Inexpensive living space due to overbuilt train stations
Inexpensive housing is scarce in cities and town centers. Building on the meadow, on the other hand, is associated with soil sealing and urban sprawl and their negative consequences.
In the future more building over railway stations etc.
“We want to gain areas that are already sealed for residential construction through multiple uses,” says Andrea Klambauer (NEOS), Salzburg’s Housing Councilor. At the same time, living should be thought of together with mobility and additional individual transport by car should be maximized. The study focused on traffic junctions such as train stations, where the building density is to be increased.
Access to transport hubs important
As the study authors – the architects Martin Oberascher and Klaus Bidner – emphasized, the aim is to appeal to people who want to do without their own car and value good public transport connections – students, senior citizens or young families, for example: “It’s no longer so important , in which city or community you live exactly, but that you can access one of these hubs as quickly as possible. Then I can be in Linz, Munich or Vienna quickly from Hallein or Oberndorf.”
The architects want to avoid singular usage functions: “So not the train station, park-and-ride areas, shops and living areas next to each other, but everything is centered and compact.”
Elongated bar as the basic form
Because platforms and parking lots are often arranged in a linear manner, an elongated base block would be ideal for construction projects. Structures such as park-and-ride spaces for commuters are housed on the ground floor or lower floors: “The apartments or additional communal functions are then built on top of this,” says Oberascher. Stations that need to be renovated would be particularly suitable for projects – or the stations of the planned Salzburg regional city railway S-Link.
Deal with numerous problems
Structures with apartments can reach up to the tracks – or even tower over them. This poses a variety of challenges. Vibrations and noise would be technically easy to get under control – for example how to align corridors and adjoining rooms to the tracks. And there are other hurdles. From a superstructure of more than 50 meters in length, one is considered a tunnel under railway law. Railway superstructures are also more expensive, which, for reasons of economy, requires higher building densities – i.e. more floors. Last but not least, the availability of space is also a problem. Even if plots of land are vacant, transport companies sometimes use them as storage areas during renovation and conversion work.
Concrete example Oberndorf
Specifically, the authors of the study looked at a solution model for the small town of Oberndorf in Salzburg’s Flachgau region with 6,000 inhabitants – the second smallest municipality in terms of area in the federal state. The municipality is on the Salzburg local railway. “We want to create affordable living space in the city center, especially for young people who want to continue living in the community in which they grew up,” says Mayor Georg Djundja (SPÖ). A concrete project is still a long way off, but the landowner Salzburg AG is showing interest.