Ottakring (German pronunciation: [ˈɔtaˌkʀɪŋ] ^ⓘ) is the 16th District in the city of Vienna, Austria (German: 16. Bezirk, Ottakring). It is located west of the central districts, north of Penzing and south of Hernals. Ottakring has some heavily populated urban areas with many residential buildings. It was formed from the independent villages of Ottakring and Neulerchenfeld in 1892.

The district of Ottakring is located in the western part of Vienna between the Gürtel (a substantial road around Vienna) and the hills of the Wienerwald (Vienna forest). The district of Hernals borders to the north, Josefstadt and Neubau to the east, and Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus and Penzing to the south. The highest points in the district are the Gallitzinberg (449 m), also known as Wilheminenberg because a palace (Schloss Wilheminenberg) is situated on its slope.

The buildings vary considerably in style. The working class settled around the industries and factories near the Gürtel, resulting in a dense checkerboard pattern of residential housing. A little further up is a collection of villas around the Ottakring cemetery surrounded by an extensive number of deciduous trees.

The district is made up of 36.7% green space (of which 22% is forest), 45.4% buildings, and 17.9% transportation. Thaliastraße is the busiest and most commercially important street in the district. A total of 1.23% of the land area is used for agriculture. The once important vineyards have mostly disappeared. Gardens are found primarily around castle Wilhelminenberg and towards the border to Penzing.

The original Ottakring was founded about 1,000 years ago by Bavarian settlers who cleared a small patch of forest on the cityward slope of the Gallitzinberg. (The exact date is not known because, as with most other places in the area, no document has survived.) It was situated where the Ottakring Cemetery is today, straddling a creek (the Ottakringer Bach) which now has completely disappeared from view, forming part of Vienna's drainage systems. Originally the Ottakringer Bach flowed along what today are the streets of Ottakringer Straße, Abelegasse, and Thaliastraße; through Lerchenfelderstraße and the Minoritenplatz; and into the Donaukanal, an arm of the Danube river. The "oldest Ottakring" settlement was completely destroyed in 1683 during the Battle of Vienna. The village was rebuilt further downstream on the Ottakringer Bach, closer to Vienna. This nucleus, parts of which survived into the 1980s, was what became known as Alt-Ottakring in the 19th and 20th century.

In 1888, emperor Franz Joseph I declared that he wanted to unite Vienna with the surrounding villages. The Lower Austrian government passed a law, the Eingemeindung der Vororten zu Wien (Incorporation of Villages to Vienna) in 1890. On 1 January 1892 the resolution took effect. Despite initial resistance, the independent villages of Ottakring and Neulerchenfeld were merged into the 16th district of Vienna, which had 106,861 residents.

After incorporation, the area experienced rapid growth. By 1910, 177,687 people lived in Ottakring. Though the number of employment opportunities was limited, the number of workers was extremely high. This encouraged industries to move to the area.

After World War I, residential construction boomed. Between 1922 and 1934, 28 Gemeindebauanlagen (community housing projects/municipal apartment complexes) with more than 4,517 apartments were constructed. Among this number were the 1,587 apartments of the Sandleitenhof, which was the largest apartment complex in Vienna to date. The economic collapse of the 1930s brought great adversity to the district with unemployment surging to over 50%. The brief Austrian Civil War of 1934 brought major instability and fighting to the region. The local insurgency overpowered the army of the original Social Democratic Party, and the residential buildings escaped mostly unharmed. There was however heavy fighting around the workers' housing in the Kreitnergasse Street.