ABSTRACT
In the last sixty years, allegedly egalitarian mass housing blocks have yielded more differences than their creators could have ever imagined. An architectural type that like few others was developed to provide equal living standards for everyone developed into a wide array of unequal variations. Serially produced apartment blocks were built as low-rises and high-rises, on individual lots and large estates, by public or private developers, from bricks and prefab slabs, in the city center and on the periphery, as housing projects or luxury condos, with tiny one-room apartments and spacious maisonettes, with austere modernist and lavish neoclassical façades, crammed on paved grounds and surrounded by lush gardens. Their inhabitants are equally diverse. They house the middle class and welfare recipients, the privileged and the outcast, long-term residents and recent immigrants. How was a building type that on the surface appears so similar able to generate so much difference?
