From State-led to Aided Self-help: Marshall Plan and Workers’ Housing Cooperatives in Turkey

This paper aims to analyze the transnational discourse behind the programmatic shift in spatial production and layout of workers’ housing in Turkey from the state-financed model of the interwar period to the aided self-help model by the introduction of the Marshall Plan after the World War II. In particular, the paper argues that the ideological and spatial discourse of the Marshall Plan indoctrinating ‘democracy, cooperation and freedom’ instrumentalized workers’ housing cooperatives in housing production for the promotion of postwar Americanization. Turkey, like other participating countries of the Marshall Plan, witnessed domestic migration as a result of rapid urbanization due to industrial and infrastructural development as well as agricultural mechanization, which were guided by financial and technical assistance programs of the United States and the United Nations, and thus a great housing shortage and construction boom at the peripheries of cities. Cooperative housing was popularized by the state as a low-cost and efficient production model against housing shortage, but rather as an element of Fordist decentralization, and to realize the productive and affluent middle class ‘worker’ of the postwar welfare state. Based on workers’ pension funds released from the Workers’ Insurance Agency and loaned by the Mortgage Loans Bank, the legislative and institutional layout of this self-help model eliminated the state-financed technocratic practice of the interwar period for rental housing, and introduced a mortgage-based community practice of workers for homeownership, which pioneered the current private real-estate development. This housing practice also guided modern urbanization and urban sprawl by settlement morphologies and architectural typologies, which shifted from single-family detached house to multi-family housing block due to the rise of land prices and construction costs, and which made apartment block on individual parcel as the common practice of modern housing in Turkey. Official documents and reports prepared by foreign experts as well as practices of political bodies, planners, architects and workers will be referred next to exemplary settlements to reveal the role of the Marshall Plan and related transnational expertise on planning and architectural practice of workers’ housing, and on political and spatial programming of the aided self-help model for postwar Americanization.