Public lwecture: June 15, 2016, Knjižnica Bogdana Ogrizovića (Zagreb, Preradovićeva 5), 18h

Vienna pentimento: the Austrian capital seen through a comparison with Miami, Florida (USA) and Edmonton, Alberta (Canada)

Professor Joseph F. Patrouch, Department of History and Classics

Director, Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta

Canada

ABSTRACT

“Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.”

(Michel Foucault, 1967)

This presentation will attempt to juxtapose concerns raised in Edmonton, Canada concerning the presence of méti or First Nation histories of the city with related issues raised by the discovery of the so-called “Miami Circle” in the United States and use these concerns and issues as ways of reflecting on the changing urban fabric of today’s Vienna. Now that the majority of residents of Vienna are not originally from the city, what consequences might this have for the city planners, administrators, and politicians whose policies configure that place?  The Gastarbeiter of the 1960’s and 1970’s, followed by the refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s and the migrants of the years following Austria’s accession to the European Union have transformed the city and will continue to do so.  What layers of the past and present will be revealed and which submerged in the decades to come?