Districts of Vienna

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vienna is composed of 23 districts (Bezirke), which although they all have their own names are numbered for the sake of convenience.

Legally, they are not districts in the sense of administrative bodies with explicit powers (such as the districts in the other Austrian states, but mere subdivisions of the city administration. However, there are elections on the district level, which gives the representatives of the districts some political power (e.g. in matters of planning, traffic etc.). Also, as a practical matter, the separate administrative buildings for each district (except for the 13th and the 14th districts which share one building) decentralize the municipal administration to some degree, meaning that citizens do not have to travel great distances e.g. to get a new passport.

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.

The numbering of the districts reflects to some degree when they were incorporated into Vienna.

The first district is Vienna's historic centre and used to be the entire city until the mid-19th century.
Districts 2-9 (and 20 which was later separated from the second district) are known as Innenbezirke (inner districts) and composed of the former Vorstädte, which were located inside the Linienwall, the second ring of fortifications around Vienna. Those districts are located within the Gürtel today.
The other districts are known as Außenbezirke (outer districts) and are the former Vororte.