Constructing Home in Vienna’s Municipal Housing: Exclusions, Architectural Utopias and ‘Lightness’ in a City of Housing for All

Sarah Leaney

doi:10.1177/13607804251412681

Constructing Home in Vienna’s Municipal Housing: Exclusions, Architectural Utopias and ‘Lightness’ in a City of Housing for All

Sarah Leaney

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Drawing upon life history interviews with 11 residents from three social housing study sites in Vienna, this article explores how the social and material provision of social housing transforms residents’ experience of home. The article locates residents’ everyday practices of homemaking within the context of ‘Red Vienna’, a city branding of housing for all, and explores the construction of boundaries, exclusions, and difference within Vienna’s social housing policy. Building upon sociological theorisations of housing stigma, the article argues that while social housing provision in Vienna remains substantially decommodified, discourses of deserving and undeserving residents reflect similar processes of the stigmatisation of social housing documented across Europe. The article considers Vienna’s municipal housing as a form of ‘architectural utopia’, suggesting its socialist foundations continue to shape residents’ everyday life, orchestrating social interaction and offering transformative possibilities for subjectivity formation.

Original language	English
Number of pages	22
Journal	Sociological Research Online
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/13607804251412681
Publication status	Published - 24 Jun 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

architecture
exclusion
home
social housing
stigma
Vienna

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leaney-2026-constructing-home-in-vienna-s-municipal-housing-exclusions-architectural-utopias-and-lightness-in-a-city-ofFinal published version, 8.37 MBLicence: CC BY

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abstract = "Drawing upon life history interviews with 11 residents from three social housing study sites in Vienna, this article explores how the social and material provision of social housing transforms residents{\textquoteright} experience of home. The article locates residents{\textquoteright} everyday practices of homemaking within the context of {\textquoteleft}Red Vienna{\textquoteright}, a city branding of housing for all, and explores the construction of boundaries, exclusions, and difference within Vienna{\textquoteright}s social housing policy. Building upon sociological theorisations of housing stigma, the article argues that while social housing provision in Vienna remains substantially decommodified, discourses of deserving and undeserving residents reflect similar processes of the stigmatisation of social housing documented across Europe. The article considers Vienna{\textquoteright}s municipal housing as a form of {\textquoteleft}architectural utopia{\textquoteright}, suggesting its socialist foundations continue to shape residents{\textquoteright} everyday life, orchestrating social interaction and offering transformative possibilities for subjectivity formation.",

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AB - Drawing upon life history interviews with 11 residents from three social housing study sites in Vienna, this article explores how the social and material provision of social housing transforms residents’ experience of home. The article locates residents’ everyday practices of homemaking within the context of ‘Red Vienna’, a city branding of housing for all, and explores the construction of boundaries, exclusions, and difference within Vienna’s social housing policy. Building upon sociological theorisations of housing stigma, the article argues that while social housing provision in Vienna remains substantially decommodified, discourses of deserving and undeserving residents reflect similar processes of the stigmatisation of social housing documented across Europe. The article considers Vienna’s municipal housing as a form of ‘architectural utopia’, suggesting its socialist foundations continue to shape residents’ everyday life, orchestrating social interaction and offering transformative possibilities for subjectivity formation.

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Constructing Home in Vienna’s Municipal Housing: Exclusions, Architectural Utopias and ‘Lightness’ in a City of Housing for All

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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