Review: The New Tenement: Residences in the Inner City since 1970, by Florian Urban

Abstract

Florian Urban The New Tenement: Residences in the Inner City since 1970 Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2018, 310 pp., 329 color illus. $59.95 (paper), ISBN 9781138224469 During the mid-twentieth century, a strong tendency toward state intervention in the urban built environment prevailed across northwestern Europe. This was channeled chiefly through the two linked mechanisms of city planning and social housing production. During the first three decades following World War II, dubbed les Trente Glorieuses in France, a modernist consensus favoring the opening out of congested cities, and the separating out of their different functions, was established. The most ubiquitous of these functions was mass housing, which in those decades was generally built according to modernist principles and mass-produced along “Fordist” lines. Individual nation-states and large cities drove these programs forward. Thus, far from being crushingly homogeneous, as later claimed by critics, postwar mass housing was bewilderingly diverse, both in its organization and in its built form. In Britain, for example, urban planning often took a radical, surgical approach, and mass housing was overwhelmingly built by municipalities; in Denmark, meanwhile, there was virtually no slum-clearance demolition, and social housing was decentralized by housing associations and cooperatives and built mainly on cities’ outskirts. Beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, any general consensus regarding social housing began to dissolve, as citizens and professionals became increasingly discontented with what they viewed as mass housing's paternalism and disrespect of the once-despised nineteenth-century urban fabric, …