Austria has no sea access, no navy, few natural resources. Vienna is strategically not in a particularly amazing position compared to most other cities around. It's not clear to me what the fundamental reasons are why Vienna should be a large city other than that it historically was one, declined a bit and somehow regrew.
I think it's great here, but I also cannot really understand why.
While Vienna is located at the crossroads between the planes and the Alps along the Danube making it modestly fortifiable from previous Ottoman incursions in 1529 and essential hub for quarterly markets. As the easternmost capital not to fall to the Ottomans, merchants that went to the Viennese markets would have valuable first arbitrage opportunities on eastern spices, textiles, medicines, gems, and ceramics coming from the east (the taxes on which solidified the Hapsburg position). However, it wasn’t until the siege of 1683 [1] that resulted in the Ottomans crushing defeat and withdrawal much like a port city by a sea only to see the sea recede.
In that withdrawal the Ottomans left behind enough coffee in their abandoned provisions that the Viennese were able to open Europe’s first coffee house and cement Vienna as Europes premier nexus for academia :-)
austria had sea access right up to WW1. and vienna only started to decline after that. vienna is also on the danube, a river that is connected to the main and rhine and allows ships to travel all the way from the north sea to the black sea. that makes it better positioned than paris, berlin or munich in this aspect. although i doubt that the river had much to do with its regrowth in the last few decades. it is more likely that its closeness to eastern europe made it an attractive destination once the eastern bloc fell apart, which was just before the time vienna started growing again.
Nearly all large cities today are large cities because they historically were one, leading to economies of scale in infrastructure and agglomeration economies in the production and exchange of goods and services. Ease of sea access is not a major determinant of a city's growth & prosperity today.
Many cities historically grew around ports due to the labor intensity of break-bulk shipping and the difficulty and expense of overland goods transport but modern container ports require relatively few employees and can easily move freight intermodally. The old piers in London and Hamburg and New York and San Francisco and their adjacent factories have all been redeveloped, and the working container ports have all relocated away from the city center to places where rail & highway access is easier, to places like Newark, Oakland, and Felixstowe.
Austria was mostly about mathematics, engineering and human sciences. There was an Austro-Hungarian Navy, and Josef Ressel gave the Royal Navy the world's most powerful navy with his invention of the propeller. :D
Maths was stronger in Germany, especially in Heidelberg. Riemann, Hilbert et al. were all Germans.
There was also a fairly strong Polish school of maths and formal logic, but it can only be called Austrian with some stretching of the word; while Galicia was part of the empire, it was about as far (ethnically, culturally and physically) from Vienna as possible.
Austria has no sea access, no navy, few natural resources. Vienna is strategically not in a particularly amazing position compared to most other cities around. It's not clear to me what the fundamental reasons are why Vienna should be a large city other than that it historically was one, declined a bit and somehow regrew.
I think it's great here, but I also cannot really understand why.