The Functional City between utopia and reality

Acting as a decision making institution on the raison d’etre of modern architecture by attributing a utopian role to it, CIAM (Congrés International d’Architecture Moderne), formed by some pioneering modern architects from Europe and USSR, and served between the years of 1928 and 1956, proposed The Functional City as a rationalized healthy urban environment in substitution for the historical organic urban pattern of Europe at its 4th meeting in Athens in 1933. Proposing different functional zones of housing, industry, and greenery with utmost importance on “circulation” as a means of providing efficiency and optimization of the mechanized daily life in between the zones, The Functional City was actually the literal manifestation of the Ideal City of the 20th century industrial society as a physical response to the Taylorist and Fordist economical pattern framed by mass production, mass consumption, and rapid distribution of industrial capital in urban scale. Although The Functional City was proposed as a liberating form of life via rationalized and sanitized urban space, it served to construct the ‘welfare society’ of the post-First World War Europe suggesting a rationalized and standardized physical re-organization of daily life from the definition of the ideal house to the ideal city by providing the physical needs of a consumerist working class in between domestic space, workspace and recreational space of the reproduction of labor via greenery. In this sense, this paper aims at questioning the imputed utopianism of The Functional City at the critical threshold between utopian thought and act in reality.

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

Sila Karatas Basoglu

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.

2019

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

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

Sila Karatas Basoglu

2021

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

Sila Karatas Basoglu

2019