitoring
Senate
Appellate Senate
Public Service Regulations
Senate
Disciplinary Commission
Chief ec tive f ce of the City of Vienna
ec tive ro for ro ean an International ffairs
irector of International elations r s ar a ra
rie rich ch i t lat
Vienna
stria
el
a
ail ost
e i ien v at
ien v at en lish olitics international in e ht l
ner an
lisher Vienna City
inistration
ec tive ro for ro ean an International ffairs
I
itor an coor inator ho as
esch
lease a ress any en iries to tho as resch
ien v at
n lish translation aria ennett a ina Ill er ri a
er ayer n ela ar er Vera i arich tea coor ination
Vienna
rt or
ea
arter trnat
Cover hoto ra hs y
rinte
trnat
as ec
y a l erin r c erei
ress ate
arch
rinte on eco frien ly a er fro
the
o a f ien sa le ortfolio
Vienna
ien o ris
Vienna
s
www.wien.at
Review 2011 – International activities of the City of Vienna
International
activities of the
City of Vienna
2011