Modern Dreams. Modern Illusions—Ideas on Cooperativism

Abstract

The modern social reformers at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Charles Fourier or Robert Owen, dreamed about healing cities. That is why they designed utopian housing estates based on tenant cooperatives. On the one hand, they believed that in the social world, one can bring order, the world can be structured and architecture would be an expression of mathematically arranged reality. On the other hand, the reformers dreamed of cooperation and self-organising citizens. This tension between the order-making ambitions of the modern state and large social structures, and the grass-roots, self-help association of citizens reveals not only the ambitions but also illusions of modernity. In Poland in total/of utter disarray which, after 123 years under Russian, Austrian and German occupation, regained its independence; these modern dreams resound with new power. The idea of cooperativism is developing dynamically. As a result, in the 1920s, on the outskirts of Europe, under conditions of brutally developing capitalism, the exclusion and exploitation of workers, and thanks to, among others, the avant-garde architects from the Praesens group and Polish socialists and cooperatives; the Warsaw Housing Cooperative was built in Żoliborz, a district distant from the centre of Polish capital city, which was to address the housing deficit, ensure a decent existence for all workers, by giving them modern, modest and cheap flats.