Image: Valentina Dirmaier
The fact that Austria is still the leader in land use and in reckless concreting is emphasized again and again. Far less public awareness is a development that is at least as appalling and has long since caused irreparable damage to the landscape.
One of my two homes is only a kilometer from the Bavarian border, and there, as far as zoning is concerned, a completely different world opens up. Closed settlement areas, no fraying and in between, apart from farmsteads, almost no building activity. These days, after my appearance at the Leipzig Book Fair, I traveled to Saxony-Anhalt for a week, the same picture. When hiking in the Harz Mountains, you follow in Heinrich Heine’s footsteps, as was the case here a long time ago, through nothing but fields and forests from village to village, while the urban sprawl in large parts of Austria hardly offers an all-round view anywhere without scattered settlements or single-family houses simply popped into the area.
If rethinking in other areas of environmental protection is at least tentative – and thus much too slow – it seems as if the local development concepts of the communities, which were intended as a tried and tested countermeasure against uncontrolled growth, are becoming increasingly obsolete. What I have to perceive in my immediate geographical environment as avoidable serious new building sins in still intact landscape relics stunned me. I’m also stunned that we still put up with all of this with a typical Austrian shrug: It’s a shame, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
It is often said that Bavaria is closest to us in terms of mentality in our neighborhood. In this area, which immediately catches the eye, there is of course a difference like day and night. Although Söder’s empire is characterized by great economic dynamism, although it is particularly open to new manufacturing technologies and attracts investors from all over, people there, like in other parts of Germany, afford to draw clear building boundaries. You afford it because you don’t want to end up like Austria. It has nothing to do with looking backwards, with old-fashioned romanticism, if you make sure that it doesn’t proliferate everywhere. With aesthetics yes. And with immense costs for exploration far out, from the streets to the canal.
Yes, and there are also the interests of animals, plants and tourists to mention. The colorful brochures of the tourism industry pretend that Austria is beautiful. We have come a long way on the way to completely wasting this capital. What if the scales fell from the eyes of many guests one day?
Ludwig Laher is a writer and lives in the countryside in St. Pantaleon and in the city of Vienna.
: Nachrichten
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