Danube Island
Bike Excursion
Wednesday, September 3rd, 10am.
Join us for a cycling journey with Daniela Lehner and Michael Klein along one of Vienna’s most unusual urban landscapes: the Danube Island. Stretching 22 kilometers through the city, this vast artificial strip of land was originally engineered as part of Vienna’s flood protection system between 1972 and 1988. Yet over the decades it has grown far beyond its technical origins. Today, the island is a living, shifting environment – a stage for countless temporary uses, interspecies encounters, and small-scale architectures. Between public bbq zones and protected wetlands, the island is shared by human and non-human life. Communities of all kinds co-exist, largely without conflict, in a place that resists commercial exploitation and real-estate speculation – an increasingly rare condition along Europe’s urban waterfronts. Our ride will be both a physical and a spatial exploration, tracing the island’s layered history, its flexible planning, and the subtle decisions that have kept it open to all.
Daniela Lehner is a landscape architect and a research assistant at the Institute of Landscape Architecture at BOKU University, where she has collaborated on various research projects, including the project Designing the Danube Island: Interviews with Participating Landscape Architects. As part of the arts-based research project Wachau Routes, a collaboration between BOKU University and the University of Arts Linz, she is currently working on her PhD, examining the various transport routes through the Wachau riverine landscape. Her research focuses on landscape dynamics and transformation processes in public spaces, with particular attention to their design and use. Previously, she has carried out teaching and research activities at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at the Universidad Austral de Chile, investigating the use and perception of public urban riverbanks.
https://www.wachauroutes.at/en/
https://forschung.boku.ac.at/en/projects/13890
Michael Klein is an architect and theorist working at the intersections of architecture, art, urbanism, and cultural practice. His work focuses on housing and everyday life, planning, history, political theory, and the ways knowledge is shared and mediated. He studied at TU Vienna, the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, learning from figures such as François Roche, Eyal Weizman, and Nasrine Seraji. He later completed a doctorate in philosophy and cultural studies, exploring questions of space, subjectivity, and governance at the origins of social housing.
https://wohnbau.tuwien.ac.at/de/team/michael-klein