Housing estates have been built worldwide, and if we look at them in Eastern and Western Europe, there are far more similarities than differences. Their origins are common, their construction was inevitable and there are no fundamental differences in their causes. They were all built to address the housing shortage in the short term. Looking at the architectural evolution of mass housing programmes after the Second World War, we find that they replicate to some extent the post-World War I situation: gradually moving from suburban neighbourhoods to large housing estates on the periphery, and the same can be said of the urban ideologies and architectural techniques used. In Europe, housing estates thus became widespread, and in many countries, they constitute an important segment of the housing market. In recent decades, the issue of high-rise housing estates has often been the focus of urban geographical, architectural, and urban planning discourses, and more recently, a new mainstream urban paradigm, the theory and practice of vertical cities have grown out of this issue. This session aims to bring together and present current research on mass housing, high-rise housing estates, and vertical cities, including social, economic, and urbanistic issues, housing market processes, and anything else.
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Specificities of Large Housing Estates in the Eastern Bloc
Dejana Nedučin, Milena Krklješ
Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
After WWII, large housing estates (LHEs) began to flourish on the urban fringes on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Their spatial organization, physiognomy, and form arose from the progressive ideas promoted by CIAM and especially Le Corbusier. When built, LHEs were praised for quickly and cost-effectively dealing with the housing crisis while offering relatively good dwelling conditions. In the Eastern Bloc, they have evolved into the most dominant type of urban housing, making up the lion's share of the total housing stock in the region. While sharing numerous similarities with their counterparts in Western European countries, primarily in the physical sense, these estates were at the same time characterized by certain specificities that were shaped by a combination of political, economic, and ideological factors related to socialism – just as socialist and capitalist cities differed, so did their LHEs. This paper aims to compare and contrast them. It discusses the main features and specificities of LHEs in Central and Eastern Europe based on relevant literature sources, particularly in relation to the development trajectory and characteristics of those located on the other side of the Iron Curtain, thus contributing to the body of knowledge on the urban heritage of socialism.
The 15-minute city concept and the housing estate
Tamas Egedy1, Melinda Benkő2, Balázs Szabó3, Kornélia Kissfazekas2
1Budapest Business University, Hungary; 2Budapest University of Technology and Economics; 3HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences
The15minEstates project was launched in January 2024 as part of the Driving Urban Transitions programme. The 15minESTATES project looks at the nexus of (1) urban space, (2) transport options, and (3) people’s needs and capacities as key dimensions for sustainable mobility transitions in five large European cities (i.e. Budapest, Delft, Halle, Riga, and Sofia). The project aims to co-create locally adapted and accepted spatial strategies and interventions for just and sustainable mobility, with a special emphasis on large-scale housing estates (LHEs). The sample area in Budapest is the large housing estate of Pesterzsébet Centre in Budapest’s 20th district, built between 1963 and 1983, located further away from the city centre, and is characterised by a declining and ageing population. The experts conducted empirical research (questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews with residents) to explore local mobility conditions in the residential area of 17,000 inhabitants. In this presentation, the authors describe the relationship between the built environment of the housing estate and the mobility issues of the local society and use these to outline the characteristics, achievements, and challenges of the 15-minute city concept in Pesterzsébet. At the end of the presentation, recommendations will be formulated to move the neighbourhood towards an area with a more sustainable environment and mobility.
Another kind of normalization? East-Germany's Large Scale Housing Estates: A review of possibly emerging debates
Arvid Krüger
Universität Kassel, Germany
For some years now, East-Germany's large-scale settlements from the 1970/80s have been experiencing a changed dynamic in terms of the social discourse about them, but also in their actual composition of residents. At the same time, the planning instruments for dealing with large housing estates have consolidated the way in which they are developed (Grunze 2017, Krüger 2019, Pasternack 2019, Altrock/Grunze/Kabisch 2018). The day-to-day urban development policy or the basic logic of community work on a large housing estate in 2024 may differ only to a limited extent from that of 2012 or 2018 (following the acceptance after 2000, that urban renewal processes must be social - Germany' Soziale Stadt/Social City). One consequence has been, that urban development and community work are interwoven. Intervention in East Germany, especially in the 2002-2017 funding scheme Stadtumbau Ost combined the deterioration of blocks in one part with an augrading of another part of a settlement. However, the view of large housing estates has changed massively in the last 10-15 years, mainly, but not only, due to the new residents who have been increasingly migrating to Germany (and not just since 2015). The dynamic is particularly striking in large housing estates in eastern Germany, which are changing “from a focus of urban redevelopment to an immigration quarter” (StadtumMig-Project, see e.g.: Bernt et al. 2022), but affects all parts of the country (Helbig/Jähnen 2019; Hunger et al. 2015).
Basically, this dynamic can also be understood as the normalization of a “special type” with a view to 20th century neighbourhoods in the urban periphery, because the heterogenization of a type of neighbourhood that tended to be demographically homogeneous until the end of the modern housing era (1989: reunification, abolition of municipal housing, construction of the last late-modern large housing estates in the GDR) also includes a greater diversity in the composition of the population.
However, the following focus is also possible - focusing on classism rather than ethnicity - according to which, on the contrary, it is more a matter of homogenization: because only the poorer people find space in the only remaining low-cost housing market reserve; i.e. no longer professors living next to shipyard workers (as described in Mau's Lütten Klein), but “Bio-German” poor people living next to immigrant poor people? Or is this what is meant by the normalization of a formerly public welfare-oriented housing estate under capitalism - the “poor” "always" relocate to the “margins”?
The idea is an impulse from a spectator's view: being the honorary chair of the national working group "Urban Regeneration and Prevention-Oriented Development" (1) of the German professional association of planners, SRL (Vereinigung für Stadt-, Regional- und Landesplanung) - and a researcher with a dissertation's expertise in this field (Krüger 2019). The following aspects shall be put into considerations
- The large-scale housing settlements become arrival cities? Do they suit the necessities for that role? Can an established Soziale-Stadt-Governance from after 2000 be transformed to cope that challenge? What change of governance may be needed?
- Due to planning interventions from the 1990s and 2000s the settlements are able to play a model role in terms of coping with an elderly population; many of the settlements received a scalable energetic upgrade; surely relevant for times of energy transformation? How these planning concepts from "repairing" large-scale estates after 1994 can be renewed in our times?
- The estates are a cultural heritage, the last sub-epoch of modern 20th-century housing in Germany. Along with metropolitan needs to erect mass housing along their fringes again - how do the sum of experiences of erection, renovation and regeneration between the 1970s and 2010s can be used for a new era of large-scale estates at the fringes of Germany's metropolises (and how can the existent neighbourhoods may profit from it)?
References:
Bernt, M., El-Kayed, N., Hamann, U., & Keskinkilic, L. (2022). Internal Migration Industries: Shaping the Housing Options for Refugees at the Local Level. Urban Studies, 59(11), 2217–2233.
Altrock, Uwe; Grunze, Nico; Kabisch, Sigrun (Hg.) (2018): Großwohnsiedlungen im Haltbarkeitscheck. Differenzierte Perspektiven ostdeutscher Großwohnsiedlungen. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Grunze, Nico (2017): Ostdeutsche Großwohnsiedlungen. Entwicklung und Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Helbig, Marcel; Jähnen, Stefanie (2019): Pfadabhängigkeiten in den ostdeutschen Städten. In: Peer Pasternack (Hg.): Das andere Bauhaus-Erbe. Leben in den Plattenbausiedlungen heute. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, S. 49–68.
Hunger, Bernd; Protz, Ralf; Weidemüller, Dagmar (Hg.) (2015): Perspektiven großer Wohnsiedlungen. Berlin: Kompetenzzentrum Großsiedlungen.
Krüger, Arvid (2019): Neue Steuerungsmodelle der Stadterneuerung - und daraus folgende Anforderungen an die Städtebauförderung, die Kommunen und die gemeinnützige Wohnungswirtschaft. Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Mau, Steffen (2019): Lütten Klein. Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Peer Pasternack (Hg.) (2019): Das andere Bauhaus-Erbe. Leben in den Plattenbausiedlungen heute. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag.
(1) https://srl.de/ueber-uns/organisation/arbeitskreise/ak-stadterneuerung-und-pr%C3%A4ventive-stadtentwicklung/ansprechpartner.html [especially with regard to session 51 in Schwerin, November 2024]
Busting the Scales: On Tirana's Vertikal Urbanism
Daniel Göler1, Dhimitër Doka2
1University of Bamberg, Germany; 2University of Tirana, Albania
Tirana, the Albanian capital, started its urban transition processes after the fall of communism in a rather small-scale and mostly informal manner. Three decades later, urban development in the metropolis with its tripled population has generally formalised. The built fabric experienced a metamorphosis into a globalised urban structure. During the last years, a certain number of megaprojects (in Albanian terms) arose in the city, such as mixed-use skyscrapers, high-rise apartment buildings and big shopping malls or other commercial buildings. In this context, the contribution will address topics of urban geographic interest. One is the overwhelming scalar dimension of the projects as well as the randomness of function and design. Tirana’s skyline shows more and more elements of globalised structures, but from an organisational point of view there is no corresponding functional internationalisation. Another is the fact that some of the large urban developments are organised as public-private partnerships. In such cases, the public sector provides the property, applies for approval and then transfers the responsibility to private developers. This model fosters urban development and renewal, but at the same time, the profits will be privatised. All in all, we note in Tirana an urbanism of exception that can only be partially explained with common theoretical approaches but rather requires an appropriate consideration of the evolutionary background, thus a relational perspective. We take up the concept of the “ordinary city” and discuss the scope of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory concepts.
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