Course Brief 2007/08

The program aims to investigate particular case studies of the post-war period. These were projects that were conceived under the growing pressure of housing need but could be seen to embody a particular ideology (mainly under social-democratic governments). They were developed with a social vision aiming to provide a new habitat for a new society as well as to deal with mundane issues of improving infrastructure, services and cultural facilities. The idea of taking the ‘incomplete’ as a seismograph of urban change is to be understood both as a tool of investigation and a method of intervention.

In the mid 1970s, with the end of the ‘industrial age’, increasing unemployment rates and the end of the ‘housing miracle’, these ambitious social projects and housing estates started to be criticized with vehemence. Throughout the 1980s and 90s they were disliked, avoided and for a long time neglected as a site for regeneration and ‘repair’. And yet, they have remained sites of large proportions of a population who could not afford otherwise and who found these estates their home.

A closer look at those well-known prejudices against these housing estates, such as monotony, repetition, or anonymity and estrangement of its inhabitants might often reveal that new social configurations and relationships are taking place in those housing estates and that regeneration efforts suffer often from a misunderstanding of those relationships. While in the 1990s it was considered enough to just paint some facades, to arrange some green and to add some balconies, we today have to rethink our attitudes and aims of ‘regeneration projects’. To do so we need to be able to grasp the new social and spatial configurations of society that constantly changes with the new ‘profiles’ of inhabitants. To understand and support their necessities rather than the conventional models as we know it from an ‘established middle class’ urbanism in the ‘core city’ or – even worse – in the sprawling fields of suburbia we need to find a new language and a new approach to grasp the dramatic changes cities have undergone in the post-communist condition.

Please download the course leaflet for further information on the course.