Houses take on housing blocks. Marshall Plan’s cooperative housing for ‘free labor'

This presentation argues that strategical activity and discourse of the Marshall Plan indoctrinated ‘democracy, cooperation and freedom’ and instrumentalized this discourse in union-founded workers’ housing cooperatives as a means of setting the bottom-up rhetoric of the US manner of democracy advertising “free will to enrolling in or proceeding from a cooperation” in housebuilding. Here, France and Turkey, two historically and geographically different countries participated in the Marshall Plan, represents the common strategical activity of the Marshall Plan in building the postwar ‘free labor” and cooperative housing as part of its anti-communist propaganda. It aims to unearth the role of the Marshall Plan and related transnational activity informing local policy, program, and architectural practice of workers’ housing as well as highlighting the programmatic shift from the public-financed model of the interwar period, aka the ‘emancipatory’ mass housing of the Modern Movement, to the assisted self-help model by the Marshall Plan which set the base for housing privatization of the neoliberal period. The presentation refers to textual and visual material by the Marshall Plan’s bodies as well as to diverse practices of trade unions, social policy officials, planners, and architects in making of the postwar suburban settlements by union-founded cooperatives in France and Turkey. In this sense, it also aims to portray the diverse forms of transnational activity behind the postwar workers’ housing practice from institutional and individual correspondences to official reports, from expert meetings to exhibitions, from film and photographs to narratives and projects.