El legado del Movimiento Moderno. Conjuntos de vivienda masiva en ciudades europeas del Oeste y del Este. No tan diferentes…

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast modernist housing projects in Western (“capitalist”) and Eastern (“socialist“) cities of Europe. Our focus is on mass housing estates built in the period of accelerated urban growth that took place mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. The obvious starting point is that socialist cities were different from Western cities because of the distinct nature of their urban policies, the centrally socialist planned economy, the absence of a free land market, the impact of industrialization on building construction, etc. However, there are many concepts in urban planning and design as well as urban processes which were shared by both ideological systems and which housing estates from that pe­riod show. This paper offers a comparative perspective of the nature of some of those Modern Housing Estates (or Housing Projects) built on both sides of the Iron Curtain – Grands Ensembles in France, Grossiedlungen in Germany, Poligonos in Spain or large-scale Socialist Housing Estates equivalents in Eastern bloc countries– in order to better understand if (and up to what point) mass housing forms are the result of a modernist international urban culture.