Lisa Wögenstein

At the start of the 20th century, Vienna was one of the most densely populated and fastest growing cities of the world. The infrastructure of the city could not support the demographic onslaught, which meant that the poor and the marginal people lived in nooks and crannies of tunnels, canals, ditches and houses filled with other humans and animals. "Ganz unten", which takes its title from Günter Wallraff's famous investigative work about the hard life of Turkish immigrants, is true in two senses: Firstly, literally as the poor were driven to live underground (in Vienna's canals made famous in the Third Man), and secondly, socially, as it depicts the lives of those at the bottom of the social pyramid. "How the other half lives" became a fashionable topic in Vienna at the start of the 20th century - which ultimately triggered the social housing initiatives of the 1920s onwards.

This catalogue to an exhibition in the Wienmuseum, the city of Vienna's historical museum, is a good introduction to 19th and early 20th century urban poverty, but in the wide breadth it covers (from New York to London to Paris to Vienna) it lacks depth. The numerous contributors can only start to introduce their topic to the interested reader when they have to stop to make way for the next author. Fewer contributors and longer texts would have given the narrative more punch. Secondly, the exposition does not connect the story of urban poverty in the late 19th century to what later happened in the 20th century. Otto Neurath and social housing would have been obvious and fruitful threads that the editors missed.… (más)