Social Housing in the Middle East

Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity

Kivanç Kilinç, Mohammad Gharipour

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253039866
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

Essays on architecture in Kuwait, Iran, Israel, and other nations in the region, and how it can and must address the needs of local residents. As oil-rich countries in the Middle East are increasingly associated with soaring skyscrapers and modern architecture, attention is being diverted away from the pervasive struggles of social housing in those same urban settings. Social Housing in the Middle East traces the history of social housing—both gleaming postmodern projects and bare-bones urban housing structures—in an effort to provide a wider understanding of marginalized spaces and their impact on identities, communities, and class. While architects may have envisioned utopian or futuristic experiments, these buildings were often constructed with the knowledge and skill sets of local workers, and the housing was in turn adapted to suit the modern needs of residents. This tension between local needs and national aspirations are linked to issues of global importance, including security, migration, and refugee resettlement. The essays collected here consider how culture, faith, and politics influenced the solutions offered by social housing; they provide an insightful look at how social housing has evolved since the nineteenth century and how it will need to adapt to suit the twenty-first. "Essential reading... for architectural and social historians, planners, and policy makers." — CAA Reviews

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INTRODUCTION

Global Modernity and Marginalized Histories of Social Housing in the Middle East

Kıvanç Kılınç and Mohammad Gharipour

THIS VOLUME BRINGS TOGETHER LESS WELL-KNOWN EXAMPLES OF social housing projects in the Middle East to explore transnational connections and their consequences that shaped low-cost dwelling practices in the region. The existing stock and heritage of social housing in the Middle East, as well as policies developed to deal with the housing shortage, are both varied and rich, but the study of these phenomena is scattered at best. Formed in response to this apparent vacuum in scholarship, this book pursues two separate but closely linked agendas.

First, it takes a snapshot of contemporary urbanscapes of the Middle East, where modernist social housing policies of the past century have been ineffective in competing with the neoliberal economic turn of the 1980s and the rampant urban transformation that followed, not to mention the destabilizing influence of ongoing wars, conflict, and political turmoil. Even in oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf, a shortage of adequate and affordable housing remains an enduring yet largely unaddressed problem.¹ From Egypt to Iran, signature tall buildings, urban renewal projects, gentrified neighborhoods, coastal tourism infrastructure, massive shopping malls, and informal settlements are the main markers of Middle Eastern urbanism of the new century, while privatization increasingly takes hold of public spaces.² Issues of security, the growing number of refugee camps, and rural migration to cities are also entangled with the generalized lack of decent housing.

Second, this book contributes to recent, more inclusive architectural history writing traditions. By recounting the diverse practices of social housing in the region and looking beyond elite pursuits of architecture, the contributors respond to the following questions and attempt to write their critical histories: How did social housing contribute to the planning and development of Middle Eastern cities, or how did certain projects delve into contextual issues and the question of modernity in the region? Were solutions proffered that went beyond the much-acclaimed modernist mass housing typologies? What ties these settlements to the historical context, and what local and regional concepts have informed the design of new housing projects since the early twentieth century? How did traveling across diverse communities, cultures, and cities transform layouts? Finally, what is the role of spatial agency? In what ways did homeowners, tenants, and building contractors play a part in the production of the so-called modern vernacular,³ along with architects, planners, and economic patronage of authorities?

In addressing these interlinked agendas exploring current urbanscapes and their various histories, stories gathered in this volume respond to a recent postcolonial turn in urban and architectural studies. In combination, they posit that all places that had their share in the making of what we call the experience of modernity are equal parts of a common human experience, although each also had its own way of dealing with it and, more pointedly, they demonstrate that globalization is not a new word.⁴

Social Housing as a Global Scene of Political Exchanges

Our understanding of social housing covers, very broadly, all types of subsidized housing built by public institutions, municipalities and national governments, or housing agencies for lower-income groups who are in need of accommodation and who, in existing market conditions, could not afford to purchase or rent without subsidies.⁵ We contend that social housing, regardless of whether it is an integral part of an ideological project—such as the Siedlungen in Germany, the Workers’ Communes in China, or the Superquadra in Brazil—is political. It is undoubtedly so, because “since the 19th-century outcry over the living conditions of the working class, housing has had a long and meaningful history as the sphere in which progressive reform has been imagined, debated, and implemented.”⁶ Moreover, developing social housing programs always required an active political imagining and agency, as public bodies seeking to build or supply housing for those who cannot meet the expense on their own do so primarily from a sense of a social contract committed to reforming inequalities.

The first examples of workers’ houses emerged as early as the nineteenth century, when the effects of industrial and urban development became widespread.⁷ But it was in the early twentieth century when the scale and scope of social housing went beyond scattered attempts to provide sufficient habitable tenements to workers. The second CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modern) meeting, which convened in 1929 in Frankfurt, centered on the theme of Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum (Housing for minimal existence).⁸ One concrete response to the search for a minimally designed, healthy, and affordable type of housing was Siedlungen, experimental mass housing quarters built extensively in Germany both before and after World War I.⁹ Earlier schemas of Siedlungen were shaped by an implicit antiurbanism and consisted primarily of detached houses. The terrible living conditions of late-nineteenth-century Mietskasernen (tenements) in Germany played a part in predominantly negative sentiments against typically urban forms such as apartment blocks.¹⁰ Beginning in the early 1920s, mixed complex types, including multistory horizontal and vertical apartment blocks, also appeared. The notion of including gardens, which would enable inhabitants to live closer to nature so as to nurture spiritual and physical health as well as support the household economy by growing vegetables in their respective allotments, however, remained unchanged.¹¹

The short-term success of many housing programs for the lower-income strata in Weimar Germany stemmed from the fact that progressive architects and planners such as Ernst May, Martin Wagner, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and Bruno Taut worked closely with social democratic city governments and thus had the support of administrative bodies.¹² The struggle there for workers’ rights, socialist ideals, and unremitting arguments over the shape of the family merged with the growth of industrial production and the new techniques applied to mass housing.¹³ It is not surprising that, together with minimal housing units, Siedlungen were characterized by the collective activities they provided, and, on a larger scale, were seen as a tool for social reform.

During the interwar and postwar periods, “modern idealism” was at the core of the urban reform and transformation agendas in major European countries.¹⁴ As architectural historian Kenny Cupers has written in The Social Project: Housing Postwar France, the new housing settlements of postwar France embodied the “belief in modern architecture as a vehicle of social progress,” in which social sciences were deployed in the service of urban planning and political management.¹⁵ Many postcolonial regimes implemented modernist projects, echoing similar developmentalist agendas. Furthermore, the post–World War II world, dominated by tensions and competition between the two major camps of the Cold War, as well as the Third World movement of nonaligned nations, witnessed a growing US influence.¹⁶ In addition to missionary and philanthropic activities of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Marshall Aid Programs signed with developing countries and small economies of Europe contributed significantly to the spread of this global influence.¹⁷ US specialists toured the world as consultants, preparing reports for low-cost housing developments in urban and rural areas in India, Turkey, Guatemala, and the Philippines.¹⁸

On the other side of the Cold War aisle were the social housing experiments in Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China. Because all housing in the former Soviet Russia and the Eastern Bloc was technically social housing and, at least in principle, equally distributed to all citizens, the term was never used to signify a specific type of dwelling.¹⁹ After the collective housing experiments of the historical avant-gardes in the 1920s and early 1930s, wherein new typologies that went beyond a more conventional family unit were deployed, post-1950s efforts were largely characterized by huge mass housing programs that relied on prefabricated building technologies to reproduce variations of the microraion (microregion) layout.²⁰ During the same decade, Mao’s China took over the zealous project of bringing “the end of the peasantry, its institutions, and its long-established way of life” with people’s communes. As architectural historian Duanfang Lu vibrantly illustrated in her edited book Third World Modernism, in the communes life was both disciplined and collectivized; local residential units were replaced with modern housing, and “communal food, laundry and nurseries were provided to free women from traditional divisions of labour.”²¹

Many differences in the economy of production, building types, and the scope of projects left aside, social housing endeavors were undertaken by socialist and capitalist regimes somewhat similarly until the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. In the decades that followed, states’ professed agency in the production of social housing, and their direct involvement in both planning and construction, significantly diminished.

The Question of Spatial Agency: New Challenges to Social Housing

In Mario Gandelzonas’s words, the architectural profession has never been sufficient “to domesticate the wild economic and political forces that traverse the urban body to impose an order,” even if it had enough desire.²² Without a doubt, postcritical discourses signaled the end of any such desire. Beginning in the 1980s, architecture became increasingly submerged in neoliberal economic policies.²³ These years brought about the privatization of public services, cuts in the subsidization of social housing programs, and the rise of consumerist ideologies.²⁴ With the central governments’ reduced role in market regulation, public-private partnerships emerged as a new model for producing lower-income housing, and the role of private contractors increased the cost of the projects.²⁵

In the past few decades, a globally configured architectural community whose works are situated on the margins of the profession has countered this strong current. One such example is an exhibition, Think Global, Build Social! Architectures for a Better World, which brought together socially concerned housing projects, schools, health clinics, and slum-rehabilitation designs developed in the last ten years across the globe, including those by 2016 Pritzker Prize–winner Alejandro Aravena. Curated by Andres L...