Viennese district

The districts of Vienna (German: Wiener Gemeindebezirke) are the 23 named city sections of Vienna, Austria, which are numbered for easy reference. They were created from 1850 onwards, when the city area was enlarged by the inclusion of surrounding communities. Although they fill a similar role, Vienna's municipal districts are not administrative districts (Bezirke) as defined by the constitution; Vienna is a statutory city and as such is a single administrative district in its entirety.

The seats of Bezirksvorsteher (political district head) and Bezirksvertretung (district assembly) are located in the respective districts, with the exception of the 14th district, whose political representatives reside in the 13th district (to which much of the 14th had belonged until 1938). The Magistratisches Bezirksamt (district office of the city administration, not headed by the political district head) in four locations combines services for two districts:

Hence Vienna has 19 district offices.

Since 2002, in Austria, instead of the police the mayors are responsible for objects found in public places. In Vienna, the mayor has ordered the district offices to perform the functions police stations have performed concerning found objects until then. Since 2005, by federal law the districts in all of Austria are responsible for issuing passports and registering residents, tasks until then covered in Vienna by the Federal Police. The mayor of Vienna again has ordered the district offices of the Magistrat to perform these functions.

Optimizing overhead costs has gone farther with the Federal Police in Vienna. The 23 District Police Commands in 2002 have been reduced to 14 City Police Commands. Reducing the number of small districts by mergers, as happened in Berlin after the 1990 reunification of Germany, has not even been discussed in Vienna, since the district assemblies function as breeding factories for the political parties' representatives.

The boundaries of each district have been shown as a layer on this map. The following are locations of the 23 districts:

By looking at the postal code it can be determined in which district a given address is located: 1XXA - 1 denotes Vienna, XX the district number (if it is a single digit then with a leading zero), A is the number of the post office (irrelevant in this case, usually zero). Example: 1070 for Neubau. Exceptions of that are 1300 for the Vienna International Airport located in Lower Austria near Schwechat, 1400 for the UN Complex, 1450 for the Austria Center Vienna, and 1500 for the Austrian UN-Forces.

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