Journal articles on the topic 'Modernist housing estate'

This article focuses on the material components of public space, e.g. walls, fences, and grids, and shows how they can be seen from an analytical point of view as active components of the (re)production of space. Based on illustrative cases from my long-term fieldwork in a modernist housing estate, I explore what roles physical barriers play in the constitution of various (in)visible relations between the inhabitants, spatial practices and, of course, the socio-material environment. For this purpose I operationalise and further extend Kärrholm’s concept of “territorial (re)productions”. This approach allows me to grasp processuality and relativity as well as the effects of constant (re)production of territoriality in the micro-context of the post-socialist modernist space. From this point of view, both human and nonhuman components (individuals, public space amenities, natural entities) of the reality are in continuous interaction. The housing estate is (re)produced by individual, collective and often (in)visible manifestations of Right to the City. These manifestations mirror the assemblage that is spatio-temporally embedded in the hybrid interplay between residual principles of socialist modernist urbanism and socialist housing policies and the economic transformation, renaissance of private ownership and individualism which emerged after 1989. Altogether these regimes are appropriated through the processes of everyday territorial (re)productions in socio-material space.

Atmosphere is a neglected topic in social work, and so this article considers the production of atmospheres amongst the residents of an extant 1960s housing scheme in Edinburgh (UK). This is in order to address not only the complexity of feelings about living on such an estate but also to consider what consequences the paying of attention to atmosphere’s production and effects might have for a social work concern with welfare and wellbeing. The article is based upon semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 residents – council or private renters and home-owners – of Claremont Court, a mixed, low-rise estate and analyses their description and crafting of atmosphere as a way to understand questions of belonging, welfare and community in situ. After reviewing some existing research on atmosphere and outlining methodological issues relating to the Claremont Court project, the article goes on to consider how residents described their feelings about or sense of the estate and its design before discussing the emergence of contradictory narratives about home. The production of narratives about those needing welfare support is particularly pertinent to atmospheric accounts of the housing scheme, and so the article addresses this before finally making an argument for the relevance of immersive and emplaced accounts of space and place for both social work practice and research.

This article describes an Arts Council England project, undertaken by the author and a photographer, to examine spatial and temporal relations between an art project, its subject and its audience. The project explored and documented the architecture of a modernist 1970s housing estate, Netherfield, designed by a group of four architects for the new city of Milton Keynes. The estate has not aged well and the visual remnants of what had been an ambitious and idiosyncratic housing scheme were to be photographed and juxtaposed with the original architectural drawings. The photographic process contributed to a more complex series of perspectives which included the archival history of the estate and its surrounding new city, the people who live there and my own reflections on a council estate childhood. In turn, these perspectives are set out in this article in terms of the spatial and temporal realms in which they are, and continue to be, produced. Loosely conceived in terms of Lefebvre’s production of space triad, these realms are traced through the estate’s historical narrative from plans to buildings which then converge in the eventual art work. The gallery is seen as an assemblage of multiple connections drawn between various productions of archival, architectural and artistic spaces.

The urban studies literature has extensively analysed the modernist, developmental or neoliberal drivers of urban restructuring in the global South, but has largely overlooked the ways in which governments, particularly those with authoritarian characteristics, try to reinforce their legitimacy and assert their political authority through the creation of satellite cities and housing developments. From Ethiopia to Singapore, authoritarian regimes have recently provided housing to the middle class and the poor, not only to alleviate housing shortages, or bolster a burgeoning real estate market, but also to ‘order power’ and buy the loyalty of residents. To evaluate the extent to which authoritarian regimes realise their political objectives through housing provision, we survey nearly 300 poor and middle class respondents from three new housing projects in Luanda, Angola. Alongside increasing social and spatial differentiation brought about by state policies, we document unintended beneficiaries of state housing and uneven levels of citizen satisfaction. We explain that internal state contradictions, individual agency and market forces have acted together to re-shape the government’s efforts to order power.

This paper sets out to investigate the origins and legacy of a significant 1960s modernist public housing estate in the North East of England. This estate at Kenton Bar remains virtually intact, and as such represents a unique example in Newcastle upon Tyne. Its architects, Ryder and Yates, had personal contact with Le Corbusier, Georges Braque, Berthold Lubetkin, Ove Arup and Clive Entwistle; and the influence and mentorship of these individuals is clearly evident in the design. Being selected to join the small team at Peterlee New Town in 1948, provided the opportunity for Ryder and Yates to work together for the first time. The experience enriched their architectural vocabulary and modernist values; and ultimately led to the establishment of their business partnership in 1953. By the time of Kenton Bar, it was by far the largest project that their architectural practice had undertaken. The office was greatly appreciative of Eric Lyons and Span Developments, and their work appears as a distinct precedent in the layout. With a pyramid in its central square, and an assortment of innovative design installations, the estate resonated strongly and immediately with residents.Today, even the pyramid that was removed some years ago, lives on in the collective memory of residents, past and present. Recently, weblogs have been established; and collages and models produced by artists, as well as adults and children from the Estate, in the style of the original design presentations. Fifty years after it was conceived, the interest of local artists and galleries, the tenants’ association, former residents, and pupils of the primary school specifically designed to be at the heart of the estate may not be unprecedented but it is certainly rare. Ryder and Yates have created a living monument to twentieth-century ideas.

The prototype “EH, evolutionary building” at Solomeo by the design team Piano & Rice Engineers and Architects Vibrocemento Perugia s.p.a. is an example of the experimental design of residential buildings for emergency situations and represents a crucial phase of transition from traditional prefabrication to open prefabrication. Built on the basis of the project prepared for the competition held following the disastrous 1976 earthquake in Friuli, many of the ideas tested in the prototype were later used to construct the RIGO housing estate at Corciano. The text describes the architectural study and guidelines for the protection and reuse of this significant modernist building, today abandoned.

This article examines how residents experience and account for stigma at Claremont Court, a modernist social housing scheme built in Edinburgh in the early 1960s. Although listed as having special architectural interest, the building has been subject to disinvestment and has a mix of residents, including council and private renters as well as owner-occupiers. This article explores micro-distinctions between residents, showing how the categories ‘stigmatiser’ and ‘stigmatised’ are not as rigid as we might expect. It then considers stigma associated not with residents but, rather, the building itself, and argues that closer attention to the relationship between the material and social is required in order to understand residents’ complex articulations of belonging. Finally, residents’ views on dirt and rubbish are explored, showing how they use these signifiers of stigma to reveal concerns about shame and respectability. Responding to the call from this journal for more sociological understandings of stigma, this article argues that interactionist approaches offer an important alternative, one that highlights how stigma is negotiated, resisted and apportioned in everyday life. This perspective reveals residents’ practices in interaction with the material environment, as well as the ways in which stigmatisation processes work simultaneously in upward and downward directions, rather than in a unidirectional way.

This article challenges the presumed benevolence of mixed-income public housing redevelopment, focusing on the first socially-mixed remake of public housing in Canada, at Toronto’s Don Mount Court (now called ‘Rivertowne’). Between 2002 and 2012 the community was demolished and replaced with a re-designed ‘New Urbanist’ landscape, including replacement of public housing (232 units) and 187 new condominium townhouses. While mixed redevelopment is premised on the hope that tenants will benefit from improved design and mixed-income interactions, this research finds that many residents were less satisfied with the quality of their housing, neighbourhood design, and social community post-redevelopment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic participant observation, this article finds that tenant interviewees missed their older, more spacious homes in the former Don Mount, and were upset to find that positive community bonds were dismantled by relocation and redevelopment. Challenging the ‘myth of the benevolent middle class’ at the heart of social mix policy, many residents reported charged social relations in the new Rivertowne. In addition, the neo-traditional redesign of the community – intended to promote safety and inclusivity – had paradoxical impacts. Many tenants felt less safe than in their modernist-style public housing, and the mutual surveillance enabled by New Urbanist redesign fostered tense community relations. These findings serve as a strong caution for cities and public housing authorities considering mixed redevelopment, and call into question the wisdom of funding welfare state provisions with profits from real estate development.

Reevaluation of Soviet heritage is a contested topic nowadays. At this moment debates are happening about the attempts to conserve the projects of High Modernism in the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s or even to designate them as heritage. In this article, however, the author attempts to reveal another dimension: postmodern architecture within the life span of the Soviet Union. The case discussed in the article is a housing estate “4blocks” located on the edge of the industrial zone in the Podil district in Kyiv, Ukraine. Podil area was spared from being rebuilt according to the modernist planning proposal in 1968. Afterwards, the district became a testing ground for experimental projects, part and parcel of which is the “4blocks” housing. One can perceive this project being a watershed between different periods of late modernism and postmodernism because of the specific architectural approach and the influence this project exerted on the following architectural production. In the article, the unique conditions which allowed the team of architects to work with unprecedented freedom are discussed. In what way did architects reflect on and use international influences in their projects? How did they work with the local peculiarities of landscape, materials, built environment and archaeology? The article also touches upon the topic of the change in approaches toward the historic urban areas in the late USSR. To highlight the parallels between local and international contexts and reflect on the resulting project the author uses the then-contemporary poststructuralist philosophy. Similarities of the concepts put forward by the philosophy in its critique of architectural Modernism and those used by the authors in “4blocks” is striking. One can conclude that Ukrainian Soviet architecture evolved into a variety of different styles in the mid-1980-s, and this project can be considered a vivid example of one of such styles, so-called postmodernism.

Mixing productive economic activities with housing is a hot topic in academic and policy discourses on the redevelopment of large cities today. Mixed-use is proposed to reduce adverse effects of modernist planning such as single-use zoning, traffic congestion, and loss of quality in public space. Moreover, productive city discourses plead for the re-integration of industry and manufacturing in the urban tissue. Often, historical examples of successful mixed-use in urban areas serve as a guiding image, with vertical symbiosis appearing as the holy grail of the live-work mix-discourse. This article examines three recent live-work mix projects developed by a public real estate agency in Brussels. We investigate how different spatial layouts shape the links between productive, residential, and other land uses and how potential conflicts between residents and economic actors are mediated. We develop a theoretical framework based on earlier conceptualisations of mixed-use development to analyse the spatial and functional relationships within the projects. We situate them within the housing and productive city policies in Brussels. From this analysis, we conclude that mixed-use should be understood by considering spatial and functional relationships at various scales and by studying the actual spatial layout of shared spaces, logistics and nuisance mitigation. Mixed-use is highly contextual, depending on the characteristics of the area as well as policy goals. The vertical symbiosis between different land uses is but one example of valid mixed-use strategies along with good neighbourship, overlap, and tolerance. As such, future commercial and industrial areas will occur in various degrees of mixity in our cities.

While working and living coexisted in the historical city, the functions are separated in the Modernist city. Recently, the idea of connected urban districts with short distances and attractive work spaces have received renewed attention from companies and planners alike, as soft site factors, tacit knowledge, and local production are gaining importance. In this article we focus on the development of multi-national company sites and the economic and spatial conditions that encourage them to transform existing sites, improve placemaking, and cross borders. We also have a look at their interactive influence on the neighbourhood. We talked to the real estate managers of BASF, BMW, Bosch, Siemens, and Trumpf about site development strategies and approaches for connecting and mixing functions, and therefore crossing borders and, where it is necessary, separating. The professional discourse on “productive cities” and “urban manufacturing” is concerned with reintegrating production into the city. Reurbanisation is especially instrumental in overcoming a major guiding principle or dogma of the Modernist city: the separation of functions. Nevertheless, reurbanisation results in price rises and increases the competition for land. Therefore, planning has to pay attention to industrial areas, as well as housing or the inner-city. An important thesis of the article is that multi-national companies are pioneers in transforming their priority sites to suit future development. For cities, it is an upcoming communal task to ensure that all existing industrial areas develop into “just, green and productive cities,” as pointed out in the New Leipzig Charter. To a certain extent, it is possible to adapt the urban planning and design strategies of multi-national companies for existing industrial areas. This is especially true regarding the question of how borders and transition zones between industrial areas of companies and the surrounding neighbourhood can be designed to be spatially and functionally sustainable or how they can be transformed to suit future urban needs. However, urban planning has to balance many concerns and therefore the article concludes with a synopsis of the importance of strategic planning for transforming existing industrial areas.

Using the Wałbrzych agglomeration housing estates—once the most important mining and industrial region in Lower Silesia—as an example, this article illustrates the specific significance of the design of green spaces, including urban layouts, and the issue of protecting unique trees and green spaces in the concepts of estates from the early modernism period after the First World War in the years 1919–1927. This article tries to deepen the knowledge on the origins of the design solutions of public and private greenery systems while considering natural, landscape, and social needs. This study complements the information gathered so far in the field of forming green areas in modernist housing estates and highlights the importance of this issue in complex urban design. The Wałbrzych housing settlements are crucial because they were among the first of their kind, not only in Lower Silesia but also in the whole of the Weimar Republic. Based on literature and source studies, it was possible to reconstruct design ideas concerning the composition of green areas in most housing estates in the discussed area. The most interesting ones were presented and broken down into the landscape-related and functional aspects of the use of greenery in housing estates. This made it possible to select specific solutions applied by designers in order to indicate sources of inspiration and theoretically developed rules which then and now seem to be extremely adequate.

The growing alienation of modernist public housing estates and their ethnically and socially excluded residents, as well as the neglected human potential-capital they symbolize (not social burden), is a grotesque expression of the failure of a system driven by the profit motive and failed housing, planning and social policy, rather than by the requirement to satisfy sustainable urbanism and dignified and just housing for all. The modernist concept of architecture & urban planning, which emerged in response to a very particular set of regional circumstance, spread throughout the world in the 20th century. The result, where the idea was simplistically accepted, had disastrous consequences. The postmodernist approach on the other hand has given up altogether on the social agenda of architecture and housing. Paying particular attention to housing, this paper discusses the contrasting results of modernist and –or post modernist planning approaches in housing and its consequences. It also looks at the rather recent Sustainable Urbanism paradigm and the possibility that it might offer as an alternative or a new complement to housing planning and design; this in contrast to the modernist satellite-suburban generic type of living in most major European cities as well as in the developing countries. The study is based on multiple methods which include, descriptive and exploratory qualitative approach (observation, introspection, analysis and deduction), as well as Futurescape Method of selected cases in the American Housing Program HOPE VI, and from ethnographic survey of an ongoing large scale housing program in Ethiopia known as Integrated Housing Development Program (IHDP).

Abstract In early twentieth-century Germany a population explosion in its big cities created a housing crisis. A widespread and heavily medialized debate prompted a search for solutions and triggered a rhetoric of the last dwelling. From large communal estates to subsistence-level dwellings, a new type of housing was propagated in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, films, guidebooks, and advertisements. Siegfried Kracauer, architect, journalist, and author, also became engaged in this debate, willfully reinterpreting New Objectivity’s aesthetics of things (Dingästhetik) both in architectural critiques for the Frankfurter Zeitung and in his novel Ginster. This article analyzes Kracauer’s critical contribution to the modernist housing debate in the Weimar Republic.

Recent decades have seen increased housing development activities in the outskirt housing estates of Wrocław, apparently driven by a trend of city dwellers escaping from the city somewhere “closer to nature”. This applies also to Brochów and Psie Pole, former independent small towns with characteristic spatial arrangement. Once absorbed by Wrocław, these housing estates were subjected to on-going expansion whose size exceeded many times their historical core area. Restoration of the historical centre of Psie Pole undertaken by the City in 2009 has produced controversial results. The modernised old Marketplace has become a dead space in spite of renovated buildings and modern spatial development of the square. Along with the market stalls at the former bus terminal the people disappeared, too. Commercial traffic was moved to the rear of one of the frontages, a so-called “shopping arcade”, in the vicinity of trash bins; whilst the benches in the renovated Marketplace are most frequently occupied by homeless people. Modernisation activities at the historical centre include: restoration, reconstruction or demolition of old buildings, construction of infill buildings, that often fail to harmonise with their surroundings.Effects of the modernisation works carried out at the historical housing estate for railway employees in Brochów, where, for example, only halves of the semi-detached multi-family houses were refurbished; confirm the necessity to adopt a comprehensive approach to the renovation process. Elsewhere, thermal retrofitting with polystyrene left the facades of the buildings deformed and their original character was permanently lost.

Residential housing compounds known as mikrorayons were enclosed within vast housing estates and served as central features of socialist urbanism in the Eastern Bloc. To reduce daily travel, designers located the communities on well-considered metropolitan sites and proposed embedded commercial opportunities and community services. This article examines, twenty-five years after the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the vision and implementation of transport planning in these modernist residential districts. A novel source of information is a rich literature, published during the operative years of the USSR, which explains and promotes contemporaneous socialist urbanization. This literature is enhanced with subsequently published critique and commentary to explore commuting, mobility, and transport-land use interaction vis-à-vis the legacy of central planning for housing estates. Findings suggest that various elements of built environments that were vital to access and mobility significantly lagged the timing, quality, and completeness of housing construction. The Soviet system substituted proximity for mobility in certain aspects of urban life, but incomplete service networks in residential districts meant that the promises of propinquity were unrealized.

ABSTRACT:In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

El trabajo presenta y analiza un conjunto de planes urbanísticos redactados entre 1956 y 1971 para ordenar los polígonos de viviendas de Paseo de Valencia al Mar, Avenida de Castilla, Monteolivete y Campanar, en Valencia, a partir de la documentación original del expediente municipal, que se conserva en el Archivo de Planeamiento del Ayuntamiento. El interés de estos planes está en que introducen la idea de supermanzana como sistema de ordenación en conjuntos residenciales de edificación abierta, una idea que ha sido retomada en propuestas urbanas recientes, pero que sin embargo no encontró una aceptación suficiente en los años sesenta. Con el fin de extraer algunas enseñanzas del pasado, que puedan proyectarse hacia el futuro, se examinarán las características de las supermanzanas que se proponían en los años sesenta para los polígonos de viviendas de Valencia, analizando su grado de realización, y valorando su papel como elemento estructurante del proyecto urbano, capaz de articular de un modo integrado el trazado viario, los equipamientos y la edificación.PALABRAS CLAVE: Supermanzana; trazado viario ramificado; polígonos de viviendas; edificación abierta.This paper presents and analyzes a set of urban plans drawn up between 1956 and 1971 for the housing estates of Paseo de Valencia al Mar, Avenida de Castilla, Monteolivete and Campanar, in the city of Valencia, using the municipal files of the original drafts kept in the Urban Planning Archive of the City Hall. The interest of these plans is that they introduce the idea of superblock as a design system in open building housing complexes, an idea that has been taken up in recent urban proposals, but which did not find sufficient acceptance in the sixties. In order to draw some lessons from the past, which may be projected into the future, the characteristics of the superblocks proposed in the sixties for the housing estates of Valencia will be examined, analyzing their degree of achievement, and assessing their role as structuring element of the urban project, capable of articulating the road layout, the equipment and the buildings in an integrated way.KEYWORDS: Superblock; ramified road layout; modernist housing estates; open building system.

AbstractThis article examines the transfer of Swedish concepts of urban modernity to British cities after 1945. It shows how an affinity between design and architecture elites facilitated the transfer of key concepts that were mediated in cities. Moreover, it argues that the often contested transfer of Swedish modern architecture and design to northern English cities initially meshed with municipal ambitions to improve working-class housing and culture. Thereafter the influence of Swedish modern was continued in altered form by the preponderance of Swedish prefabrication techniques in the construction of new poured concrete and high-rise estates during the 1960s. These aspirations to improve the urban environment with Scandinavian examples of good living often magnified the difficulties of modernising the industrial conurbations of the north.

Books and periodicals for children and teenagers constituted an important instrument of education and also social persuasion in the People’s Republic of Poland. In such publications, illustrations played a crucial role. Printed in several dozen or even several hundred thousand copies, such publications circulated among great numbers of young readers, therefore becoming a very effective medium for disseminating certain desired views. There can be no doubt that the messages directed at the youth largely reflected the opinions held by the adult section of the society: the authors and the people ordering and authorising the publication. The numerous topics presented in a form suitable for young readers included architecture. The nature of architecture-related themes was varied indeed; at times architecture (historical or contemporary) appeared in the foreground, but most often depictions of buildings served only as a visual backdrop for the narrated story. However, even presented in the background, the forms of architecture chosen by illustrators were not received indifferently by the readers, since they conveyed a certain model imagery of houses, flats, housing estates, or entire cities. Since such images were published by the thousand, a thorough analysis of the issue would not fit the spatial constraints of a single article. The aim of the text is, therefore, restricted to identifying the possibility for expanding the source material for studies on architectural culture; it focuses on a single theme, namely the methods in which publications for children and young readers issued in communist Poland presented, and often even propagated, modernist architecture. Due to the choice of the subject matter, the article mainly concentrates on the period of the post-Stalinist Thaw when modern forms gained a true monopoly in Polish architecture. The tendencies observable in architectural theory and practice at the time were reflected with considerable fidelity in publications for young audiences. Popular images included the vision of a modern metropolis with heavy pedestrian and automobile traffic, full of high-rise buildings, lit by lamps and neon lights after dark. Depictions of modernist housing estates with blocks of flats, as well as modern schools or playgrounds were equally common. The message conveyed by such imagery may easily be summarised by the title of one of the children’s rhymes analysed above, namely Nasz dom [Our home]. Both the texts and the visual depictions of the day constructed a vision in which modernist architecture became the natural habitat of contemporary people. The present article describes numerous depictions which corroborate such an interpretation of the phenomenon under analysis.

Urbanisation in Xinjiang in the last two decades has been accompanied by immigration, a real-estate construction boom and changing residential patterns. This paper discusses how the construction of new residential compounds occurs simultaneously to the construction of social, spatial and ethnic belongings in oasis towns in southern Xinjiang with a particular focus on the city of Aksu. While investment considerations and the promise of a modernised urban lifestyle motivate citizens to purchase housing, the market-oriented real-estate business since the end of the 1990s also offers opportunities for Han and Uyghur residents to draw ethnic boundaries. The choice of a neighbourhood as well as the preference of interior design are frequently used to mark ethnicity. However, ethnic residential choices are restricted by work unit affiliation and the available socio-economic means. Thus, although discourses of Han and Uyghur residents display clear tendencies of ethnic segregation, urban residential spaces are in fact often ethnically mixed.

<p>Druga połowa lat 50. XX w. w Polsce to czas zniesienia doktryny socrealizmu oraz znacznej decentralizacji planowania przestrzennego miast i osiedli. Widoczna w życiu politycznym odwilż jest również okresem, w którym po drugiej wojnie światowej powróciły mieszkaniowe ruchy spółdzielcze. Działo się to również w Lublinie. Powstanie Lubelskiej Spółdzielni Mieszkaniowej w 1957 r. było odpowiedzią na ówczesne potrzeby lokalowe, określone jednak ściśle w wielkim planie miasta ustalonym w 1957 r., a przyjętym w 1959 r.</p><p>Z dzisiejszej perspektywy możemy zauważyć, że śmiałe projekty urbanistyczne poszczególnych osiedli, jak i całej zrelizowanej dzielnicy, są zapisem kooperacji rozwoju technologii architektoniczno-budowlanych z próbami uchwycenia potrzeb ludzkich jakie może wypełnić architektura. Czy ten mariaż był udany? Czy humanistyczne postrzeganie projektowania zostało odzwierciedlone w późnomodernistycznych realizacjach dawnego obszaru lubelskich Rur oraz całym nowym projekcie miasta Lublina? Próba analizy związków między technologia urbanisty, czy architekta, a szeroko rozumianymi potrzebami człowiek, również w społeczno-psychologicznym wymiarze, zostanie podjęta w celu uzyskania odpowiedzi na pytanie, ile jest w tej modernistycznej architekturze inżynierii, a ile sztuki projektowania ludzkiego życia?</p><p> </p><strong><strong>Modern Spatial Planning as Exemplified by the Plan of General Development of Lublin in 1959 in the Context of Selected Cooperative Housing Estates</strong></strong><p>SUMMARY</p><p>The latter half of the nineteen-fifties in Poland was the time of the abolishment of the socialist doctrine and considerable decentralization of spatial planning of towns and housing estates. The noticeable thaw in political life was also the period in which cooperative housing movements were restored. This was also the case with Lublin. The establishment of the Lublin Housing Cooperative (LSM) in 1957 was an answer to the housing needs of the time, which were strictly defined in the grand plan for the town developed in 1957, and adopted in 1959.</p><p>From today’s perspective it could be observed that the bold urban development projects of individual housing estates as well as the whole LSM district are a record of the cooperation between the development of architectural-building technologies and the attempts to grasp human needs that can be fulfilled by architecture. As a result, the late modernist implementations in the former area of Lublin’s Rury district and in the new urban project of Lublin reflected the humanist perception of town design. They can be regarded as an example of successful combination of engineering and the art of planning the multidimensional space of human life.</p>

Focusing on the case of urban development in Gangnam, this article explores how middle-class identity based on residence in apartment complexes was created in South Korea beginning in the late 1970s. I argue that state policy, speculation, and exclusion were key ingredients in the making of the middle class in Gangnam. Many white-collar families became apartment owners through a government-subsidised apartment lottery programme, and subsequently climbed the economic ladder more rapidly than others because of skyrocketing housing prices. Their rise to middle-class status, facilitated by chance and furthered by their willingness to engage in real estate speculation, was seen by many as illegitimate. In the face of scepticism about their status, Gangnam residents strived to cultivate cultured, modernised, and Westernised middle-class lifestyles so as to distinguish themselves from non-Gangnam residents and justify their economic success. This paper emphasises the dialectical process – both top-down and bottom-up – of middle class formation during the Gangnam boom. Based on a year of field research conducted in Korea, I analyse the lives and experiences of the middle class and their strategies for upward social mobility in the housing market.

In France and West Germany, public opinion on modernist mass housing switched from positive to negative over a short period of time. The following article explores and compares this disenchantment with urban modernism in both countries. Analyzing TV documentaries, press reports, and sociological studies, as well as inhabitants’ reactions to them, it traces the discursive production of modern high-rise estates as arenas of social and emotional malfunction. It investigates how contemporaries came to contrast the apparent desolation of modernist high-rises on the periphery of French and West German cities with the warmth and solidarity of traditional working-class neighborhoods. Tracing the genesis of this socio-emotional framing, the article foregrounds the influence of psychological discourses and a new left-wing activism on contemporary urbanism and highlights the local repercussions of modern housing’s public denigration in France and West Germany.

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). 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AbstractIn most post-socialist cities modernist mass housing comprises a remarkable share of urban housing with a substantial population living there. Therefore, socialist large housing estates (LHEs) have been a fruitful source for research to gather systematic knowledge concerning segregation and housing preferences. Less is known, however, of contemporary LHE-related urban policies and planning interventions. This study asks how in the post-privatisation era, when former governance structures had disappeared, did new urban governance arrangements related to LHEs begin to emerge. We take a closer look at two LHE areas in post-Soviet cities: Annelinn (Tartu, Estonia) and Žirmunai Triangle (Vilnius, Lithuania). The research is based on expert interviews and document analysis exploring the formation of governance networks in both cities since the 2000s and the rationale behind recent planning initiatives. A common new spatial expectation for housing estates’ residents and contemporary urban planners seems to be a perceptible differentiation of the public, semi-public and private spaces, instead of the former modernist concept of free planning and large open areas between buildings. As the heightened planning interest came at a time when European cohesion measures supported urban budgets, it also has led to tangible investments, and builds the consensus that the public sector should return to post-privatised LHEs. We argue that public space has been a great medium for modern governance networks and bringing LHEs back to the urban agenda in post-socialist cities and that the lessons learned in the post-socialist context provide an insight for the wider global marketization debate.

Architectural and urban projects in the countries of Eastern Europe after WWII were subordinated to political ideology, but also to the means of its implementation. The ideology of the communist party was realized through new forms of architecture and urban planning implemented in many war-ravaged and newly-built cities. This new, ideological architecture style was called socialist realism. The buildings of that period was to show the superiority of the new communist architecture over the modernist realizations of the interwar period. In many buildings, architectural solutions implemented were based on palace patterns, also numerous decorative elements, typical of Classicist architecture, were applied, enriched with themes of national architecture style. The urban systems created monumental spatial arrangements, often connected with industrial plants - steelworks, factories. The article will present chosen examples of housing estates complexes realized in socialist realism period in Poland (1949 - 1956). Keywords: Housing estates, Urban planning, Socialist realism, Postwar architecture, Polish architecture