Publication

‘Monsieur, I have a wife and child, a house and a garden, et alors?’

Sila Karatas
2023
Poster talk
Abstract

Marshall Plan, officially operated from 1948 to 1952 for reconstruction and development in Europe and non-European countries such as Turkey and Switzerland, marks the Cold War economy-political and foreign policy of the US. Referred by its bureaucrats as “the democratic way of self-help and cooperation,” the Marshall Plan publicized notions such as mutual aid, self-help, cooperation, democracy, and freedom to build the Western Bloc against the so-called “Soviet threat.” Devoting specific attention to labour affairs to prevent strikes and communist tendencies, the US engaged in workers’ housing production in Marshall Plan countries through financial and technical assistance programs. Introducing the notion of “free labor” towards “non-communism” and exporting the New Deal manner of housing through labour advisers and housing experts, the US assisted labour unions in founding housing cooperatives. Be detached, twin or row in form, a house with a garden offered an archetype for the “good life” of the “free labor.” Promoting a pre-industrial community and nuclear family life in an industrial setting for wage workers, the US instrumentalized workers’ housing as a subtle mechanism for postwar Americanization. This presentation attempts to portray Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program put into practice in France and Turkey in a strongly similar layout. It argues that the reincarnation of garden suburb as self-built single-family housing against the state-led multi-family housing of the interwar Europe and postwar USSR led to a paradigmatic shift in housing development as well as design, construction, and domestic life. Casting an authorship to workers in not only land provision but also construction, this housing model pioneered the current real-estate development as it channelled inhabitants into informal systems of capital and property development through construction. The presentation discusses this postwar typology of house with a garden referring to housing for miners, textile workers, heavy industry workers and for construction workers built by the US-assisted labour union activity in France and Turkey.

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Ontological neighbourhood
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Public housing
Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is usually owned by a government authority, either central or local. Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, definitions of poverty, and other criteria for allocation vary within different contexts. In the United States, public housing developments are classified either as housing projects that are owned by a city's Housing authority or federally subsidized public housing operated through HUD.
Affordable housing
Affordable housing is housing which is deemed affordable to those with a household income at or below the median as rated by the national government or a local government by a recognized housing affordability index. Most of the literature on affordable housing refers to mortgages and a number of forms that exist along a continuum – from emergency homeless shelters, to transitional housing, to non-market rental (also known as social or subsidized housing), to formal and informal rental, indigenous housing, and ending with affordable home ownership.
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