Modernist mass housing in Europe: Comparative perspectives in western and eastern cities (1950s-1970s)

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to compare and contrast modernist European mass housing projects built from the 1950s to the 1970s, namely during the period of rapid urban growth, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. (As a reference, we take the size of French 'grands ensembles', more than 1000 housing units.) This comparison could easily focus on the well-known characteristics of the socialist cities, due to the different nature of their urban policies, the absence of a free land market or the relative impact of industrialisation in construction. Nevertheless, many urban planning concepts and urban processes were evidently shared by ideological, political and economic blocs during that period. Despite their different names-housing estates in the UK and in other English-speaking countries; grands ensembles in France; Grobsiedlungen in the Republic of Germany; polígonos de vivienda in Spain; panelaky in some Socialist countries such as the former Czechoslovakia; Plattenbau in East Germany, etc.-most of these estates rely on similar urban forms. Therefore while mass social housing is a concept difficult to define, it is one with a clear morphological dimension: "a form and landscape characterised by clusters of blocks and towers in a space subjected to the zoning rules" (Dufaux and Fourcaut 2004, 45-61). The question is to what extent these similar urban forms are the result of the dissemination of modernist international urban culture. The text explores the nuances of these opposed positions, both those which consider functionalist urbanism-and modernist urban forms- responsible for the failure of many of these estates and those which claim that sociological and economic factors to be the cause of their degradation in ghettos. The aim is to understand to what extent the project might be responsible for the low quality and the early obsolescence of most of these estates.