ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how housing became one of urbanism's major issues. Using examples primarily from the Netherlands, the chapter explores how housing became one of urbanism's major issues. The main body of the Dutch public housing law provided the organizational and financial arrangements for public housing. It also included a paragraph that required the larger Dutch cities to introduce general expansion plans, forging very close ties between public housing and urbanism that were only severed in the last decades of the 20th century. Dividing the city into functional zones and defining a traffic structure to connect them, urbanists created the city as a three-dimensional construct. The chapter discusses how the changes shaped new realities, with fundamental consequences for the relation between urbanism and housing. It concludes by pointing out the virtual abolition of planning and discontent with its major legacy: the immense numbers of dwellings in suburban housing estates built after World War II.