WIREL … as WI for Wien-Vienna and REL for Religion, is a project addressing the role of religions in shaping social and the demographic structure of the population in the city of Vienna. WIREL aims at reconstructing, analyzing, and forecasting Vienna’s religious composition (in relation to the rest of the country for comparison), based on different characteristics, through the analysis of the different demographic forces shaping this composition and their implications over a period ranging from 1951 to 2051. The main objectives are stratified along this time line. The religious groups under study will be the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, the Muslims, the Orthodox, the Jews, the other religions, and those without religion.
In our research, we will investigate the changes that can be observed in the religious distribution of the population within Vienna in relation to the rest of Austria. The study of the evolution of trends and patterns in religious landscape in Vienna since the end of the Second World War will also address different forces that have been shaping this religious composition at both the city level and at the district level, namely, migration, differential fertility, and religious conversion. These findings will be used in the evaluation of the potential for the future evolution of these forces and the resulting religious landscape of Vienna until the middle of the century.
see also >> PAST – PRESENT – FUTURE
Funding
WIREL received a grant from the WWTF‘s (Vienna Science and Technology Fund) 2010 Diversity-Identity Call.