Red Vienna

Released in 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal posters drew their composition and styling from the New Deal’s WPA-National Park Service campaign (1938-41). Featuring well-known urban parks, AOC’s series hint, laterally, at the nation’s earlier coordination of conservation, employment, and the arts. But why limit our imagination to picturesque tropes, passive scenes, or the problematic concept – ecologically and socially – of National Park precincts? As the Covid recession and a rising Abolitionist movement have underlined, our ‘visions’ for combating climate change must foreground everyday environmental justice, sustainable socio-economic relationships, and keep pace with the Green New Deal’s own policy ambitions.

This GND poster series thus starts from an alternate park precedent: Red Vienna’s squatters’ settlements and the recovery programs they inspired. Initially informal, Red Vienna’s settlements appropriated the city’s peripheral park lands, as the Austrian Empire and economy collapsed during WWI. They began as a mix of humble shacks, agricultural allotments, and emigres. By 1915, different settlement ‘associations’ had formed to organize leases, trade materials, and host events. By1921, Vienna’s umbrella settlement organization, OSVK, could boast 40-50,000 members, a ‘Building Bureau’ co-administered with the new Austrian Republic, and significant overlap with the Social Democratic City Council and its’ Settlement Office.

Learn more about Red Vienna, as inspiration & as captured by the poster: gnd-vienna-background