Our trip for today consisted of visiting a district city outside of Vienna, a guided-tour of the Museum Quarters, and exploring around for the last night in the city. The first destination was to a new developing city called Seetown Aspern, that incorporates the idea of producing a green city. The city has a goal to inhabit over 20,000 citizens by 2028. One of the project’s main focus was traffic. It wasn’t vehicle traffic. The project’s main priority was to get rid of the need for the use of vehicles and focus on pedestrians. So everything in the city (stores, markets, was in a 10-15 minute walk. The coolest part is that I learned about cities like Seetown Aspern in my Environmental Planning class. The term for these fully environmental green cities is New Urbanism. In America, new urbanism has been produced in places like Seaside, Florida and a couple other cities. It was really interesting to see everything in reality and the endless possibilities of developing a city that is safest for humans and the environment.
The next stop of the day was back in Vienna’s 7th district, the Museumsquartier (Museum Quarters). The quarter has two museums of modern and historical art and includes Austrian cultural. We meet up with an architect who owns his own company in the city and he showed us how he transformed a busy street with cars into a public, open area for people to walk around and shop while minimizing traffic usage. He showed us how the area become popular with tourism compared to previously being run-downed and poor area. A perfect example for the new street creating a new area for tourism is like the High Line in New York City except it isn’t a park. It is unbelievable what planning can do to a bad area to transforming the area into a booming place for everyone to enjoy.
After visiting the destinations for the day, I had the decision to either go back to the hostel to sleep or go explore the sight-seeing of Vienna with a few other students. Although a pillow sounded amazing, I couldn’t resist to the exploring on my last night in Vienna. So the exploration included visiting the palace Schonbrunn which is pretty much like a mini Versailles and then going to Prater which is a small amusement park.
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