Housing as Social Experiment: Rethinking the Legacy of Modernist Planning Outside Europe, 1900-1950

Abstract

Although considerable research has been done on the advent of modernist planning in different parts of the world in the early 20th century, discussion of the linkages between planning, housing and social reform, especially those in territories outside Europe and North America, have yet to receive sustained attention. The lack of discussion of these linkages in contemporary scholarship belies the active exchange of knowledge amongst international planning and social reform circles of the period, when the question of housing was subject to key experiments within the modern movement. While recent writings on colonial and postcolonial urbanism pay attention to the relationship between formal and informal settlements and the production of social space and citizenship in urban peripheries, there remains an assumed distinction between the 'planned' and 'unplanned' city - a dichotomy that continues to reinforce the idea that housing is either an 'infill component' of planning schemes on the one hand, or as 'counter practices' against state governance on the other. The subsumption of housing in contemporary planning literature may have much to do with the passing of the colonial era itself, where the high hopes of town planning as a modernist approach to colonial management and social betterment were never realized. Notwithstanding the perceived disjuncture between developments before and after decolonization, the specific directions that many cities eventually assumed cannot be fully explained without accounting for their earlier experiences. A critical element, for example, is the adoption of different colonial land tenure systems, such as the British model of land leasing and the German Genossenschaften, which were significant in shaping the relationship between the individual and the collective and had important implications for the ways in which housing figures within practices of community and nation building. Moreover, these different models were directly reflected in different assumptions made regarding the preferred unit of settlement and the inclusion of necessary collective amenities. This session will provide a comparative examination of the production and exchange of new knowledge of housing, planning and social reform in the colonial and proto-national contexts outside Europe between 1900 to 1950. Of particular interest are the interconnections between housing and planning, the idea of housing as social experiments and political strategies for governance, and the relationships between the 'planned' and the 'unplanned.'