How Vienna Built an Island and What it did With it Next

The Viennese adore the River Danube. Over the centuries, they’ve depended on it for drinking water, food, and the movement of people and goods. It flows, after all, through four more capital cities before it empties into the Black Sea. On New Year’s Eve and at weddings, Austrians dance to Strauss’ joyous love song for the river, The Blue Danube waltz. Even today, the river is such a part of city life that it seems the residents believe that it runs through their back garden. Vienna has the Danube to thank for its prosperity but, for centuries, it also lived under threat of capricious, catastrophic floods. Picture Austria and you think of mountains but the skiing capitals of Salzburg and Innsbruck are hours away by train. Vienna, home to a quarter of Austria’s 8.8 million people, sits in a geographical bowl. It’s a risky place to put a city which was, until 100 years ago, the centre of an empire. Even in the 20th century, the fear that large parts of the city could be washed away was a constraint on Vienna’s growth. <a href="https://mairibunce.medium.com/how-vienna-built-an-island-and-what-it-did-with-it-next-6916e6166e42">Read More</a>