Modernist housing estates in European cities of the Western and Eastern Blocs

• Published in: Planning perspectives 2016-10, Vol.31 (4), p.533-562
• Main Authors: Monclús, Javier, Díez Medina, Carmen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: mass housing estates; post-1945 Europe modernism; socialist housing estates; urban design; urbanity
• ISSN: 0266-5433; 1466-4518
• DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2015.1102642

The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast modernist housing projects in Western and Eastern Blocs built in the period of accelerated urban growth that took place mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. The obvious starting point is that cities in the Eastern Bloc were different from Western cities because of the distinct nature of their urban policies, the centrally planned economy, the absence of a free land market, the impact of industrialization on building construction, etc. However, there are many concepts in urban planning and design, as well as urban processes and urban forms, shared by both ideological systems and that can be clearly recognized in housing estates from that period. This paper offers a comparative perspective of the nature of some of those modern Housing Estates built on both sides of the Iron Curtain such as Grands Ensembles in France, Großsiedlungen in Germany, Polígonos de viviendas in Spain, or Socialist Housing Estates equivalents in Eastern Bloc countries. The goal is to understand how mass housing forms were related to the modernist international urban culture of the Athens Charter and what was the role of urban design in the significant loss of environmental quality appreciable either in the West or in the East in those years of accelerated urban growth almost everywhere in Europe.