ABSTRACT
Introduction: unity or diversity? Today, of all aspects of the cultural landscape bequeathed to us by the disciplined, collectivist state of the mid-twentieth century in Europe, the one widely seen as most emblematic of its supposedly alienating homogeneity and mechanistic dirigisme is the surviving landscape of the mass-housing programme, still vast in extent in many countries. Usually treated, at best, with benign neglect (Russia, France) and, at worst, with active denigration and mass demolition (former East Germany), this mass-housing legacy is widely branded ‘all the same’, and often ‘all bad’, in both its state-driven socio-political aspects and in its modernist architecture – in the latter case, despite the recent revival of interest in the Modern Movement, focused on commodifi able ‘icons’ rather than collectivist programmes.1
