SSU #6. Mass Housing (EN)

This lecture, based on Miles’s research for his recent book, Mass Housing – Modern Architecture and State Power, a Global History, and for his upcoming history of public housing in Hong Kong, explores the potential of the heritage of state-sponsored mass housing as an unexpected expression of local collective cultural identity and community solidarity, in contrast to the traditional preconception of mass housing as alienating, homogenous, and ‘the same everywhere’.

The lecture begins with a historical overview of the very diverse ways in which mass housing programmes originally sprang up in different locations, both within Europe and beyond, exploring this diversity through a number of specific case studies.

It continues by discussing how this surviving heritage is often now becoming intertwined with community resistance struggles against housing regeneration, privatisation and low-income displacement, including case studies from Scotland of campaigns to preserve public housing ‘tower blocks’ from demolition.