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2.1 Vienna Bratislava Governance Structures
2.1 Vienna Bratislava Landscape
2.1 Vienna Bratislava Tools
In the past century the geo-political relationship between the two cities has changed radically, from the times of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the two cities were governed under the same legislation but playing very different geopolitical roles, to the independence of Czechoslovakia after WWI, from the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain; from 1993, following the Velvet Divorce, when Bratislava became the capital of the newly formed State of Slovakia to the entry in the European Union; from the entry in the Shenghen area until today, when they are a functional metropolitan region.
Nowadays, Vienna presents itself as a rather compact city, surrounded by a Green Belt and crossed by the Danube, following which we arrive at Bratislava. This presents itself as far less dense than the “Twin City” (which is approximately 4 times more populated with relatively the same surface) and has grown mainly towards the East because of the presence of the Iron Curtain so close to the city centre on the South West, where we find the Petržalka neighbourhood, densely built up on one side of the border and then agricultural landscape on the Austrian side.
The long separation due to the Iron Curtain has still left traces in the landscape and in the memory of the people, but the recent ‘Europeanisation’ process has dimmed the line of the border. It is important, nonetheless, to be aware of the critical historical changes over the past decades as these have still strong impact on the territory and the decision making taking place.
With the entry into the EU the region has lived a major shift from being respectively the periphery of the western or eastern block to being the centre and heart of the new Europe.
This condition if also experienced on a daily level by the inhabitants, as it is becoming more common to live in one country and work in the other. There are in fact approximately 1.000 daily cross-border commuters (ESPON, 2010), meaning that although the system is polarised by the two capitals, also the in-between urban subsystem has gained much more importance. A counter effect of this phenomenon is that the area between the two cities also presents problems of land speculation as there has been sometimes a very fast pace of construction, especially for suburban family houses, and particularly on the Austrian side. Moreover, there has been often the phenomenon that owners of building areas would just wait for the land value to rise (Schremmer, 2003).
The buffer zone of what used to be the Iron Curtain is still evident, both physically as the border runs through agricultural fields where there is very low density, and mentally, as the division is still in the mind of many people (Haccou, 2010).
2.1 Vienna Bratislava Governance Structures
2.1 Vienna Bratislava Landscape
2.1 Vienna Bratislava Tools
Image 1: Urban Atlas of the Metropolitan area between Vienna and Bratislava
Source: http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/map/UrbanAtlasBeta/
In the past century the geo-political relationship between the two cities has changed radically, from the times of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the two cities were governed under the same legislation but playing very different geopolitical roles, to the independence of Czechoslovakia after WWI, from the rise and fall of the Iron Curtain; from 1993, following the Velvet Divorce, when Bratislava became the capital of the newly formed State of Slovakia to the entry in the European Union; from the entry in the Shenghen area until today, when they are a functional metropolitan region.
Nowadays, Vienna presents itself as a rather compact city, surrounded by a Green Belt and crossed by the Danube, following which we arrive at Bratislava. This presents itself as far less dense than the “Twin City” (which is approximately 4 times more populated with relatively the same surface) and has grown mainly towards the East because of the presence of the Iron Curtain so close to the city centre on the South West, where we find the Petržalka neighbourhood, densely built up on one side of the border and then agricultural landscape on the Austrian side.
The long separation due to the Iron Curtain has still left traces in the landscape and in the memory of the people, but the recent ‘Europeanisation’ process has dimmed the line of the border. It is important, nonetheless, to be aware of the critical historical changes over the past decades as these have still strong impact on the territory and the decision making taking place.
With the entry into the EU the region has lived a major shift from being respectively the periphery of the western or eastern block to being the centre and heart of the new Europe.
This condition if also experienced on a daily level by the inhabitants, as it is becoming more common to live in one country and work in the other. There are in fact approximately 1.000 daily cross-border commuters (ESPON, 2010), meaning that although the system is polarised by the two capitals, also the in-between urban subsystem has gained much more importance. A counter effect of this phenomenon is that the area between the two cities also presents problems of land speculation as there has been sometimes a very fast pace of construction, especially for suburban family houses, and particularly on the Austrian side. Moreover, there has been often the phenomenon that owners of building areas would just wait for the land value to rise (Schremmer, 2003).
The buffer zone of what used to be the Iron Curtain is still evident, both physically as the border runs through agricultural fields where there is very low density, and mentally, as the division is still in the mind of many people (Haccou, 2010).
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