40 Years as the Provincial Capital: St. Pölten

I must admit that the ‘aha’ moment was significant. When we walked the 12 stops spread across the city centre and Zentrum Nord for the first time, I had my own – not necessarily thrilling – story to tell about each location, one that had unfolded over the past six years since I moved to St. Pölten. As someone who wasn’t born here and is living in a small town for the first time, I lack not only a point of comparison with what the town was like 40 years ago, but also an understanding of what it means to have to hold its own as a liveable place in the shadow of Vienna.

But step by step and stop by stop, I realised that something fundamental was changing in the way I perceived my new home town. With these 12 stops, the Lower Austria Provincial Museum and the City Museum have provided an insight into the recent history of the city (and the province), offering visual material and explanations that illustrate just how much St. Pölten has changed for the better in just 40 years, and how optimistic we can be not only about the city’s future but also about our society as a whole.

I can only highlight a few of the stops here and invite you to explore the full experience for yourselves or join us on a walk. We’ve made this a little easier for those interested – and, as always, particularly for schools – by incorporating all 12 stops into various interactive quests, ensuring they’ll remain accessible not just after the anniversary year has ended, but with a healthy dose of gamification.

This article is not intended as a pardon for past mistakes in town planning and urban development that have been criticised, but I would like to express my respect for what has been achieved – because even if there have been some serious blunders here and there and many things could work better, the people who have steered the city’s fortunes over the past decades can look back on an impressive body of work.

The exhibition takes visitors to ten key locations in the city, with the two museums serving as the starting and finishing points. Each stop focuses on a different aspect of life. Contemporary images illustrate the changes taking place in both the city and the countryside. This explains the project title ‘City + Countryside = 40’, which takes a little getting used to.

 1 St. Pölten City Museum
 2 Town Hall Square
 3 Railway Station
 4 University Hospital
 5 University of Applied Sciences
 6 Cathedral Square
 7 Alumnat Garden
 8 Former Synagogue
 9 Altoonapark
 10 Gateway to the Landhaus
 11 Klangturm
 12 Museum of Lower Austria

Whilst walking the route between the stations, we realised that they had not been curated with the walker in mind, but rather with a view to the aspect of life that each is intended to showcase. As a result, the eight stops between the State Museum and the City Museum are very easily accessible on foot, whilst two stops are somewhat out of the way, resulting in a distance of 3.8 km and a walking time of at least three hours if you wish to explore the stops in detail. We have addressed this issue by creating different route options.

Option 1 starts in the Alumnatsgarten and follows a sort of ‘S’ shape, first heading south towards the government district and then north towards the University of Applied Sciences: https://ark.greensteps.me/commons/stp/quest/40-years-provential-state-capital-st-polten 

Option 2 starts at the University of Applied Sciences and heads south from there to the Klangturm, ending at the gate to the Landhaus:  https://ark.greensteps.me/community/stp/quest/40-years-stp-version-2 

Option 3 covers only the stops in the town centre, thereby shortening the distance to 2.4 km, but includes a few additional sights that shift the focus from culture to nature: https://ark.greensteps.me/community/stp/quest/40-years-stp-version-3 
 

Educational projects in public spaces often involve substantial budgets. For the ‘Stadt+Land=40’ project, curators from the State and City Museums carried out research and adapted the content accordingly. In addition, 12 panels, each measuring 3 x 3 metres, were produced, mounted on concrete elements and distributed across the city. The scale of the project is commensurate with the anniversary, but at least the display elements will be disposed of or put into storage by the end of 2026 at the latest – the exhibition, comprising 12 stations, officially ends on 1 November.

With the Green Steps ARK, the curated content is digitised and permanently preserved at the desired locations – without leaving a carbon footprint in the form of concrete plinths or similar single-use materials. Furthermore, the content is not only available in German or English, but can be accessed in all the commonly spoken languages in our city, where, according to the city council, over 120 different nationalities live. If you’re multilingual, why not try one of the three featured quests in Turkish, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Serbian or Hungarian!

We are delighted with a new feature on the ARK that enables teachers to incorporate the content of the quest into the next lesson in the classroom, for example as a revision session. The REVIEW function displays selected questions relating to the stations on the interactive whiteboard in any language and allows teachers to link experiences in the open air directly to classroom learning. So, when the weather is fine, there’s all the more reason to head outside and explore one of St. Pölten’s 40-plus quests. When the weather is bad, the topics can be covered in class instead of outdoors.
 

That the local council in St. Pölten will also recognise the value of our project (other towns have already done so) and make it possible for children and families to collect the trading cards from these locations (and now over 500 attractions) – for example, by picking them up at the citizens’ service centre – and to keep them in a scrapbook already designed by Green Steps. Gamification can be analogue too :)

Read more:
• https://www.museumnoe.at/de/40Jahre-Stationen 
• https://www.st-poelten.at/news/20027-ausstellung-zu-40-jahre-landeshauptstadt 
• The Mobile Campus 4.0 as an educational strategy for climate change adaptation 
• Daniel Wahl: Reconnecting to place for planetary health