The intertwined history of social housing and schooling in the 1940s Mandatory Palestine, especially from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 onwards, is a story of “means” that ended up shaping “ends,” or of instruments which became creators (Cohen, 1992). The 1940s and 1950s were the period of Israel’s “great migration”: Following the foundation of Israel, Arab countries withdrew citizenship from Jews, and 1.5 million became refugees. The 650,000 pre-state Zionists (mostly of European descent) had to “absorb,” as it was dubbed at the time, the new groups of population: provide housing, schooling, jobs and language services at once. The paper pursues the thesis that housing and schooling intertwined as part of the welfare system that the ruling Labor Zionism aimed at creating while merging Jewish religious and ethnic ideologies with socialist visions: Drawing on Jackson (1968), this materialized a societal curriculum where housing and schooling politics and practices worked multidirectionally and social challenges were educationalized within and beyond school politics (e.g. Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008). The housing projects, just like the schools that were established along with them and as part of them, were the immediate solution Israel’s state institutions came up with to face the immigration wave: placing people of similar background, language skills and cultural profile together in these so-called “shikunim.” But simultaneously, this became part of dividing the centralized state-run education system into four semi-segregated systems according to residence and religious affiliation (Carmon, 2002). One of the consequences was that immigrants arriving from Muslim countries in the 1950s were placed in the so-called “mekif,” the Zionist orthodox school track, while housed in the “shikunim” projects (Zameret, 1997). These residences materialized the reality that some “mekif” schools “happened” to be “Ethiopian only,” something that created critical media attention, while school administration claimed it to be only technical, since they all lived in the same street. However, placing in housing and placing in schools were the two sides of the same institutional action. The structures created to “facilitate” the mission of “ingathering of exiles,” proclaiming Jewish unity and sovereignty, essentially created ethnic divides among Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, religious and seculars. While Israel by the end of the 20^th century received new waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union alongside increased implementation of US-hyper capitalism, these structures stayed, physically and institutionally. The “immediate housing and the school solutions” of the 1940s and 1950s became formative for segregated systematics of the Israeli state and society up until the present. Based on a source material consisting of legal documents, construction plans, educational reports, speeches held at the Knesset (the parliament), as well as video and audio footage from the construction process collected at the Israeli National Library, the paper asks the following questions: What ideological structures of socialism and Zionism materialized in Israel’s state-run housing facilities and educational systems constructed during the founding years of the state, and how did it possibly shape present structures and ways of addressing social challenges?

This paper aims to problematize the relationship between the extension of social housing and education during the period known as the first Peronism in Argentina (1946-1955). In 1946, Juan Domingo Perón became president through general elections. Perón set out to achieve three primary objectives that became the heart of Peronist doctrine and the creation of a “New Argentina”: Economic Independence, Political Sovereignty and Social Justice. In continuity with the import substitution policy, the Peronist government developed an economic model based on industry, oriented towards the domestic market with solid state intervention and a redistribution favorable to workers (Gregoric, 2002). The economic boom of the early post-war years and the growth of state services and infrastructure led to a change in the population’s quality of life, an increase in consumption and the extension of social rights. For some authors, it was an Argentinian-style welfare state (Golbert, 1988), as the model would soon find its limits due to international economic changes and internal resistance. The development of the urban proletariat increased housing problems, particularly in Buenos Aires and its surroundings, which were the areas of greatest population concentration. Peronism’s housing policy was developed through direct construction and granting of credits. Two models of urban development and social vision coexisted in the early years: the neighborhood where a family inhabited each house — a reflection of a rising social class but conservative in values — and the central European working-class neighborhood based on pavilions or blocks of flats with shared spaces for circulation and use — a reflection of the social integration of Peronist employees and workers (Aboy, 2003). Underlying both was the creation of a new imaginary in which the benefits of urban life were proposed to be more accessible: clubs, schools, libraries, theaters, recreational centers, churches and government offices (Puigróss & Bernetti, 1993). Hence, social housing policies involved the development of a new subject: the migrant worker arriving from the countryside to the city. What were the educational assumptions of these policies? How did they relate to schooling extension policies? Indeed, Perón’s five-year plans included the construction of school infrastructure: educational buildings — considering all educational levels — comprised the largest group of buildings to be constructed and were assigned the most significant budget burden concerning the totality of architectural works (Durá Gúrpide, 2017). But also school textbooks and propaganda served as vehicles for disseminating this new imaginary (Somoza Rodriguez, 1988). The paper proposes that, during the first Peronism, the process of educationalization of social problems (Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008) that accompanied the formation of the educational systems demanded a reversal of its terms. There was a need to socialize the population into urban life, and the means to do so were the extension of schooling together with a hidden curriculum beyond school walls. To this end, the paper develops a general review of social housing and education policies during the period under study through the analysis of primary sources (official plans, housing and education statistics) and secondary sources (studies on textbooks and propaganda under Peronism).

How did modernist 1960s and 1970s social housing meet newcomers, be they newly arrived guest workers or other people displaced from the old working-class area in Copenhagen that was demolished from the late 1960s? What could newcomers learn about being part of the welfare-state population in the new suburban cities that formed part of mid-20^th century welfare-state planning? By means of these overarching questions, the paper sheds light on the history of social housing as a history of education and of the educational welfare state. The paper takes its point of departure in the case of Ishøj-Planen [The Ishøj Plan], a prestigious social housing project, sketched out from 1965 and ready to be inhabited in 1970. The Ishøj Plan had direct roots back to the late 1940s’ urban planning being part of the welfare-state expansion that took place in the decades following WWII, mainly under Social Democrat reign. In 1947, the so-called Five Finger Plan was stipulated in the Danish parliament, an urban regulation principle for how to expand the capital area with “fingers” of new cities connected to “the palm.” The southern coastline of Køge Bay, where Ishøj is located, made up the thumb. New cities were to be constructed with quotas for small private-ownership houses and modernist social housing in order to cleanse the old urban working-class areas and raise the working class and lower middle class into higher living standards in a carefully differentiated way, mirroring the Nordic welfare-state ideal of a peaceful social contract across social differences (Bergenheim, 2020; Buchardt, 2023). In 1971, renting out especially the big apartments proved difficult. Economic crisis and decreased state support for social housing resulted in the rent being too high for most working people, and the planned commuter train was still just a plan. One of the solutions became renting out to people with an income so low that they were eligible for housing subsidies from the state. Another was to accommodate so-called guest workers. From the mid-1970s, the guest workers became problematized key figures in the media coverage of Ishøj- Planen. “The Plan” had developed from modernist pride and hyped welfare-state expansion into being seen as an economic, social and integration-political problem. Drawing on the concept of hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968; Buchardt; 2023) and the diagnosis of educationalization as part of state modernization (Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008), the paper explores how the planned and practiced curriculum of social housing in the case of Ishøj-Planen transformed from late 1940s welfare urban planning to a 1970s welfare-state problem. The written source material consists of minutes, instructions and communication between the operating social housing associations, municipal agencies in Ishøj and the Ministry of Housing, including the so-called Køge Bay commission that controlled that the construction of the new city of Ishøj was following the planning principles. Among the sources are also the tenants’ magazine of Ishøj-Planen, newspaper coverage as well as oral history interviews with local actors in Ishøj-Planen and the municipality.