A Techno-river in the Making

Wien River is a small but very dynamic tributary to the Viennese Danube. Being both an important resource and a nuisance to city dwellers, it structured urban production and expansion for many centuries. In our study we locate power, or influence, in terms not only of agents but also of space-time. We elaborate on three different periods and related aspects of Wien River’s transformation as a techno-river. Arrangements to harvest the water’s energy are scrutinized in the first section. For several centuries since the Middle Ages, watermills, millstreams and weirs formed a delicate large-scale ensemble paralleling the suburban course of Wien River. The second section traces the manifold patchworked attempts to control fluvial dynamics and to stabilize the riverbed from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. The breaking-up and technical “reassembly” of the urban river and its entire catchment is addressed in the third section, focusing on the properties and legacies of a comprehensive river-training undertaken between 1895 and 1906. Today, sophisticated artificial structures mediate between different layers of a hybrid hydraulic landscape. From those most hidden to those most prominently on display, the present techno-river is best conceptualized as one big entangled “wild artefact”. As our longue durée study is able to demonstrate, the shifting connections between natural, technological and social processes and their material precipitates impacted on and were structured by the dynamics of urbanization.