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in garden suburbs though, individualized middle class welfare within preindustrial patterns of community life superseded collectivized working class welfare of industrial domestic life.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.

Reindustrializing Europe

Roberto Sega, Ianira Vassallo

“For a European Industrial Renaissance” it’s the title of the European Commission Communication in January 2014 which promotes the reintroduction of production of goods and services in Europe and wants to implement a solid industry base through specific policies and actions. The discussion about the relation between economy and territory suggests two main issues for our discipline. From one side studying this phenomenon is a difficult task because it hasn’t generated many changes in our cities yet. From the other side it interrupts the research campaigns on dismantling and deindustrialization which characterized many scholars for years. The document doesn’t really talk about territories. The communication and the policies are mostly about common market, actions for economical growth, about SME and clusters, regional polishes, real economy and crisis. It doesn’t state much about territories, cities and crisis effects. The long-lasting deindustrialization process started in the 70s and emphasized after 2008 has generated very different effects in the European countries and just now we can observe in EU programs and in real phenomena as well the social need and political will of a productive release. A really various phenomenology of actions and answer is highlighted by territories. A storm of creative enterprises and coworking spaces in Milan, a territories rewrited from bottom up like in Prato, a systematic approach in Brussels, a failed big postfordist program in Turin. The territories show an intricate effort of redesigning the spaces for production. Not only reuse and recycle: reindustrialization is not the answer to dismantling cities. We observe microspaces where working and living are mixed (Morandi, Di Vita 2015), extremely various coworking spaces (Pacchi 2015), but also the completely redefinition of big areas such as the Prato Macrolotto (Dei Ottati 2014) or the Sassuolo transfers (Mattioli 2015). This production systems metamorphosis is not really supported by actions from the top and the industrial implementation occurs mostly without a well structured shape in some “classical” productive territories: nonetheless the European Commission suggests to “think mostly about small”,-referring to SME and clusters, but also about cities (Armondi, Bolocan 2015). Internal areas such as the Alpine Macroregion seem more in the back. Here the fragility of urban systems together with the development insecurity don’t really generate comparable reindustrialization opportunities. These “slow territories” (Lanzani 2005) with a very high level life quality are marginal and policentric and their release also depends on ecological and cultural consequences as well as on attraction power. The geography described by our cases is not uniform and unambiguous. Very different approaches which sometimes are very far from European and local policies emerge and design spaces. Only with a deep analysis it’s frequently possible to recognise territories transformations: illegality, transnational dimension and virtual construction make them bigger and more hidden at the same time. The masterclass hypothesis is that we could talk about European reindustrialization trying to understand transformations and waste of territories and standard production models. What’s left of industrial districts? Of urban industries? Of regional production systems? What is the role played by territories and by these small phenomena if the European context is characterized by big industries and large capitals, off and reshoring, an insecure market, technological innovation and neo colonialism? While our cities are made of microscopic enterprises, and our territories are consumed by our cannibalistic past, some innovative new manufacture systems emerge. Thus, are all these events really able to generate a shared and democratic development and wellness? Is the European reindustrialization program just an utopia?

2016

The right to housing? The antinomies of social housing between public and private

Sila Karatas Basoglu

What is social housing, is it a right or a property? Is it guaranteed for all by welfare state or non-governmental organizations or a commodity in capitalist production and market relations? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, housing is a human right for ‘a standard for living.’ Nowadays referred next to ‘adequate housing,’ ‘the right to housing’ refers to specific groups of society such as ‘women, children, slum-dwellers, homeless, disabled, displaced, migrants, and indigenous’ as denoted by the UN Habitat for human rights. Either defined in relation to ‘the standard of living’ by mass housing of the Fordist welfare state or to ‘the quality of life’ by ‘the right to buy’ discourse of the post-Fordist neoliberal state, ‘the right to housing’ represents the antinomy of social housing oscillating between public and private entity. It is a means of realizing the eidos of both collective and individual, therewithal of building the wall or the cave to shelter and to evict, or to imprison. Referred as an umbrella term for producing collective habitation for specific groups in need of adequate housing, social housing is inclusive of diverse terminology in terms of political, socio-economic and institutional tools as well as of procedural approaches in building design and construction typologies and of shareholders in production. These terms vary as affordable housing, public housing, self-help housing, core housing, cooperative housing, co-housing, low-income housing, low-cost housing, and so on. Informal housing or self-provisional housing also participate in this sub-terminology of social housing developed as informal responses to housing demand by the poor. However, all the above classifications related to form and content, assessable and evaluable not only to spatial and functional but also social and cultural criteria, do not figure out the critical core in social housing as a field of space production. Through a Platonic reading of space, social housing signifies a dialogue between form and content. Through a Marxist reading of space production, social housing reifies the eidos, thus is a commodity. Superposing both readings on a material ground, social housing dialectically denotes both public and private property due to provision, distribution, use and maintenance of resources and people on land through settlement and eviction processes reproducing itself anew. As long as the notion of dwelling is tied to the land dominated by production and market relations, housing embodies the notion of property as a field of policy, planning and design by searching for equilibrium between land value and population control. It is a ‘right’ neutralizing the tension between accumulation by dispossession and need for shelter as well as a ‘commodity’ fatting up housing industry, thus is a means of reconciliation and of restraint at the same time. Social housing has occupied an urgent field of architecture and urbanism since the Industrial Revolution. It was a ‘space of harmony’ for ‘emancipation’ of the working class in tune with the Fordist everyday life, but rather is a ‘conflict space’ in the post-Fordist age intermingled with the search for forms and tools of common land and home ownership against the rise of poverty and shortage of resources in different geographies. At this specific moment, this paper aims at a critical analysis on the antinomies of social housing by digging Fordist and post-Fordist discourses and practices on social housing and by unravelling the networks between institutions and actors as well as environment and people in housing production. With reference to the praxis of social housing in the last century oscillating between settlement and eviction practices, it suggests a materialist and dialectic re-definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ for social housing.

2021

Towards a sustainable innovation framework to assess new Indo-Swiss collaboration scenarios

Myrna Fatima Flores Pineda

The world is "becoming flat" (Friedman, 2005), this means that innovations are emerging thanks to the deployment of new open collaborative frameworks and Information and Communication Technologies that enable the development of new products and services. Additionally, there are two key emerging trends changing the business arena: 1) the fast development, of economics, such as China and India that besides low cost opportunities also represent new attractive markets counting together with more than 2 billion people and which at the same little are investing to improve their innovation capabilities and 2) the acknowledgement of the latent worldwide need to care not only about economic returns, but also about the social welfare of human beings, in whichever market they live, and the impact that any type of organisation has oil the environment to diminish worries such as global warming, energy consumption and waste. Therefore, the goal of this paper is twofold: 1) propose a sustainable innovation framework that integrates four key enablers and 2) explain how this framework was applied ill file SWISSMAIN project to assess and compare seven identified scenarios to enable Swiss and Indian firms to collaborate towards new business opportunities considering economic, social and environmental impacts..