The first decades of the post‐war era saw a large and quickly growing need for new housing. In Sweden, rapid urbanization, growing prosperity and demands for higher housing standards led to years‐long housing queues. The housing shortage became a political liability for the ruling Social Democratic party. To end the housing shortage once and for all, the Swedish parliament decided that a million new dwellings should be built in the period 1965 to 1974 and this was achieved. When the Million Homes Programme, as it came to be called, had reached barely half‐way, the housing shortage was replaced by a housing surplus, partly caused by the rapid expansion of the housing stock and by the fact that economic growth gave way to stagnation. At the same time, criticism began to be heard about what some people perceived as uniform and poor architecture and, since then, the Million Homes Programme has never ceased to engage people and provoke debate. Most of the buildings and areas of this era have survived quite wel...

The Million Homes Programme: a review of the great Swedish planning project

This paper develops a more diverse and multi-dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban verticality. In particular, it argues for vertical geographies that encompass more than issues of security and segregation and are not necessarily framed by the three-dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine identified by some commentators. In opening up a wider world of vertical urbanisms, the paper outlines three key approaches: close attention to where urban verticality is theorised and the relationship between power and height, the importance of ethnographic detail to emphasise more everyday verticalities and disrupt top-down analytical perspectives, and geographical imaginations that carefully attend to the myriad spatial entanglements of the three-dimensional city.

Vertical urbanisms Opening up geographies of the three-dimensional city

This dissertation seeks to discern the impact of social housing on public health in the cities of Glasgow, Scotland and Baltimore, Maryland in the twentieth century. Additionally, this dissertation seeks to compare the impact of social housing policy implementation in both cities, to determine the efficacy of social housing as a tool of public health betterment. This is accomplished through the exposition and evaluation of the housing and health trends of both cities over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the cities of Glasgow and Baltimore had long struggled with both overcrowded slum districts and relatively unhealthy populations. Early commentators had noticed the connection between insanitary housing and poor health, and sought a solution to both of these problems. Beginning in the 1940s, housing reform advocates (self-dubbed ‘housers') pressed for the development of social housing, or municipally-controlled housing for low-income persons, to alleviate the problems of overcrowded slum dwellings in both cities. The impetus for social housing was twofold: to provide affordable housing to low-income persons and to provide housing that would facilitate healthy lives for tenants. Whether social housing achieved these goals is the crux of this dissertation. In the immediate years following the Second World War, social housing was built en masse in both cities. Social housing provided a reprieve from slum housing for both working-class Glaswegians and Baltimoreans. In Baltimore specifically, social housing provided accommodation for the city’s Black residents, who found it difficult to occupy housing in White neighbourhoods. As the years progressed, social housing developments in both cities faced unexpected problems. In Glasgow, stable tenant flight (including both middle class and skilled artisan workers)+ resulted in a concentration of poverty in the city’s housing schemes, and in Baltimore, a flight of White tenants of all income levels created a new kind of state subsidized segregated housing stock. The implementation of high-rise tower blocks in both cities, once heralded as a symbol of housing modernity, also faced increased scrutiny in the 1960s and 1970s. During the period of 1940-1980, before policy makers in the United States began to eschew social housing for subsidized private housing vouchers and community based housing associations had truly taken off in Britain, public health professionals conducted academic studies of the impact of social housing tenancy on health. Their findings provide the evidence used to assess the second objective of social housing provision, as outlined above. Put simply, while social housing units were undoubtedly better equipped than slum dwellings in both cities, the public health investigations into the impact of rehousing slum dwellers into social housing revealed that social housing was not a panacea for each city’s social and public health problems.

The impact of social housing on health in Glasgow and Baltimore, 1930-1980

This essay presents a study of the influence of certain cultural, social, and architectural factors upon the meaning and use of domestic space. It attempts to promote an understanding of the history of the kinds of ideas which are invested in the spatial form and use of houses. In addition, it establishes the principle that the meaning and use of domestic space are not intrinsic to a set of physical characteristics, nor the nomenclature applied to rooms and their facilities.

Domestic Space and Society: A Cross-Cultural Study

Throughout the twentieth century, England experienced a chronic problem of housing supply that persists to this day. In an attempt to manage it, philanthropists, policymakers and politicians have directed planning policies and legislation to build new planned communities: Howard’s town/country magnet; New Labour’s sustainable communities; and, the recent Coalition government’s initiatives in delivering locally-led garden cities. Problematically, this results in planning being trapped between political ideology and problems of housing supply. To examine this tension, the New Towns programme provides an important example of how goal-driven planning policy was used during the period 1946-1976 to address housing supply. This research focuses on the first wave (mark 1) of New Towns built as ‘balanced communities for working and living’ (Reith, 1944) between 1946-1955 in Southeast England, to decentralise London’s population and industry. Three critical lenses are employed to understand the development of mark 1 objectives: self-containment (Hall 1973, Ward 2004), newness vs. sameness (Clapson 2003) and governance (Aldridge 1979, Reade 1987). This research provides a different appraisal to the New Towns programme and makes a critical contribution to the meta-discourse of building new communities. A principal critique here is that the historiography of New Towns has been predominantly written by experts (academic and otherwise), providing a limited interpretation of the legacy of (living in) New Towns. To empirically rectify this, Sandercock’s (2003) suggestion of a narrative-led approach is employed in investigating two mark 1 case studies: Harlow and Hemel Hempstead. Perspectives of original New Town pioneers as well as planners/officials working in development corporations and local authorities/councils have been collected and analysed for a hitherto undocumented experience of planning, building, managing and living in New Towns. It thus provides not only valuable scholarship on New Towns, but also reinforces their contemporary relevance to the continued pursuit of building new communities in England.

Anthony Sutcliffe

Papers

Multi-Storey Living: The British Working Class Experience