Housing Estates in Europe

Daniel Baldwin Hess,Maarten Van Ham,Tiit Tammaru

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92813-5

Abstract

This open access book explores the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. Are these estates clustered or scattered? Which social groups originally had access to residential space in housing estates? What is the size, scale and geography of housing estates, their architectural and built environment composition, services and neighbourhood amenities, and metropolitan connectivity? How do housing estates contribute to the urban mosaic of neighborhoods by ethnic and socio-economic status? What types of policies and planning initiatives have been implemented in order to prevent the social downgrading of housing estates? The collection of chapters in this book addresses these questions from a new perspective previously unexplored in scholarly literature. The social aspects of housing estates are thoroughly investigated (including socio-demographic and economic characteristics of current and past inhabitants; ethnicity and segregation patterns; population dynamics; etc.), and the physical composition of housing estates is described in significant detail (including building materials; building form; architectural and landscape design; built environment characteristics; etc.). This book is timely because the recent global economic crisis and Europe’s immigration crisis demand a thorough investigation of the role large housing estates play in poverty and ethnic concentration. Through case studies of housing estates in 14 European centers, the book also identifies policy measures that have been used to address challenges in housing estates throughout Europe.

Highlights

Lessons Learned from a Pan-European Study of Large Housing Estates: Origin, Trajectories of Change and Future ProspectsDaniel Baldwin Hess, Tiit Tammaru and Maarten van Ham AbstractMid-twentieth-century large housing estates, which can be found all over Europe, were once seen as modernist urban and social utopias that would solve a variety of urban problems
We present new evidence about changes in large housing estates from 14 European cities—Athens, Berlin, Birmingham, Brussels, Budapest, Bucharest, Helsinki, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Moscow, Prague, Stockholm and Tallinn (Fig. 1.1)— enlarging and updating findings from the Restate study (Dekker and Van Kempen 2004; van Kempen et al 2005; Rowlands et al 2009; Turkington et al 2004)
The first modernist apartment buildings and housing estate-like neighbourhoods appeared in Europe during the inter-War period (Wassenberg 2018), we focus in this book on an intense period of post-World War II housing estate construction between the 1950s and 1980s

Summary

Introduction

Lessons Learned from a Pan-European Study of Large Housing Estates: Origin, Trajectories of Change and Future ProspectsDaniel Baldwin Hess, Tiit Tammaru and Maarten van Ham AbstractMid-twentieth-century large housing estates, which can be found all over Europe, were once seen as modernist urban and social utopias that would solve a variety of urban problems. Many others have become stigmatised urban spaces, which are discursively linked to the accumulation of a whole series of social, economic and physical problems (Hall et al 2005) The reasons these large housing estates have followed divergent trajectories have long been the focal point of important debates in contemporary urban studies, giving rise to complementary theories about their recent evolution (van Kempen et al 2005b; Rowlands and Murie 2009). In Sweden, the label ‘large housing estate’ has primarily been associated with multifamily housing constructed during the so-called Million Programme, when one million dwellings were built in 10 years (1965–1974) During this period, the projects were larger and the industrial efficiency of the construction process further driven than in earlier decades, resulting in metropolitan areas in very large estates with little mixing in terms of housing tenure and dwelling sizes. Generous public subsidies to maintain buildings and public spaces were withdrawn and former public tenants lacked the skills and financial resources to act as owners

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Discussion

Conclusion