Up-to-date and digital
The multi-purpose city map
The Vienna multi-purpose city map (MZK) is a digital map with optimum depth of field that is updated in regular intervals. It provides its users - urban development planners, traffic planners, architects or property developers - access to the city's topography, in up to three dimensions. As long as 25 years ago, the Vienna city administration decided to come up with a map offering a degree of accuracy equalling a scale of 1:200. Today, this map has become a major resource for planning and administrative activities in Vienna.
The digital map of Vienna or MZK was developed to record the structure of the city with the objective of creating a map suitable for multiple purposes.
MZK is a GIS-based tool that is used by Vienna's municipal administration for planning purposes. It has scales of 1:200 to 1:100,000. Representing the latter scale requires some generalisations, for which you need suitable data gained from surveying and aerial photography.
The digital map is produced in three steps:
- Terrestrial surveying of all the roads and streets:
involving the digital recording of the position and height of public traffic area boundaries (such as building contours, fences, walls, limits of green spaces) and street ‘fixtures' (such as curb stones, water hydrants, masts, trees, rails, ironwork). - Photogrammetric evaluation:
Existing aerial photographs are superimposed on current aerial photographs to check and, where applicable, re-evaluate map contents. Such contents include building contours, routes around trees, shrubs or groups of trees, footpaths, fences and enclosures, sealed surfaces. Objects are encoded according to object class in order to permit users to select specific views. - Cartographic editing:
Texts and symbols are added to the map for supplementary information, standard output scales and sheet formats are prepared, and contours are linked up to form areas
The MZK forms the basis for several special follow-up products. One of these is the ‘area MZK', in which contours are linked up to form areas, and land-use classes (buildings, roadways, pavements, etc.) are defined as an additional feature
Incorporating existing information on the height of buildings into this map produces a three-dimensional structure model in which buildings are shown in the form of prisms. If information about roofs is recorded as well, this results in a 3D model of the city.
The MZK and all of its follow-up products are updated every three years.
The urban development bodies would not be able to act and react as quickly and flexibly as they do today without the MZK, since each new project would require separate surveying.
Sections of the MZK can be ordered from MA 41 Customer Services or from the online shop via the Internet. This service is available both to private users (e.g. architectural firms, property developers) and public authorities.
MA41_01_Multi-purpose City Map 
Facts & Figures
- Initial map preparation period: > 10 years
- More than 3 million terrestrial grid points
- Aerial photography flight covering the whole of Vienna once a year
- Area to survey: 415 km2
- 2009 = 25th anniversary of completion of first MZK sheet
- Copyright: City of Vienna, MA 41
Contact
DI (FH) Volker Schaffler
Tel. +43 1 4000 84269
Fax +43 1 4000 7997
volker.schaffler@tinavienna.at
Links