Planning Perspectives

ISSN: 0266-5433 (Print) 1466-4518 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rppe20

Architecture and the Welfare State

Stephen E. Nepa

To cite this article: Stephen E. Nepa (2017) Architecture and the Welfare State, Planning
Perspectives, 32:1, 140-141, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2016.1241540

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2016.1241540

Published online: 16 Oct 2016.

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Download by: [University of Calgary] Date: 05 August 2017, At: 11:49

construction). This ARC tunnel, funded by Washington to the tune of $3 billion, was unceremoniously
cancelled by Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2010. A feudal order thus blocked
rational regional planning.
Philip Mark Plotch is to be commended for all the interviews he conducted, all the official reports he
read, and all the local politics he waded through, for the result is an important study of how our govern-
ment works, or does not.

Jeffrey A. Kroessler
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York
[email protected]
© 2016 Jeffrey A. Kroessler
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2016.1241536
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Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete, and Dirk van
den Heuvel, Abingdon, Routledge, 2015, 353pp., US $59.95 (paperback)

For several years, scholars have examined the relationship between modern architecture and social wel-
fare. Works such as Pare’s The Lost Vanguard (2007), Zipp’s Manhattan Projects (2010), and Cupers’ The
Social Project (2014) addressed how housing developments, cultural facilities, and infrastructure, when
planned and constructed by governments, affected citizens and their relation to the state. Broadening
the field of inquiry, Architecture and the Welfare State is the first-ever work considering how throughout
Western Europe, state-directed development generated both support and criticism. Framed by events
including the Cold War, decolonization, deindustrialization, and postwar consumption, the essays in
this ambitious volume research the ‘enormous role the built environment played in the welfare state’.
Following the editors’ introduction are three thematic sections. In ‘Cultures and Continuities’, Eve
Blau examines Austria’s ‘proto-welfare’ Red Vienna project. As the hot centre of the urban proletariat,
Vienna after the First World War emerged as an experiment in working-class consciousness, shaped
by what she terms ‘Austro-Marxism’, and the state’s response to that consciousness. More than 400 build-
ings, from schools to health clinics, resulted from the Red Vienna plan. Yet its signature features were
‘superblocks’, massive, enclaved developments that reordered the landscape and intended to blur the
boundaries between the private and public spheres. After the Second World War, a new generation of
architects lamented superblocks as ‘devoid of architecture’ and designed lower-rise buildings incorporat-
ing green spaces and terraces. Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye address postwar sprawl in Belgium with
particular focus on the Flanders region. They argue that the bifurcation of the state’s Flemish and Fran-
cophone communities ultimately produced the ‘nebulous city’, a constellation of communities separated
along cultural and ideological lines. In a chapter covering multi-storey housing in Britain, Simon Pepper
finds that while many people assume such planning occurred after the Second World War, agencies such
as the London City Council (LCC) addressed housing concerns from the 1930s onward. Similar to US-
built housing in Depression-era Puerto Rico, he also finds the LCC’s directives to move thousands of
‘slum dwellers’ to the Woodberry Down project faced opposition. Nicholas Bullock rounds out the
first section charting the postwar history of London’s West Ham borough. As a major target of the Luft-
waffe due to its industrial capacities, West Ham became after 1945 a stage for the British welfare state’s
attempts at urban revitalization. He concludes that by the early 1970s, the socioeconomic forces then-pla-
guing Britain (e.g. deindustrialization and racial tensions) overwhelmed the ‘aging’ welfare state and its
inability to adapt to such forces.
Part II, ‘Critiques and Contradictions’, considers sociological debates over the promises (and pitfalls)
of state power and modern architecture. Lukasz Stanek discovers that France’s grands ensembles (mass-
 PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 141

produced estates built on the edges of cities), their spatial orientations, and their representations of con-
sumerism birthed neo-Marxist criticism from Chombart de Lauwe, Henri Lefebvre, and others who
derided their ‘rigid functionalism’. Dirk van den Heuvel’s chapter on the Netherlands’ housing projects
designed by Piet Blom attends to the utopian idealism almost inherent in the spirit of the postwar welfare
state. Applying a ‘house-city’ analogy to his work, Blom’s work merged with what van den Heuvel
identifies as ‘open society’, the idea that postwar architecture could be tailored against the evils of
Communism. Yet Blom’s critics cited his Kasbah project at Hengelo for its ‘Gestapo mentality’ and
repetition of style. Similarly, Helena Mattsson points to Stockholm’s Skärholmen (a planned community
with 26,000 residents) as an emblematic meeting of car culture and consumerism, one in the late 1960s
railed against for its controlled environment that undermined human individuality. Using West Berlin’s
Märkisches Viertel as a case study, Florian Urban charts the ‘ambivalent heritage’ of the once-divided
city’s most recognized experiment in addressing its postwar housing shortage. Though the project opened
to great fanfare in 1963, by 1968 (a watershed year for challenging the welfare state’s unmet goals) the
towers and plazas were spurned as ‘monotonous slabs’ worthy of ‘science fiction’. Yet Urban posits
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that revulsion over Märkisches Viertel stemmed from objections over state policy rather than design.
Lastly, Caroline Maniaque-Benton surveys how the countercultural winds of the 1960s shaped transat-
lantic responses to welfare state architecture; from the American West to Europe, works such as the
USA’s Whole Earth Catalog, Britain’s Architectural Design, and France’s Le Catalogue des ressources pro-
moted alternative and environmentally conscious forms of homebuilding.
In the final section, ‘National and International’, Luca Molinari finds that in postwar Italy, the roles of
the state in architectural design and execution clashed with the principles of authenticity. Tom Avermaete
compares Le Corbusier’s planning concepts, with their reliance on ‘total approach’, to the work con-
ducted by the USA’s Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and 1940s. After the Second World
War, the heavy hand of the French state applied total approach policies in its rebuilding efforts in
North Africa, a time when the process of decolonization was gathering momentum. Michelle Provoost
applies a similar framework to her study of ‘new towns’ (cities built from scratch), which built by mod-
ernist architects, were used as Cold War tools for socially engineering Western loyalties in cities from
Khartoum to Tehran. In concluding the section, Miles Glendinning, interested in capitalism’s rise in con-
temporary Asia, cites the British-directed efforts in 1960s Hong Kong and Singapore as successfully
embedding public housing in popular consciousness; unlike in the West, he discovers that few critics
in the Orient, largely due to those city’s economic successes, reject or stigmatize mass housing.
The fifteen chapters in Architecture and the Welfare State include illustrations, blueprints, artist ren-
derings, and concluding sections that complement the authors’ well-researched narratives. Though some
terminology will at first challenge readers, scholars interested in urban planning, public policy, architec-
ture, and how they affect social relations and human identity will find this volume of remarkable use.

Stephen E. Nepa
Temple University
[email protected]
© 2016 Stephen E. Nepa
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2016.1241540

Barrio rising: urban popular politics and the making of modern Venezuela, by Alejandro
Velasco, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015, 344 pp., $29.95, £22.95 (paperback)

Latin America has its share of modernist icons that stand as testimony of incomplete promises. Brasilia
laid bare the unrealistic ambition of developmentalism in postwar Brazil; the abandonment of the
National Arts School in Cuba became a symbol of the unfulfilled goals of the revolution; and the massacre