Policy, program and project in social housing of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of postwar Mediterranean models in translation of existenzminimum

About 20 years after CIAM 2, themes of minimum dwelling for working class were put into large-scale practice for building welfare state and social democracy in all countries that participated in the Marshall Plan and postwar phenomena of transnational and local development. Spread in response to housing shortage in war-devastated European countries by reconstruction programs, but advanced within regional planning strategies to industrialize and populate rural territories by development programs, social housing programs of welfare states adopted existenzminimum in realization of workers’ habitats at peripheries of modern cities. These programs had similarities in terms of policies and governance, financial and organizational models, tenancy and ownership systems, planning and land use strategies, population and density patterns, settlement morphologies and architectural typologies as well as roles of policy-maker, planner, architect and community in postwar habitat development. While embracing Taylorist and Fordist planning, design and construction methods to maximize economic and spatial efficiency and revitalize construction economy through prefabrication of housing as well as promoting peripheral urban development, they redefined economic and hygienic dwelling. Sticking to rational urbanization in garden suburbs though, individualized middle class welfare within preindustrial patterns of community life superseded collectivized working class welfare of industrial domestic life. Yet, postwar social housing represents long-disappeared public practice for participatory and sustainable housing, and face privatization and gentrification by neoliberal urban practices. On that note, this proposal aims to comparatively analyse social housing programs introduced by welfare states of France, Italy, Greece and Turkey as the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan and performed large-scale housing in planned industrial city-regions. It suggests an interdisciplinary portrayal of their schemata in housing production in terms of policy, program and project to trace their translation of urban, architectural and societal narrative of existenzminimum especially when bottom-up initiatives reclaim social housing against current housing crisis.