Competition in Transition: An Exploration of Water and Land Use in the Wien River Valley Through the Eyes of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Engineers

Abstract

Between 1847 and 1857 engineering students under the civil engineer and architect, Josef Stummer (1808-1891) created a rich cartographic and written description of Wien River, the largest tributary of the Viennese Danube. The highly dynamic flow regime, the riverbed and shores are described as intensively used in manifold ways by different actors. Townspeople used the water's energy to drive mills and process water for dyeing works, intanneries and laundries. Others extracted gravel from the riverbed or dried laundry on the shores, people grew vegetables and animals grazed. While the city grew along the shores of the river, water and land uses were still influenced by old manorial regulations. The river itself, with its natural dynamic change between periods of water scarcity and torrential floods, had an important bearing on the possible uses. In the 1850s, Wien River valley was a waterscape on the verge of change from an agrarian to an industrial socio-metabolic regime. Only a few years after the engineers had conducted their survey, the mill creeks were abandoned. 40 years later city authorities intervened with extensive regulation and constructed a railway line in the riverbed. We use Stummer's material to tell an environmental history of competition over water and land in the Wien River waterscape during this transitional period.