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This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing - high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style - became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia.

Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing - particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century.

Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East - where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making? Both sweeping and detailed, Mass Housing is about more than massive housing or even housing for 'the masses'. It is an ambitious and broadly-comparative inquiry into the globally-felt political need to undertake such quests, revealing and illustrating surprisingly diverse architectural expressions. * Lawrence Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA * This book comprehensively dismantles the caricatured view of modernist mass housing as homogenous, repetitive and ill-suited to the diversity of contemporary urban life. In its place, Miles Glendinning offers a fresh perspective on the formal inventiveness, social complexity, global reach and sheer problem-solving spirit that this architecture embodies. * Stephen Cairns, ETH Zurich, Switzerland / Future Cities Lab, Singapore *

Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power - a Global History

List of Illustrations



Acknowledgements



INTRODUCTION

Cuius regio, eius religio - the multiple modernities of housing

Mass housing - spearhead of radical modernisation

Methodological challenges and constraints: balancing narrative and geography





PART A: MID 19th-CENTURY TO 1945 - The gathering storm



1. Pre-1914: The Long Mobilisation

Mid 19th-century innovators and experiments

Late 19th- early 20th century ideologies: public housing and arm's length building

The dual market: working-class tenements and middle-class apartments in North America

Housing and colonialism: building for rulers or the ruled?

The upsurge in emergencies: 1905-1914



2. 1914-1945 The maturing of mass housing in the age of emergencies

Systematisation and individualism: the emergence of modern mass housing

World War I: war socialism and rent control

The Hare and the Tortoise: municipal housing in 'Red Vienna' and Britain

Continental permutations in the 1920s

Totalitarian housing visions in the Great Depression

Democratic housing systems of the 1930s

Interwar Latin America and the colonies

World War II - The globalisation of emergency







PART B: 1945-1989 - The 'Three Worlds' of postwar mass housing



3. Postwar mass housing: an introductory overview

First World, Second World, Third World

International modernism: from global to local



4. Housing by Authority - post-war state interventions in the 'Anglosphere'

Red scares, race scares - the brief heyday and long retreat of US public housing

New York City - the monumental exception

Local trajectories of renewal and decline

Canada: government intervention and the revival of renting

'Big Daddy' and mass housing in Metro Toronto

New Zealand and Australia

Commonwealth and state: the CSHA

High flats and slum reclamation in Victoria and New South Wales



5. Council Powers: postwar public housing in Britain and Ireland

Central and municipal

Postwar housing design in England

Slum clearance, planning and the 'land-trap'

Financing and organising high flats in the 'sixties

London and the English cities

Scotland: the legacy of 'Red Clydeside'

Island diversity: Ireland and the Channel Islands



6. France: the Trente Glorieuses of mass housing

1945-55 - A hesitant revival

SCIC, SCET and the etat planificateur

'Le hard french': the housing legacy of Perret

1955-75: 'grands ensembles' and the industrialisation of national grandeur



7. The Low Countries - pillars of modern mass housing

Socialist skyscrapers versus Catholic cottages: postwar housing in Belgium

The Netherlands: planned housing and 'polder politics'

Standardisation and galerijbouw: postwar Dutch housing design



8.Stability and Continuity: West Germany and the alpine countries

Tenure-neutral building in Switzerland and Austria

West Germany: the housing of soziale Marktwirtschaft

'Wohnungen, Wohnungen und nochmals Wohnungen' - Neue Heimat and 1950s-70s production



9. The Nordic countries - social versus individual?

Building the 'Folkhem' - housing and Social Democracy in Sweden

Denmark: modernisation through quiet quality

Finland, Norway and Iceland - mass housing for the individual



10. Southern Europe - social housing for kinship societies

The progressive South: postwar housing in Italy and Malta

INA-Casa: the Christian Democratic housing vision

Left Turn? 1960s-70s 'comprehensive' planning in Italy

The conservative South: postwar housing in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey

Conclusion: First World housing in summary



11. The USSR: Developed Socialism and Extensive Urbanism

'Quickly, Cheaply and Well' - Soviet housing under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

The curate's egg - national and local housing production in the postwar Soviet Union

Order out of chaos? central and private-sector initiatives

Monumentality and space in postwar Soviet housing

SNiP and DSK - standardisation and industrialisation

Taming the colossus: towards 'complexity' and 'flexibility'

A brotherly mosaic - regionalist housing in the USSR

Tashkent - model Soviet city

Soviet housing in the perestroika years



12. A quarrelsome family: the European socialist states

The satellite bloc: from dissidence to decomposition

The diversity of socialist standardisation

Socialist outliers: European divergences from the Soviet model

The 'Ongoing Revolution' - self-management and monumentality in Yugoslavia

Novi Beograd - epicentre of decentralism

Late socialist cluster-developments across the Yugoslav republics



13. Socialist Eastern Asia: mass housing and the Sino-Soviet split

Danwei: fragmentation and austerity in Chinese socialist housing

From the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution: austerity and anarchy

'Soviet' Asia: Mongolia and North Vietnam

Building at 'Pyongyang speed': housing in Juche Korea

Conclusion: Second World housing in summary



14. Latin America - chameleon continent

Mass housing and the politics of charismatic leadership, 1945-1964

Housing as social security: pre-1964 Brazil

1960s Cold-War housing politics in Latin America

Order and Progress? Post-1964 housing in Brazil, Argentina and Chile



15. Echoes of empire - postwar housing in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa

The Middle East: decolonisation and development

Israel: creating a 'new geography' through public housing

India and South Asia: building on colonial bureaucracy

Capital colonies: post-independence Delhi

Bombay/Mumbai and MHADA: pressure-cooker building

Sub-Saharan Africa: colonialism's last stand

'Progressive' housing decolonisation in francophone Africa

Divide and rule? Segregation and mass housing in 'British' Africa

South Africa: segregated housing in a siege society



6. From Third World to First World: mass housing in capitalist Eastern Asia

Towards the developmental state - postwar housing in Japan

Housing the 'Asian Tigers'

'Housing Gangnam-style': South Korea's tanji revolution

Hong Kong and Singapore - a study in sibling rivalry

Shek Kip Mei and Bukit Ho Swee: from resettlement to home-ownership

Race to the Top: HDB and HKHA architecture

First cousin: Macau







PART C: 1989 TO THE PRESENT - Retrenchment and renewal



17. Resilience and renewal: mass housing into the 21st century

Introduction

The aftermath: mass housing at bay in the former First and Second Worlds

Residual mass housing in the Global South



18. Race to the top: the new Asian developmentalism

TOKi and AKP Turkey

Developmental Eastern Asia into the 21st century

Building for the 'Mass Line': social housing in 21st-century China



19. Conclusion: global and national, idealism and realpolitik



Index