Donau City

Donau City, or Vienna DC, is a new part of Vienna's 22nd District Donaustadt, next to both the Reichsbrücke and the left bank of the Danube's 21.1 km new channel, Neue Donau.

Construction work for the first building on this site, the Andromeda Tower, started in 1996.

Although the Danube river has been inextricably connected with Vienna, for centuries, it had played only a subordinate role in the city of Vienna.

Unlike in many other cities, the Danube River, because of the numerous floods it regularly caused, was omitted from the urban area. Buildings grew up in Vienna on both sides of the Danube - but not up to the Danube. Only after extensive flood-control engineering and the creation of the New Danube relief channel, with Danube Island, in the 1970s, was the surrounding cityscape of the Danube of interest to builders.

The establishment of Donau City had its origins in the organization of the Vienna International Garden Festival in 1964. This was on a site of a former landfill, later superficially rehabilitated, in an area between the Old Danube and the New Danube.

In 1962, the construction of the Danube Tower began, and two years later, the Garden Festival was held. The site of the garden show was known as Donaupark. Not far from Donaupark, in 1967, the planning of the UNO-City was started, opened in 1979. Through the construction of the U1 and the Reichsbruecke (Empire Bridge), the UN-City had a high-ranking access to the traffic system.

The terrain gained increasing importance with the opening of the congress center Austria Center Vienna in 1987. Next, at the end of the 1980s, there were plans to hold a Vienna-Budapest EXPO along the northern bank of the Danube in Vienna. However, the planned EXPO 1995 was canceled because a majority of Viennese voters rejected it in a referendum on the project. The site was then developed for a subsequent use as a multifunctional district.

In 1991, the EXPO organizing corporation was succeeded by the Vienna Danube Region Development Corporation (WED), with major Austrian banks and insurance companies (BA-CA, Erste Bank, Raiffeisen Bank for Labor and Economy, Invest Bank AG, UNIQA, Wiener Städtische) as principal shareholders. WED owns the area and is responsible for its overall development. Within a few years, the district became a second urban center in Vienna, with residential and office buildings, research facilities, recreational facilities and event locations.

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