Population of Vienna growing faster than previously thought

The population of Vienna, Austria's largest city, is growing even faster than previous calculations forecast it would, with 33,000 new residents recorded in the national capital in 2014 alone.

This means the city of Vienna is growing at the fastest rate since the end of the Second World War, and if the trend continues, the population will climb from its current 1.74 million residents to over 2 million residents by the year 2029, Vienna City Administration's statistics department announced Friday.

Additionally, by 2022, the city will grow by 150,000 people per year, roughly the size of the city of Salzburg, and by 2034 this will increase further to 265,000, almost the current number of residents in the country's second-largest city, Graz.

The statistics department said the growth was being spurred largely by an increase in birth rates along with immigration from other Austrian states as well as other European countries.

This is also making it a younger city-state, with the average age of residents to become the lowest amongst all Austrian states either this year or at by 2016, a reversal of the long-standing trend of elderly people making up the larger proportion of Vienna's citizens.

Overall, the growth has led to Vienna overtaking the populations of Hamburg, Warsaw, and Budapest to become the seventh largest city in Europe, behind London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Paris, and Bucharest. Endit