Building schematic of Vienna in the late 1920s

Abstract

Urban archives provide rich information on historical data. To a large extent, these data are not available in machine-readable format and therefore not linkable with other datasets. The “Häuser-Kataster der Bundeshauptstadt Wien” is a building schematic for the city of Vienna for the end of the 1920s. While this schematic was used as a knowledge base for real estate and finance business about 100 years ago, it has been used in the 2000s to manually map the historic building periods by property. We use the analog version and produced a machine-readable version to assign the historic addresses, building periods and number of floors to a building stock model down the road. The dataset has been complemented with codes of cadastral communities from the late 2010s to enable geotagging of the historic building data. To avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts by others and to share the dataset with urban historians and the public, we provide the dataset under creative common license.