European Middle-Class Mass Housing: Past and Present of the Modern Community

Abstract

The COST Action entitled “European Middle-Class Mass Housing (MCMH-EU)” started in April 2021 with a challenging and compelling goal: creating a transnational and multidisciplinary network to carry out studies on residential buildings and neighbourhoods built for the middle-class in Europe from the 1950s onwards. This far-reaching network aimed to develop new scientific approaches for the study of MCMH while bringing together researchers from different fields and with diverse skills. At the time of the project submission, the MCMH had generally been underestimated in architectural and urban studies. A structured understanding through a comparative analysis and a transnational perspective was thus long overdue. This shortcoming was also evident in the lack of cross-references in transnational publications and scholarly networks. By crossing different approaches, tools, and repositories of sources of Architecture, Urbanism, Planning, History, and Sociology, the MCMH-EU project sought to pave the way for fresh interpretative and methodological frameworks. The COST Action was thus committed to producing narratives that would contribute to a broader understanding of the shaping and diffusion of the MCMH phenomenon, deepening ongoing research and focusing on a set of existing case studies. The methodologies shared by the 117 researchers who joined the project – with different backgrounds, perspectives and lines of research –, along with the surveying, cataloguing, and contextualisation tasks, allowed for an initial mapping of the relevant case studies as well as an assessment of their varying degrees of resilience and their adjustments to current (urban and social) conditions. In the meantime, the project also fostered an understanding of the interaction between spatial forms, social behaviours and inhabitants’ satisfaction by combining architectural analysis and sociological inquiry. The Action CA18137 was developed by three Working Groups: Documenting the MCMH (WG1); Development of a specific set of (new) concepts for MCMH analyses (WG2); and Leverage contemporary architecture interventions and Public Policies (WG3). The MCMH-EU COST Action was concluded in October 2023. This book results from the work of the first group (WG1) coordinated by Inês Lima Rodrigues, with the collaboration of Dalit ShachPinsly, Kostas Tsiambaos and Vlatko P. Korobar. The two remaining groups were coordinated by Els De Vos with the assistance of Yankel Fijalkow (WG2) and Uta Pottgiesser with the support of Muge Akkar Ercan (WG3). The MCMH Atlas gathers a set of 97 case studies across 27 European partner countries plus one Cooperative country. This wide-ranging group shows paradigmatic examples of how the MCMH was tackled in post-war Europe. A total of 170 researchers were involved in the production of this book, many of whom are from outside CA, revealing the topic’s expansive relevance and substantial interest. This atlas offers a first attempt to map the phenomenon of MCMH in Europe since WWII by grasping a varied set of typologies and scales of intervention. However, while intersecting quantitative and qualitative methods, it sheds light on the potentialities of cases-based studies and micro-analyses. Each case offers a lens to address broader narratives on the planning policies, architectural cultures, professional practices, and financial mechanisms that generated MCMH, questioning the strategies of regeneration and conservation inaugurated in the diverse Countries. While middle-class is considered an extremely complex object of study, due to its stratification and internal fragmentation, the crossreading of case studies reveals also its homogeneity through the study of living patterns and housing solutions. We strongly believe that this project has gone a step further in describing the phenomenon of MCMH by bringing together the various political, economic, and social geographies that Europe has embraced over the last decades. As a generator of urban landscapes, the MCMH reinforced its structuring role in the construction of the contemporary city. The studies gathered in this Atlas precisely show the impact of its architecture today.