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Housing and the City
Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale, Nick Haynes, Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale, Nick Haynes
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eBook - ePub
Housing and the City
Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale, Nick Haynes, Katharina Borsi, Didem Ekici, Jonathan Hale, Nick Haynes
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About This Book
Housing and the City explores housing histories, theories, and projects in diverse geographies. It presents a geographically dispersed history of the twentieth-century modern housing project and its social diagram, juxtaposed with case studies from the past and the present that suggest that we can live and work differently.
While the contributions are diverse in their theoretical approach and geographical situation, their juxtaposition yields transversal connections in the conception of the home and the city and highlights the diversity of architectural solutions in the formation of housing and its communities. The collection also reveals architecture's contribution to the construction of the self and communities, the individual and the collective—as both urban spatial entities and socio-political concepts.
Housing and the City provides essential reading for students, academics, and practitioners interested in the history, theory, or current design of housing. At a time when cities are witnessing new ways of working, changing social demographics, increased geographical mobility, and mass migrations, as well as the pervasive threat of the climate crisis—all trends exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic— Housing and the City presents a historical and theoretical reflection on the question: what does it mean to be at home in the city in the twenty-first century?
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Introduction to Part 1 The Modern Housing Project in an International Context
Didem Ekici and Jonathan Hale
DOI: 10.4324/9781003245216-3
Part 1 explores the evolution of modern housing in relation to the city throughout political, social, and economic changes via case studies in diverse geographies from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The chapters focus on the design of housing estates and domestic space as ideologically charged arenas that involve various state actors, private stakeholders, architects, planners, medical professionals, and users themselves—engaging competing social and biopolitical visions. The themes explored include housing and health, reformist housing estates, tenement design, domestic space and gender, public-private partnerships, community building, and user agency.
The first section, “Formations”, examines housing estates and the concepts of domestic space that emerged in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period. These papers highlight how reform agendas in modernity concerning design, health, and social welfare shaped housing estates and the domestic sphere. As housing design became a tool of social engineering, reformers, planners, and architects often conflated the desired qualities of housing and dwellers.
In “Language Logics: Housing in Translation”, Irina Davidovici examines the estate logics that emerge from the terms used in various languages to denote housing. Their meaning and etymology throw light on typological particularities, cultural settings, and general attitudes towards the urban realm. At the same time, the examination of parallel terminologies highlights the common dimensions of a widespread housing discourse, as a varied yet networked field of knowledge. This glossary of terms assists the discussion of both common and distinct aspects of the housing discourse, produced and reproduced in Europe’s metropolitan centres from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards.
Eva Eylers discusses the reform efforts to provide healthy living environments for urban dwellers in Berlin around the turn of the twentieth century in “Health, Tuberculosis, and the City: Strategies to Approach the Dwelling Hygiene of Berlin, 1882– 1914”. These efforts revolved around preventing the spread of such infectious diseases as tuberculosis. Eylers examines three different approaches to healthy living. The first stemmed from the belief that well-being could be restored only outside the polluted city. Reformist housing estates were established outside big cities. The Eden colony, founded in 1893 in Brandenburg, was such an estate that promised a holistic, healthy, and more spiritual lifestyle. The second approach was to abandon the ‘back to nature’ idea and bring nature into urban homes, which is exemplified by surgeon Dr Simon von Unterberger’s 1899 ‘home sanatorium’ concept. Unterberger offered an alternative to the sanatorium treatment by medicalising domestic space and domesticating nature. The third approach placed the responsibility to improve living environments on urban dwellers. Such was journalist Paul Schirrmeister’s 1907 health advice, which aimed to reform the dwellers’ behaviour to encourage healthy living habits.
Didem Ekici’s chapter, “The Concept of Type in Hellerau Garden City”, examines the paradoxical translation of type into architecture in the first German ‘garden city’, Hellerau, from its founding in 1908 until 1914. The founders of Hellerau attempted to recover a sense of organic development, even if it was conditioned by new production methods, reflected, for example, in the city’s irregular picturesque layout. But they also sought organicism in the production and perception of type houses. On the one hand, the economic emphasis on inexpensive, standardised production and marketability turned type houses into generic commodities. On the other hand, these houses were presented as a remedy for the uprootedness of the working class by restoring a Heimat feeling as permanent homes. In other words, architecture played a contradictory role: although it was instrumentalised by the capitalist economy, it was presented as being autonomous from capitalist exchange. The concept of type in Hellerau profiled not only commodities and buildings but also the mass subject with its promise of “unity within diversity”.
In “The Logic of the Norm: LCC Urban Housing during the Interwar Period”, Christopher Metz analyses the first London County Council (LCC) slum clearance scheme of the interwar period, Tabard Garden Estate in Southwark, London. Immediately after the war, however, the policy of slum clearance was regarded as less urgent and even counterproductive in the effort to overcome the housing shortage. Contrary to this approach, the LCC, the local housing authority for the London area, still believed in the value of high tenement buildings. Faced with strong disapproval of this type of dwelling, the LCC Architect’s Department was challenged to introduce new sanitary measures and develop innovative floor plan typologies to refute concerns about the seemingly ‘unwholesome’ and ‘unhealthy’ tenement. Its goal was to impose notions of order, domesticity, and good manners on both the urban dwellers and architecture. The Tabard estate thus played an important role as a testing ground and established new standards of hygiene, comfort, and privacy that defined the typical LCC tenement design of the interwar period.
The following section, “Modernism and Ideology”, considers the ideological significance of residential planning and organisation within the context of the midtwentieth-century city. Each of the chapters questions traditional conceptual oppositions, such as individual and collective; private and public; male and female, with several case studies drawn from settings beyond the typical mainstream of Euro-American culture.
As an introductory statement, Angelika Schnell presents some critical reflections on the various tensions between theory and practice within recent collective housing developments in Vienna. Negotiating a path between Manfredo Tafuri’s pessimism and the possibilities of contemporary critical theory, she highlights a number of intriguing paradoxes in these projects’ ambivalent architectural and operational complexity. She concludes by asking whether these projects can really be considered somehow ‘less ideological’ than those of the iconic Red Vienna period of social housing between 1918 and 1934.
Martino Tattara describes the important but neglected work of the OSA group in 1930s Soviet Russia, including their proposals for a radical rethinking of the then— and generally still—dominant capitalist model of the dense urban metropolitan centre. Their plan for a new ‘green city’ 40 kilometres north-east of Moscow proposed a mix of residential units disposed in different configurations, from the individual to the collective. This dispersed and flexible approach to the organisation of living spaces constituted a powerful critique of the prevalent Soviet planning strategies, including the belief that enforced communality was an essential tool in the transition to a socialist society.
In Hamed Khosravi’s contribution, the relation between individual and collective is seen through a different lens, specifically that of mid-twentieth-century Iran, a country lying on the fault line between the communist and capitalist worlds. The paper reveals how modern domestic space emerged in this context as a space of political resistance, acting as a breeding ground for radical ideas and narratives of liberation. It presents an overlooked chapter in the history of the international left, moving between the cities of Tehran, Rome, and East Berlin, while tracing the multifaceted lives of a husband-and-wife team who, between them, founded both the Women’s Association and the Association of Iranian Architects.
Completing the section, the contribution from Sigal Davidi drills down further into the minutiae of domestic planning—from the kitchen table to the neighbourhood— as a way of better understanding the political, cultural, and social role of women in modern life. Focusing on the analysis of an urban neighbourhood planned by a women architect in Tel Aviv in the 1930s, the author shows how Judith Stolzer Segall played a vital role in the promotion of modern architecture during the construction boom in Tel Aviv, as well as exemplifying the changing role of women in mid-century society.
The third section, “Housing and the City in the Welfare State”, showcases housing examples in Europe and Australia against a rapidly transforming political and socioeconomic backdrop from the mid-twentieth-century to the present. These chapters each present a sequence of moments of typological innovation that experimented with new patterns of dwelling and community living, types of tenure, and design processes. These typologies modified the conventional stakeholder structures and modes of urban governance to reassess what forms housing should take in liberalised economies.
Nick Haynes’ and Katharina Borsi’s theory positioning paper “Type and the Collective Space of the Housing Project” traces the continuity of the collective space that emerges in parallel to the rise of the modern housing block in the nineteenth century. The chapter traces a typological lineage of the relationship between this collective space and the modern housing project, from the reform block of the late nineteenth century; the expansion of its concept in the modernist Siedlungen and neighbourhoods of the 1920s and 1950s to current co-housing examples. The chapter shows how this space was charged with variations of the concept of community, and how its typological articulation can be seen to complicate the relationships between the public and the private.
Íñigo Cornago Bonal and Dirk van den Heuvel explore user agency in housing design in Netherlands via the concept of ‘Open Building’, which emerged in the 1960s to promote user participation during the design process and the life cycle of the building. Cornago Bonal and van den Heuvel compare the Molenvliet housing complex, built in 1976 in Papendrecht, to Superlofts, a series of contemporary projects based on a typology developed by architect Marc Koehler. While early Open Building projects were built as affordable social housing, recent projects target wealthier classes looking for alternatives to mainstream housing. Even though the contemporary Open Building projects offer more options to users, they remain exclusive to those who can afford them.
Catherine Townsend and Paul Walker explore the state’s intervention into the North Melbourne housing market in the post-war era and the present day, which has favoured concentrated inner-city housing over the prevailing suburban expansion. The authors examine the inner-city public-private housing complex, which was deployed between 1959 and 1976, and which is resurrected today despite the changing circumstances of Melbourne. While each period displays similarities in the government’s rhetoric on the benefits of inner-city housing to accommodate key workers and middleincome earners as well as its justification for the dispossession of low-income communities, the focus of housing renewal efforts evolved from the notion of urban blight to architectural obsolescence.
Finally, Gary A. Boyd and Brian Ward examine new typological manifestations of housing between 1950 and 1980 under Ireland’s economic liberalisation. Rapidly changing social, economic, and religious conditions shaped the imagined occupants, including emerging, and at times conflicted, fictive characters. Accommodating these different characters involved experimenting with forms, spatial arrangements, types of tenure, and design processes. Boyd and Ward argue that the promise of the post-war era housing projects as potential paradigms for future construction remains unfulfilled. Or else these projects have evolved in unforeseen ways with respect to the social lives they contained in the subsequent Celtic Tiger period of economic boom and bust.
Part 1 The Modern Housing Project in an International Context
Section 1.1 Formations
Chapter 1 Language Logics
Housing in Translation
Irina Davidovici
DOI: 10.4324/9781003245216-5
The Emergence of the Housing Estate
The planning of housing, especially in the context of large-scale estates, is underlined by multiple and revealing logics. In many cases, estates were built as the result of an assumption of responsibility by state agencies for the provision of affordable housing. In the crystallisation of the urban housing canon, they represent the more elaborate stage that followed the halting articulation of social and housing policies during the nineteenth century, accompanied by philanthropic experimentation with multi-storey, multi-family prototypes. In this process, the original reformist zeal became absorbed into systemic enterprises shaped by social, public health, and economic rationales. These streamlining processes, reorganised through the wide adoption of standards in construction, dwelling types, and urban layouts, enabled a jump in the scale and extent of housing being built. During this upscaling, the notion of a housing estate came to be understood as the nominal unity of larger urban figures, built and administrated in a coordinated manner. This top-down unity defines the identity of estates, in contrast to the speculative, often heterogeneous and piecemeal, constructions of the same time. To be sure, speculative developments could also occupy vast tracts of the growing cities, as demonstrated by nineteenth-century terraced housing in London or Amsterdam. While, on the outside, reformed and speculative housing could look similar, distinctions were nevertheless clearly articulated—outwardly in the scale of individual buildings or urban ensembles, and internally, through the typological characteristics of dwellings. These more or less subtle differences amount to an index of the different political, ideological and economic agendas animating the production of reform housing in particular locations.
Social welfare policies, strategies of urban planning and architectural design, building regulations, economic and legal frameworks, and the status and availability of land all amount to discrete logics that have shaped the design of urban housing since at least the nineteenth century. In addition to such preliminary conditions, the ways in which built projects were received, mediated, and inhabited constitute further viable housing logics. This chapter concentrates on the one rationale that arguably precedes and underlines all others: the logic of language. By examining the te...