Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2020.107.05
A Crisis on Paper? On the Sociological Critique of Mass Housing in Late Socialism
Lea Horvat
; Sveučilište u Hamburgu, Odsjek za povijest, Hamburg, Njemačka
Sažetak
Collective housing developments that sprung up throughout Yugoslavia starting from the 1950s were a response to the housing crisis that was partly inherited from the interwar period, and partly exacerbated by war destruction. Guided by socialist and modernist ideas, architects focused on solving the housing issue en masse—by designing relatively cheap apartments in collective housing developments embedded in self-managed housing policies. The first objections, soon followed by the almost unison professional and popular stigmatization of modernist collective housing, appeared in the 1960s in Western European social democracies such as France or West Germany. Based on the texts of sociologists who analysed the housing developments in Yugoslavia as well as on archival sources the article focuses on the contributions and limitations of sociological critique in Yugoslavia from the 1970s to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the genesis of arguments against (some aspects) of collective housing developments. The author first addresses the issue of alienation, a concept that was popular in sociology starting with the Marxist theory(Marx’s alienation of labour) through the early sociological studies of urbanity (Simmel in the early 20th century) to the neo-Marxist reinterpretations (Henry Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and the activity of Praxis). In the second half of the 20th century, a hypothesis on collective housing developments as places particularly affected by alienation was formed in Western European sociological discourse. In the early 1970s, sociologist Sreten Vujović applied the ideas of the French sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and his critique of French grands ensembles to the Yugoslav context with minimal reserves. In Rudi Supek’s Humane City (Grad po mjeri čovjeka, 1987), the radical alienation of collective housing has been dramatized to the proportions of existential despair and highlighted by a suggestive choice of illustrations (French and Belgian caricatures as well as visual juxtapositions of “traditional” and “modern” settlements to the detriment of the latter). Secondly, the significance of pathologization of the new housing developments in medical and even criminological discourse has been considered. While in the 1960s the emphasis was on ensuring modern hygiene (adequate size, fresh air) and optimal conditions for physical health to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in the then new housing developments, in the following decades they were increasingly seen as a risk factor for mental conditions (neuroses, phobias) and “social pathologies”. Thus, at the Continuing Conference of Yugoslav Cities on the Influence of Some Environmental Factors on Youth Delinquency and Urban Planning (1981), the pathologization of collective housing developments was supplied with the subtext of criminalization—most pronounced in the critique of youthful deviance. Thirdly, the history of threatening slumification in terms of decline in the material value of housing developments has been analysed. Taking the development of the situation in European social democracies as a reference point, sociologist Ognjen Čaldarović wrote about the probable abandonment of these apartments in the near future as early as the 1970s, when housing shortage were still an acute Yugoslav problem. The hypothesis on “filtration”, gradual impoverishment of the housing developments, demographic change in the population structure (emigration of the privileged, immigration of the marginalized), and slumification intensified in the 1990s, when collective housing developments were predicted to end with the “Harlem syndrome” and a significant decline in the market value, classified as “social housing” (Čaldarović). Recent studies have refuted these fears, but show that the indicators of social inequality are on the rise and the gap between the privileged and pauperized parts of the housing developments is deepening. Intervention proposals in the 1970s and 1980s ranged from abandoning the concept, which was guided by the idea that an optimal collective housing development was a “contradictio in adiecto” (Dušica Seferagić), through the implementation of elements of the premodernist city (the project of Lefebvre, Renaudie, and Guilbaud for layering, condensing, and connecting New Belgrade with the old part of the city), to the idea of gradually supplementing and filling in the housing developments that would happen with time (Čaldarović). This article shows how the critique of collective housing often relied unreservedly on the theoretical, empirical, and visual stereotypes about the new housing developments, taken over from the context of European social democracies and used as a prefiguration of the Yugoslav future. The author has pointed out the ambivalent image of residents of collective housing developments in sociological studies, which, on the one hand, affirm their role in shaping the housing developments (thus opposing the dominance of architects in their concept), while on the other hand take their attitudes with reserve (especially satisfaction with the housing developments). It is argued that the sociology of the city offered solutions to some of the problems in the new housing developments while simultaneously constituting them as acute crisis areas. Indicators such as crime rate, dissatisfaction of the local population, or social structure have here been considered as counter- arguments to provide a more complex picture of life in the new housing developments.
Ključne riječi
late socialism; sociology of the city; mass housing; Yugoslavia
Hrčak ID:
257934
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.12.2020.
Posjeta: 1.532 *