The idea of the City in the Social Housing experience throughout the past century: scale, shape and extent

We can say that social housing was a big part of all the architectural experience of the last century, since it had the position of partially or totally (according to some) solve a housing problem that, more than physical, was also social and political.

Architects and Urban planners work hardly in the search of solutions that would face the pre-existing problems of housing in the traditional city, as the result of an uncontrollable industrial growth, among others. Their solutions varied according to their intentions and their ideological purposes, and different proposals were made in order to solve the same problem: to dignify the urban living of the lower classes, the ones that most suffered from housing shortage and speculation.

Although different and specific, we can gather most of the experiences in three categories, the first two attempting to overcome the traditional city by a) creating a disperse organism according to a scale and spatial solutions dear to previous urban settlements, or b) inventing a condensed city as part of an infinite modern system. Finally, the last group includes c) the rehabilitation of the traditional city fabric by surgical or large interventions.

The idea of the paper is not to offer a critical review of the different ‘cities’, or even to make a choice among them of the perfect settlement, but just to present different solutions supported by various case-studies, pointing flaws and successes, demystifying misconceived ideas or supporting others. This, more than answers, will offer tools of evaluation for present and future proposal of architects and urban planners.