Looking at half a millennium of co-existence: the Danube in Vienna as a socio-natural site

Abstract

Which insights can be gained from a long-term study for river management today? Vienna's layout and city budget are still influenced by interventions undertaken in the 19th century or even earlier. This introduction to a thematic issue on the Viennese Danube's environmental history from 1500 to 1890 offers a short overview of important events in Vienna's and the Danube's intertwined histories as well as an overview of the study's conceptual basis and summarizes the main results, ranging from method development and floodplain evolution reconstruction to the histories of settlement, sewage and regulation. Today, Vienna is a city with almost 2 million inhabitants, the capital of a small, landlocked country. Since the great regulation of the 1870s, the Danube river has flowed straight through it. A second, parallel river bed was designed in the 1970s to build a retention basin big enough to cope even with major floods. The path leading to this arrangement was both long and winding. To understand the complex interaction between urbanites and the river, one must look beyond the water-filled channel and take the entire floodplain into account. To do this, our interdisciplinary group of researchers synthesized results from river morphology and history into a long-term perspective.

Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology

“…At the contrary, the historical perspective focuses on the dynamic pattern of the appropriation and transformation of "nature" and its repercussion on societal change. Several concepts (important in the regard are concepts like the colonisation of nature, i.e., the transformations of natural ecosystems to increase yields; [57], operationalised in the human appropriation of net primary production or HANPP indicator [60], Long-term Socioecological Research [61,62] and Socio-Natural sites [63], and in particular, the concept of metabolic regimes and the transition between different regimes [64]) offers an important dimension of SETs often neglected within transformation research. Focusing in particular on large-scale and long-term implications of energy and resource use, sociometabolic regimes are marked by a certain energy system and related basic technologies, which constrains the option space for societal developments [58].…”

The long-term evolution of urban waters and their nineteenth century transformation in European cities. A comparative environmental history

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‘Friendship is a slow ripening fruit’: an agency perspective on water, values and infrastructure

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