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Students design 'Hypotopia' city

The Local Austria
The Local Austria - [email protected]
Students design 'Hypotopia' city
3-D image of the city and its river. Image: Die Milliardenstadt

A group of students from Vienna’s Technical University (TU) have designed a city for 102,574 inhabitants that would cost €19 billion - the same amount of money it will cost Austria to bail out the Hypo Alpe Adria bank.

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They have made a small scale plastic model of the city which will be on show from October in Vienna’s Karlsplatz.

The students calculated that the €19 billion would cover everything - from the subsoil excavation to the construction of buildings and institutions.

They have named the fictitious city Hypotopia, and designed it in order to make the financial and social context of modern urban development visible.

Hypotopia would cover an area of 12.17 square km, and would represent the sixth largest city in Austria. A digital 3-D model of the city can be seen on the group’s website.

Hypo Alpe Adria has received €5.5 billion in state aid since 2008. Hypo's costs will push state debt to 80 percent of gross domestic product this year.

Opposition parties have demanded a parliamentary investigation into how Austria got into this mess and whether it really had to take over the bank, which nearly collapsed after breakneck expansion fuelled by debt guarantees from its home province of Carinthia.















 

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