ABSTRACT
The international ‘foundation narrative’ of the history of public housing has revolved almost exclusively around Europe and North America, spanning from the earlytwentieth century up to the 1970s and 80s.1 This narrative comprises a relatively restricted palette of well-known world-outlooks, often polarised against each other in stereotyped ways – as between the European welfare state and the U.S. combination of capitalism with residual public housing; or between Soviet communism and western social democracy, or between the supposed homogeneity of the Soviet-bloc ‘Plattenbau’ (prefabricated housing) and western European diversity. But these programmes in Europe and North America had one thing in common – the fact that most of them came to an end, often rather dramatically: earlier in some western countries, later in the Soviet case (1989-1991). In Europe and North America, public housing is seen today as a ‘closed’ subject, a twentieth-century phenomenon that is no longer in active development, but is now a matter of management or even dismantlement.2
