Constructing Home in Vienna’s Municipal Housing: Exclusions, Architectural Utopias and ‘Lightness’ in a City of Housing for All

Drawing upon life history interviews with 11 residents from three social housing study sites in Vienna, this article explores how the social and material provision of social housing transforms residents’ experience of home. The article locates residents’ everyday practices of homemaking within the context of ‘Red Vienna’, a city branding of housing for all, and explores the construction of boundaries, exclusions, and difference within Vienna’s social housing policy. Building upon sociological theorisations of housing stigma, the article argues that while social housing provision in Vienna remains substantially decommodified, discourses of deserving and undeserving residents reflect similar processes of the stigmatisation of social housing documented across Europe. The article considers Vienna’s municipal housing as a form of ‘architectural utopia’, suggesting its socialist foundations continue to shape residents’ everyday life, orchestrating social interaction and offering transformative possibilities for subjectivity formation.