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ARCHITECTURE AND THE 
WELFARE STATE
In the decades following the Second World War, and partly in response to the Cold 
War, governments across western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social 
welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of 
their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes – housing, schools, new towns, 
cultural and leisure centres – involved not just construction but a new approach to 
architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes 
were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was 
profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in archi-
tectural discourse, not just in Europe but worldwide.
This is the first book to explore the architecture of the welfare state in western 
Europe from an international perspective. With chapters covering Austria, Belgium, 
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, the book explores the 
complex role played by architecture in the formation and development of the welfare 
state in both theory and practice.
Themes include:
• the role of the built environment in the welfare state as a political project
• the colonial dimension of European welfare state architecture and its ‘export’ to 
Africa and Asia
• the role of welfare state projects in promoting consumer culture and economic 
growth
• the picture of the collective produced by welfare state architecture
• the role of architectural innovation in the welfare state
• the role of the architect, as opposed to construction companies and others, in 
determining what was built
• the relationship between architectural and social theory
• the role of internal institutional critique and the counterculture
Mark Swenarton is James Stirling Professor of Architecture at the University of 
Liverpool, UK, and author of Homes fit for Heroes (1981) and Building the New Jerusalem 
(2008).
Tom Avermaete is Professor of Architecture at TU Delft and author of Another 
Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005).
Dirk van den Heuvel is Head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe 
Instituut, Rotterdam, Associate Professor at TU Delft and co-author of Team 10: In 
Search of a Utopia of the Present (2005).
ARCHITECTURE AND 
THE WELFARE STATE
Edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and 
Dirk van den Heuvel
First edition published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
The right of Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel to be identified as authors of 
the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in 
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. The purchase of this copyright material confers the right on the purchasing 
institution to photocopy pages which bear the photocopy icon and copyright line at the bottom of the 
page. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, 
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, 
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used 
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Architecture and the welfare state / edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den 
Heuvel. -- First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Architecture and state--Europe, Western--History-–20th century. 2. Architecture and society--
Europe, Western--History-–20th century. 3. Welfare state--Europe, Western--History-–20th century. 
I. Swenarton, Mark, editor of compilation. II. Avermaete, Tom, editor of compilation. III. Heuvel, 
Dirk van den, 1968- editor of compilation. IV. Blau, Eve, author. From red superblock to green 
megastructure.
NA100.A72 2014
720.1’03094--dc23
2014000473
ISBN: 978-0-415-72539-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-72540-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76692-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
PART I
Cultures and continuities 25
2 From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure: 
Municipal Socialism as Model and Challenge 27
Eve Blau
3 The Welfare State in Flanders: De-Pillarization and the 
Nebulous City 51
Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye
4 The Beginnings of High-Rise Social Housing in the Long 1940s: 
The Case of the LCC and the Woodberry Down Estate 69
Simon Pepper
5 West Ham and the Welfare State 1945–1970: a Suitable 
Case for Treatment? 93
Nicholas Bullock
PART II
Critiques and contradictions 111
6 Who Needs ‘Needs’? French Post-War Architecture and its Critics 113
Łukasz Stanek
vi Contents
7 The Open Society and Its Experiments: The Case of the 
Netherlands and Piet Blom 133
Dirk van den Heuvel
8 Where the Motorways Meet: Architecture and Corporatism in 
Sweden 1968 155
Helena Mattsson
9 The Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin 177
Florian Urban
10 Alternatives to Welfare State: Self-Build and Do-It-Yourself 199
Caroline Maniaque-Benton
PART III
National and international 217
11 From Knoxville to Bidonville: ATBAT and the Architecture of 
the French Welfare State 219
Tom Avermaete
12 High Density without High Rise: Housing Experiments of the 
1950s by Patrick Hodgkinson 237
Mark Swenarton
13 Matteotti Village and Gallaratese 2: Design Criticism of the 
Italian Welfare State 259
Luca Molinari
14 Exporting New Towns: The Welfare City in Africa 277
Michelle Provoost
15 From European Welfare State to Asian Capitalism: 
The Transformation of ‘British Public Housing’ in 
Hong Kong and Singapore 299
Miles Glendinning
Appendix: Outcomes from the Liverpool Workshop 2012 321
Further Reading 324
Contributors 334
List of figures 336
Index 343
1
INTRODUCTION
Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and 
Dirk van den Heuvel
In recent years the architecture of the second half of the twentieth century has become 
a prime area of interest for architectural historians. Most of their studies adopt the 
classic format of the monograph, devoted to individual architects (for example, Ernst 
May, James Stirling), to groups (Archigram, Team 10) or to offices (Candilis-Josic-
Woods, Atelier Montrouge, Van den Broek and Bakema),1 while others have tried 
to theorize the field as part of a revisionary, historiographical critique of the period.2 
The list of publications is extensive and proof of a most fruitful practice in mining the 
(recent) history of modern architecture. At the same time, within political sociology 
there has emerged an enormous literature on the welfare state, with Gøspa Esping-
Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) triggering a plethora of 
studies examining the post-war welfare state as an international phenomenon from an 
economic, social and political viewpoint.3
Strangely, however, these twin developments have taken place virtually in complete 
ignorance of each other. Little attention has been given to the varied ways in which 
architecture and urban planning interacted with the different regimes of welfare 
provision.4 The forementioned architectural histories have tended to analyze post-war 
buildings and neighbourhoods as expressions of individual oeuvres or cultural currents, 
rather then as exponents of complex welfare state arrangements. Only in Belgium and 
Sweden hasthere been an emerging interest in the architectural production of the 
welfare state per se, but largely from a national perspective.5 Conversely, to the extent 
that the sociological studies have investigated welfare state intervention in the built 
environment, they have done so as an abstract matter of decrees, programmes and 
strategies, without reference to the physical realization of the welfare state in archi-
tecture and the built environment.
If the built environment was of little significance to the welfare state, this situation 
might be understandable. But the planning of the built environment – from new 
towns (Figure 1.1), to social housing, to schools and universities, hospitals and health 
centres, to leisure and sports complexes, to arts centres – was one of the key areas in 
which the welfare state sought to achieve its ambitions of economic redistribution and 
2 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
social welfare. This already vast area of intervention in the everyday environment of 
the population becomes even greater when we consider that the post-war welfare state 
also incorporated the reconstruction of national industries and energy production, 
involving the construction of vast new infrastructures. Given the enormous role 
that the built environment played in the welfare state, and the role that welfare state 
ideology and commissions played in the architectural developments of the period, this 
mutual indifference of the two disciplines appears extraordinary.
This book is a first attempt to connect these two fields with each other from an 
international perspective and to look at post-war architecture in western Europe in 
terms of its role within the welfare state. The aim is to investigate the complex kinship 
between the welfare state and the built environment, looking at the role of plans, 
neighbourhoods and buildings within welfare programmes, as well as probing the 
contribution made by planners, urban designers and architects to the implementation, 
articulation and development of the welfare state in post-war western Europe. What 
is offered is not a comprehensive account or synoptic overview, but rather an attempt 
to explore the field through a series of case studies – some thematic, some based on 
particular architects or projects – written from different points of view by leading 
architectural historians from Europe and the USA. Likewise, rather than attempting 
an overview of this vast subject, this introduction aims to elucidate some of the key 
themes and issues involved: conceptual, methodological and historical.
The book is the outcome of a transnational project extending over a number of 
years. The first steps were taken by Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel of TU 
Delft when they organized a session on Architecture and the Welfare State at the 
European Architectural History Network (EAHN) 2010 conference in Guimaraes, 
Portugal.6 Mark Swenarton was one of the speakers at that session and together the 
three collaborated on a follow-up at the EAHN conference in Brussels in 2012.7 
Meanwhile, Swenarton’s move to the University of Liverpool provided the oppor-
tunity for a rather different kind of event, again organized by the three editors – an 
invited international closed-doors symposium, called the Liverpool Workshop – 
which took place in September 2012. It is the papers presented there, substantially 
revised in the light of the debates that took place at the symposium, which are 
published here for the first time.8
At the Liverpool Workshop intensive discussions took place on a wide range of 
issues and these were summarized on behalf of the organizers by Adrian Forty as a 
list of questions and issues for future research; for the benefit of other scholars these 
are reproduced in the Appendix.9 A specific obstacle identified at the symposium was 
the lack of an international multilingual bibliography on the subject and so, as a step 
towards this, a list of items for further reading is also provided.
Why now?
Our project investigating the relationship of architecture and the welfare state has 
coincided with the period of crisis that seized the economies of the United States and 
Europe in 2008. While the rationale for the project stems in part from the crisis, the 
one is not reducible to the other. While the crisis of the neoliberal economic model 
that had become dominant in the 1990s with the completion of the internal market of 
 Introduction 3
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4 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
the EU gave a particular urgency to our research, the investigations into the post-war 
discourse of modern architecture created a more sharply defined project than that of 
the apparently neutral term of ‘the post-war’ so widely adopted: namely that of archi-
tecture and the welfare state.10 It also made re-focusing on western Europe a matter 
of course, while being aware of the possible criticism of maintaining a eurocentric 
perspective.
But the economic crisis is not the only reason that the relationship of architecture 
to the welfare state is relevant today. The built production of the welfare state consti-
tutes a sizable portion of the cities of Europe that we inhabit today; if we are to 
make the best use of this inheritance we need to understand both its objectives and 
its historical formation. Moreover, the question of what parts of this inheritance to 
retain and conserve, and what parts can be demolished and redeveloped, is one that 
arises regularly in public debate in most European countries, with newspaper articles 
and exhibitions regularly devoted to the question of the conservation (or otherwise) 
of post-war buildings.11 The ultimately unsuccessful campaign to save Robin Hood 
Gardens in London, the only major housing scheme built by Alison and Peter 
Smithson (Figure 1.2), was one of the most high-profile of these. For many years the 
Docomomo International conferences have provided an international professional 
platform for these debates.12 Decisions about retention or demolition need to be 
informed not just by an understanding of the individual building or buildings, which 
can be provided by conservation bodies and listing agencies, but by an understanding 
of the broader context within which they stood. If we are to assess their historical 
importance, we need to understand that history.
To investigate the shifting role, or roles, of the architect in society and in the 
process of planning and building constitutes a second motivation for revisiting the 
architecture of the welfare state. For a number of years the claim of the architect to be 
the leader of the building team has been under attack.13 Architects, it is said, may be 
useful at the early stage of a project for gaining planning consents, but after that have 
little to offer, with contractors taking over their role in the specification of construc-
tional methods and materials and project managers taking over their role in directing 
the project. This contrasts with the picture of the architect widely held in the heyday 
of the welfare state. In those times, we are told, the architect was the heroic figure, 
building the future, the form-giver who devised new forms of homes, of schools, 
of hospitals, and of entire cities: the person at the forefront of innovation, tasked by 
government to devise new ways of living for the population and with the authority 
to drive through his or her (mostly his) vision. Recently, this historical role of the 
architect has been subjected to reappraisal, notably at OMA’sinstallation at the 2012 
Venice Biennale, Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants. But was the architect really 
as powerful as it appeared? The claim is double-edged, because if so then the architect 
also has to take responsibility for those things that went wrong. Perhaps the architect 
was only the figurehead, and in reality, others – politicians, managers, planners, the 
building industry – had more influence. If so, it may be that the post-war golden 
age of the architect is a myth and then, as now, it was the development process that 
dictated the outcome. We need to know what the real roles of the various actors were, 
what the space that they had for decision-making was, and what coalitions were built 
between the parties involved in the planning processes.
 Introduction 5
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6 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 it has become apparent that in Europe 
we have been entering an era in which the large-scale provision of public services by 
public bodies will be further reduced. To revisit the welfare state era accordingly is not 
to look back in nostalgia but to learn from the consistent negotiations between capital, 
labour and the state from which the western European welfare state emerged. The 
resulting balance of power was not so much a clear-cut model as a precarious hybrid, 
a balancing act, indeed. Whereas in the past in many countries the state undertook 
to provide the necessities of life – for example, education, health services, housing – 
more and more it seems today that these are either left to the market, with the state 
withdrawing altogether, or are provided by private companies operating on its behalf. 
In the Netherlands, since 1995, the national government has ceased providing credit 
to housing corporations, turning them into de facto private companies. Likewise, in 
the UK the ‘academy schools’ programme, first launched in 2000 and much extended 
since, has devolved the state’s responsibility for secondary education to private 
companies. The role of architecture and the built environment in the delivery of state 
policy is becoming more complex and diffused, since a building provided by a private 
company in this way no longer stands as the emblem or image of the state. What will 
this mean for our cities and suburbs? It is hard to predict but by looking at the period 
when almost all publicly funded buildings carried this meaning (whether implicitly or, 
as with Vienna’s housing of the 1920s, explicitly), we can get a better understanding of 
the role of buildings in carrying messages about the state and society in western Europe.
As European economies appear to stagnate and welfare provisions are under 
pressure, it is parts of Asia, South America and Africa that lead the world in economic 
performance. These countries (for example, China, India, South Korea) are now 
enjoying the kind of boom that Europe experienced in the decades following the 
Second World War, and face not dissimilar issues of rapid urbanization and moderni-
zation. Sociologists have pointed out that features of the European welfare state, not 
least construction of new towns and state-funded housing, are now recurring in the 
sunshine economies of China and south-east Asia.14 In other parts of the world popular 
demand for basic welfare provision, especially education and healthcare, is fuelling 
social unrest, for example, in Brazil in the widespread protests against the staging of 
the 2014 football World Cup.15 To what extent is what happened in Europe, whether 
in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, being repeated elsewhere? To what extent 
is a model devised for European countries in that period applicable to other parts of 
the world today?
Mapping the welfare state
This book focuses on the welfare state as a largely European invention that has known 
its greatest development and proliferation in north-western Europe.16 The politics of 
the Cold War and the rise of a new consumer culture (the so-called ‘western way of 
life’) form part of this development, together with the concomitant phenomena of 
decolonization and the emergence of the post-industrial society.
The sources of this western welfare state date back to the nineteenth century 
when, as economist Karl Polyani has argued, a ‘Great Transformation’ took place, 
characterized by the development of industrial capitalism, rapid urbanization and 
 Introduction 7
economic growth, and intense population increase.17 These radical transformations 
not only altered social, cultural, economic and political life. They also destabilized 
the traditional forms of welfare provided by family networks, charity organizations, 
feudal ties, guilds, municipalities and religious institutions. The result was a massive 
pauperization which was strikingly portrayed in the engravings of Gustave Doré, the 
photography of Thomas Annan, the political analyses of Karl Marx and Friedrich 
Engels, and the novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.
Increased productivity resulting from industrialization, however, provided the 
resources necessary to cope collectively with the emerging ‘social question’. Towards 
the end of the nineteenth century institutional initiatives started to emerge at 
local, regional and national levels that engaged with these social needs politically 
and demanded redistribution of some of these resources.18 Simultaneously the 
counter-movement to Polyani’s Great Transformation gave rise to a growing Labour 
Movement which itself became an important driver of the move towards welfare 
provision by the state.
Wars have often acted as the catalyst for the development of the welfare state 
and its architecture.19 With the Second World War, welfare was, for the first time, 
presented as a goal of national and international policy. Two of the eight war aims 
in the Atlantic Charter (1941) dealt with social welfare, specifically ‘securing, for all, 
improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security’ (aim 5) and ‘that 
all men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want’ (aim 
6).20 After the Second World War the need for reconstruction propelled economic 
growth and provided once again resources for welfare state expansion, while rivalry 
with the Communist block – the Cold War – provided the ideological imperative for 
a non-revolutionary route to social improvement.
As noted above, in the past two decades a large and impressive sociological 
literature has developed on the welfare state. Following Esping-Andersen, much of 
the focus has been on the way in which the various western European countries – 
though all affected to greater or lesser degree by the fundamental transformations 
– differed in response. Investigations have focused on the remarkable diversity experi-
enced with respect to the timing of welfare state consolidation, the variety of goals 
(whether to provide a safety net for all or for specific groups, etc.), the diversity of 
financing mechanisms, various forms of public-private collaboration, and the variety 
of administrative models and programme types (for example, enacted collectively or 
individually). The magisterial Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, extending to more 
than 900 pages, with five editors and 70-plus contributors from fifteen countries, gives 
a good overview of this field.21
What is meant by the term ‘welfare state’ in this literature? A useful starting point 
is provided by Wil Arts and John Gelissen in a 2002 review article in the Journal of 
European Social Policy. They state:
the general term ‘welfare state’ is a label for a certain class of democratic indus-
trial capitalist societies, characterized by certainproperties (i.e. social citizenship 
or the fact that more or less extensive welfare provisions are legally provided, or, 
in still other words, the fact that the state plays a principal part in the welfare 
mix alongside the market, civil society and the family).22
8 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
According to Ian Gough (2008), the emergence of welfare states is to be understood 
in terms of what he calls the Five ‘I’s. First, industrialization, which creates both the 
wealth to sustain, and the changes in social organization that create the opening for 
the state to deliver items of social welfare. Second, interests, or what Marxists would 
term classes: ‘class cleavages, class organizations within civil society, their respective 
powers, their economic and social mobilization, and later, their parliamentary repre-
sentation’.23 One might add that the balance of power between the classes is markedly 
affected by wars and by the booms and slumps of the economic cycle, which is why 
these events have played such a prominent role in the history of the welfare state. 
Third, institutions, i.e. the organization of both civil society (the church, trade unions, 
voluntary associations, etc.) and the state (central government, municipalities, etc.), 
which determines the pattern in which welfare is provided, both outside and within 
the remit of the state. These three ‘I’s are the primary determinants but the way they 
operate is shaped by two further factors: ideas, i.e. the prevailing culture and ideology 
of different countries (for example, Catholic social teaching in Germany and Italy); 
and internationalism, both the fact that one country looks at and learns from another 
and that international communities of experts develop who claim special under-
standing of, and therefore power over, a given area of policy and decision-making.24
While Esping-Andersen originally identified three variants of welfare capitalism, 
the general view now is that within Europe four types can be distinguished.25 First, the 
liberal type developed by the Anglophone countries (Britain and Ireland), based on 
individualism, with pronounced social citizenship in some areas (notably the National 
Health Service) and reliance on the market elsewhere. Second, the continental 
type pioneered in Germany and prevalent in western European countries (France, 
Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria), where the primary focus is on protecting the 
income of the (male) industrial worker via social insurance schemes delivered through 
employer/employee partnerships. Third, the social democratic type developed in the 
Nordic countries (Sweden, followed by Norway, Denmark and Finland), in which 
the state assumes responsibility for the welfare of all (women as much as men), on a 
universal basis. Fourth, the southern type followed in Italy after 1945 and in Spain, 
Portugal and Greece after the overthrow of the dictatorships in the 1970s, which is 
based on the primacy of the male wage earner and offers only a weak safety net for 
those outside the official labour market.26
In terms of periodization, it is generally considered that the 30-year period from 
1945 to the 1970s – what Jean Fourastié called Les Trente Glorieuses or the Glorious 
Thirty – was the ‘golden age’ of the welfare state.27 The term ‘welfare state’ was taken 
from Britain, where the vision of social support extending ‘from the cradle to the 
grave’ was set out in the 1942 Beveridge Report, establishing a ‘new European model’ 
of welfare provision.28 In the immediate post-war years, governments across Europe 
introduced extensive welfare systems as part of the settlement negotiated between 
labour and capital at the end of the Second World War, while Keynesian economic 
policies oiled the growth that made seemingly ever-higher consumer and welfare 
spending possible. This came to an abrupt end with the economic crisis of the 1970s 
and the neoliberal counter-revolution that followed.
In geographical terms, while the primary locus was western Europe, the process of 
industrialization out of which the welfare state emerged had always involved a much 
 Introduction 9
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10 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
wider geographical reach. Industrialization in Britain, the pioneer industrial nation, 
was accompanied by the involuntary de-industrialization of other countries (for 
example, India, Ireland, Egypt), which were converted from manufacturers of goods 
to a new role as suppliers of raw materials for, and consumers of the goods manufac-
tured by, British industry.29 To this extent, the process that spawned the European 
welfare state had global, and globally destructive, implications from the start. Colonial 
or quasi-colonial economic relationships with other parts of the world were integral 
to the process of wealth accumulation in western Europe and provided the resources 
for the welfare state.
This colonial dimension fed directly into architecture and building programmes. 
The experience gained in the colonies was re-deployed in the home countries, where 
the devisers and designers of welfare facilities – housing, or schools, or hospitals – could 
draw on what had been done overseas in colonies and protectorates, and architects 
specializing in these typologies could operate equally at home and abroad. The ‘homes 
fit for heroes’ programme in Britain of 1919–1921 – the first national programme of 
state housing construction undertaken anywhere in the world – derived parts of its 
financial and administrative structure from the (far smaller) housing programme that 
Britain had been carrying out in the preceding years in Ireland.30 Architects from 
Weimar Germany, fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, found an outlet for their talents 
in the colonies (for example, Ernst May in Kenya, Otto Koenigsberger in India) while 
prominent figures in the 1950s like Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in Britain or the team 
of Georges Candilis, Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods in France could operate equally 
on the colonial and domestic stage (Figure 1.3). In the same period international 
development programmes such as those organized by the World Bank and the United 
Nations provided an infrastructural basis for architects like Constantinos Doxiadis to 
develop international practices exporting welfare state expertise on a global scale.
Pre-history of the welfare state
While the thirty years after 1945 is considered the classic period of the welfare state 
in Europe, this does not mean that story begins in 1945. On the contrary, its origins 
lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and what we might term the 
‘proto-welfare state’ of the inter-war years.
The first steps towards general provision of welfare by the state are considered to 
be the insurance schemes protecting industrial workers against sickness, industrial 
accidents and old age introduced by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s. Over the 
following decade neighbouring countries followed Germany’s lead in whole or part: 
Austria in the 1880s, then Belgium, Denmark, the UK, Italy, France, Norway, Spain, 
the Netherlands and Switzerland in the 1890s.31 The connection between state-
subsidised welfare and construction was established in 1869, when Liverpool became 
the first city in Europe to provide social housing, and over the years that followed 
other municipalities followed suit, notably the London County Council following its 
creation in 1889.32 In the Netherlands the advent of the welfare state is commonly 
identified with the so-called Woningwet (HousingAct), enacted in 1901 and imple-
mented the following year, which was one of the first examples of the integration of 
spatial planning, house construction and welfare provision. The act compelled local 
 Introduction 11
councils to start developing comprehensive zoning plans, while the state made credit 
available for low-cost housing construction. The regulation of slum clearance was also 
included, along with the introduction of building permits for all construction work, 
whether public or private.33
While by 1914 social insurance measures were in place in most advanced European 
countries, the First World War brought the problem of housing to the forefront. The 
problem was that while the war brought house construction to a virtual standstill, 
demand, generated by household formation and demographic movements consequent 
on the war (and peace), soared. In Berlin, for example, there had been nearly 28,000 
vacant dwellings in 1914 but by the end of the war these had all been taken up and 
after 1918 the authorities stopped recording vacant dwellings and instead started 
recording households seeking accommodation, which by 1922 had reached 195,000.34 
Moreover, with the general expectation that at some future point conditions would 
return to normal and construction costs would come down, there was no realistic 
prospect in the meantime that the market would provide, and hence unless the state 
intervened in some way, nothing would be built and the housing crisis would simply 
intensify. This was the conclusion reached in most European countries in the 1920s, 
with the result that many governments became involved in the large-scale provision of 
social housing. The proportion of housing production represented by social housing 
varied widely in different countries but in many cases was substantial: 82 per cent in 
Austria (1914–1928), 42 per cent in Germany (1927–1929), 36 per cent in Britain 
(1919–1929) and 29 per cent in the Netherlands (1921–1929).35 In major cities the 
figures could be as high or higher: for example, reportedly 76 per cent in the five 
largest towns in Norway (1914–1928) and 61 per cent in Copenhagen (1910–1929).36
These housing programmes of the 1920s had major implications for architects. The 
Tudor Walters Report of 1918, the ‘bible’ of the new municipal housing in Britain 
(largely written by Raymond Unwin), recommended that every housing scheme 
should be designed by an architect.37 In mainland Europe, modernist architects 
inspired by the dream of building a new society set about building new Siedlungen 
(housing settlements) in Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, etc. (Figure 1.4). Some of them 
came together in 1928 at La Sarraz in Switzerland for the inaugural meeting of the 
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and the following year gathered at 
the CIAM 2 conference on existenzminimum (minimum-income) housing held in the 
office of Frankfurt city planner Ernst May. But even while the architects were meeting 
in Frankfurt an event took place across the Atlantic that would bring the housing 
programmes to a standstill. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 brought chaos to 
the European economies, prompting the rise of rightwing parties (nowhere more so 
than in the central European economies dependent on U.S. finance) and major cuts 
in welfare spending, including housing. As Karel Teige told the delegates at the next 
CIAM conference, held in Brussels in 1930, ‘the restoration of private house-building 
and the free market are the dominant tendencies in nearly every country’, and by 1933 
the housing programmes in Germany, Austria, Britain and France had been axed.38
But the economic catastrophe that brought about the demise of these welfare 
programmes also had counter-effects. In 1933 in the USA, Franklin D. Roosevelt 
launched the New Deal to counter the effects of the Great Depression.39 In Europe, 
just as the proto-welfare states bequeathed by the post-1918 settlement were being 
12 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
Figure 1.4 C
ity of Frankfurt am
 M
ain (E
rnst M
ay/C
arl R
udloff ), B
ruchfeldstrasse estate (‘Z
ickzackhausen’), Frankfurt, 1927 (B
ryan &
 N
orm
an W
estw
ood/R
IB
A
 L
ibrary 
Photographs C
ollection).
 Introduction 13
dismantled, a new type of welfare state was emerging, containing many of the features 
of the future (post-1945) welfare state. In 1932 the social democrats came to power 
in Sweden and, determined to avoid the dictates of free-market political economy 
in responding to the slump, demanded that the state become an active player in the 
economy and in the creation of social welfare. Anticipating the ideas that Keynes 
would make famous in General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, they 
set about creating a new kind of society, Folkhemmet (The People’s Home), in which 
the citizen would be protected by the state and consumption would be the motor of 
the economy, thereby foreshadowing the ideas that were to be pursued much more 
widely after 1945.40
The built environment and the welfare state
During the Trente Glorieuses of 1945–1975, the built environment was a preferred 
locus of economic redistribution for the majority of welfare states.
Along with social insurance, pensions, healthcare and education, housing was 
considered as one of the main pillars of the welfare state.41 As with the other three 
pillars, with housing, welfare states attempted to achieve de-commodification and 
thus to provide families with access to housing, independent of the income they 
acquired through the labour market. This implied that the state would become a main 
actor in the delivery of housing accommodation, ranging from providing subsidies 
for individual families in some welfare state regimes to the commissioning of social 
housing through corporations and local authorities in others, but always with the aim 
of making good-quality housing widely available to the population.42 In some cases 
this new housing was located within or on the edge of existing cities but it was also 
provided in new towns (essentially, state-funded garden cities), which played a key 
role in the planning and construction of the new national infrastructure that lay at the 
heart of the mixed economy system of the welfare state.
Figure 1.5 Jean Prouvé with construction company CIMT, youth club for the Mille Clubs programme, 
1966 (L’Architecture d’Aujord’hui, 1967).
14 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
Welfare state intervention in the built environment was not limited to housing 
but also included buildings for health, education and leisure. In 1966 in France, for 
instance, the French Minister of Youth and Sports, François Missoffe, launched the 
Mille Clubs programme that produced more than a thousand youth clubs across France 
as the complement to the mass housing programmes (Figure 1.5). It would soon be 
followed in 1969 by other initiatives such as the Mille Piscines (Thousand Swimming 
Pools) and Mille Tennis (Thousand Tennis Clubs), that together would further extend 
the reach of the welfare state into everyday life.43
In many welfare state regimes ‘experts of the built environment’ – not only 
architects but also politicians, economist and sociologists – played a central role in 
these spatial policies. They not only devised the policies, organized the competitions 
and launched the building programmes, but also interacted with the major business 
interests, including construction companies, materials manufacturers and property 
developers. In France, as Bruno Vayssière has shown, the concrete companies that had 
been developing roads and infrastructure during the Second World War were instru-
mental in propelling the construction methods for mass housing in the immediate 
post-war period.44 This predominance of the building industry would soon be 
reflected in the joint competitions for architecture offices and construction firms that 
the governmentorganized.
Within welfare state regimes architects and urban planners acquired new roles, 
and architects were asked to articulate progressive definitions of modern living.45 Not 
only did the welfare state become embedded in the education and formation of the 
profession – in the UK, for example, at the Architectural Association in the 1950s all 
students designed a housing project as part of their studies46 – but governments, which 
often had no clear image of what the concrete infill of the welfare state would be, 
looked to architects and urban planners to provide the concepts and deliver the forms 
in which everyday welfare would be provided. Thus in the Mille Clubs programme 
the French government invited architects to produce not just the designs but also the 
brief.47 To this extent, architects were not just designing, but also devising, the services 
delivered by the welfare state.
Critiques and crisis of the welfare state
The 1970s are considered the point when the welfare state project went into crisis and, 
just when the goal of a more equitable society seemed within reach, the welfare state 
system started to unravel. In the early 1970s, three decades of economic expansion 
abruptly came to an end with the first oil crisis and the arrival of ‘stagflation’.48 While 
the unions were pushing aggressively for even more radical redistribution, the economic 
crises of the decade brought to light the limits of the welfare state and the affluent 
society. These limits were not only economic; there was also a shift in terms of values 
and ideology. Ideas of progress and enlightened democracy had been compromised 
by the geopolitics of the USA and NATO, with the Vietnam War a critical chapter 
triggering massive public protests. The environmental pollution caused by unlimited 
industrialization and consumption made people aware that the western way of life was 
exhausting natural resources and damaging the environment beyond regeneration.49 
Such political and economic developments were paralleled by the rise of youth culture 
 Introduction 15
and counterculture, of which the student revolts of May 1968 would remain the most 
memorable moment, with a lasting impact into the 1970s (Figure 1.6).50
A further element of the critique of the welfare state and its planning system was 
represented by the local actions that emerged at this time against the demolition of 
inner cities and historic districts as part of modernization, slum clearance policies 
and functionalist planning. Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities 
(1961) represents a milestone here of course, but there are also examples of activist 
communities such as the radical West Berlin district of Kreuzberg or the squatters of 
Copenhagen’s Christiania.51 Likewise, in Amsterdam in the late 1960s and early 1970s 
the demolition required for the construction of the underground railway led to fierce 
and aggressive occupations by its citizens, with the Provo movement declaring its 
own republic (Oranje Vrijstaat or Orange Free State) and, in the 1980s, the anarchist 
squatting movement turning parts of the city into practically autonomous enclaves.52
But although the student revolts, the environmental movement and local urban 
pressure groups continued some sort of a progressive political project of grass-roots 
democratization and in some cases even utopianism, albeit in a fundamentally different 
way from the post-war, modernizing welfare state, by the end of the 1970s the rise of 
conservative postmodernism and anti-utopianism evidenced a major shift in cultural 
values and ideology. The costly and cumbersome bureaucracy of the welfare state, the 
result of a combination of Fordism and Keynesian politics designed to secure optimal 
redistribution of welfare for all, came under increasing attack. In Britain the ‘Winter 
of Discontent’ of 1978–79 saw the country paralyzed by a wave of public sector strikes 
against which the Labour government appeared powerless, precipitating the election 
victory in May 1979 of a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, pledged to rolling 
Figure 1.6 Giancarlo De Carlo talking to the students/protesters occupying the Milan Triennale, 1968, 
photographed by Cesare Colombo.
16 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
back the welfare state. The following year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the 
USA, marking a definitive breakthrough of neoliberal politics in the western world, 
with the welfare state and its institutions now depicted as a patronizing ‘nanny state’ 
curbing individual freedom and responsibility.
While in hindsight the 1970s can be seen as marking the end of the ideological 
hegemony of the welfare state project (even though it was fiercely contested at 
the time), the criticisms being made of the welfare state were not wholly new. In 
particular the Fordist rationale behind the planning of the economy and the subse-
quent territorial distribution of functions throughout the various countries – the 
new industries, the new infrastructure and new towns – were attacked by certain 
intellectuals from the start, including Sartre, Heidegger, the Situationists, etc. Henri 
Lefebvre’s work is a prime example from the field of sociology, a profound critique 
of the technocratic impulse and the depersonalized anonymity of the planning system 
which he produced even while working within the system itself.53 Within architecture 
we see the same sort of auto-critique: it was Aldo van Eyck who – as early as 1947 
at the CIAM reunion congress in Bergamo – criticized rationalism and functionalism 
as a ‘mechanistic conception of progress’ unfit for the reconstruction of the European 
cities in the aftermath of the Second World War.54
The welfare state was not a homogeneous phenomenon. Rather than attempt a 
synthetic overview, the research presented here proceeds by way of in-depth case 
studies that cover a wide range of issues, building types and countries. The studies 
highlight the singularities of the different national contexts at different dates, allowing 
both a broader, and a more nuanced, portrait of the architecture of the welfare state to 
emerge and providing clues for further enquiry. The chapters are grouped into three 
broad sections: cultures and continuities; critiques and contradictions; and national 
and international.
Cultures and continuities
The first study in the first section focuses on one of the most celebrated episodes of 
the ‘proto-welfare state’ era, the housing programme of Red Vienna of the 1920s, 
and explores its afterlife in the architectural culture of the post-war period. Eve Blau 
shows how, based on the theories of Austro-Marxism, the housing superblocks of 
Red Vienna created a new urban typology in which the barriers between public and 
private, city and home, were eliminated, creating a new picture of the collective and 
a new kind of integrated (socialized) urban space. In the very different political condi-
tions that prevailed in Austria after 1945, the example of the superblocks was excluded 
from the welfare state agenda, but from the 1960s a new generation of Viennese 
architects took a renewed interest in their form and history, eventually giving birth in 
Vienna to a new type of superblock, the ‘green megastructure’.
As noted before, one of the major innovations represented by the welfare state was 
the transfer to the state of functions formerly undertaken by unofficial or voluntary 
organisations such as churches, trade unions, etc. As Hilde Heynen and Janina Gosseye 
show, in Belgium the process had a particularly pronounced character because Belgian 
society was split into strongly differentiated sectors or ‘pillars’ along denominational 
lines (Catholic, trade union, etc.) and the provision of housing and other welfare 
 Introduction 17
facilities was shaped accordingly. But from the 1960s a programmatic differentiation of 
another sort, namely linguistic, between Flemish and French-speaking,took over and 
in this process architectural projects played a key role. But while the political objec-
tives changed, the impact on the urban landscape remained remarkably consistent, 
reinforcing the creation of urban sprawl – the ‘nebulous’ city – which is so marked a 
feature of Belgium today.
The notion that the welfare state was the creation of the post-war period inevi-
tably turns the Second World War into something of a watershed: but how much of 
a break did it really represent? Simon Pepper addresses this question in his study of 
one of the key episodes of architectural innovation in the welfare state, the adoption 
of the high-rise model for social housing in Britain. Against the accepted view that 
high-rise was an innovation brought to Britain by modernist architects after 1945, 
Pepper shows that from the mid-1930s the London County Council (LCC) was 
working on high-rise schemes which were intended to address the perceived failings 
of the housing output of the 1920s and 1930s. Pepper shows how the famous LCC 
high-rise schemes of the 1950s were the product of architectural, political and admin-
istrative developments that had extended throughout what he calls ‘the long 1940s’. 
Continuity, in other words, as well as caesura was inherent in the story.
Continuities of another sort are explored by Nicholas Bullock. Taking a single 
borough in east London, West Ham, that was one of the most deprived in the capital, 
he shows how over the thirty years after 1945 the welfare state changed from being 
seen as the saviour of the population to becoming its oppressor. Behind the headlines 
of the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 was a much more complex 
picture, in which local politicians were losing touch with their roots, the problems 
facing the local state were becoming far more demanding and the simple meeting of 
material ‘needs’ offered by the welfare state was no longer deemed sufficient by an 
increasingly sophisticated consumer society. Bullock shows thereby how the ‘success’ 
of the welfare state in this borough contained within itself the seeds of its own ‘failure’.
Critiques and contradictions
Critiques of, and contradictions within, the welfare state constitute the focus of the 
second section of the book. Nowhere was the internal institutional critique of the 
welfare state more developed, and more firmly embedded in the state apparatus, 
than in France, where almost from the start of the great housing programmes of the 
1950s the government created sociological research institutes to investigate the results. 
Łukasz Stanek’s study focuses on this new group of experts generated by the auto-
critique of the welfare state, showing how a whole generation of French sociologists 
including Chombart de Lauwe and Henri Lefebvre first came to prominence through 
these studies of state housing. They developed concepts of ‘needs’ that went far 
beyond those envisaged by administrators or architects, not least Lefebvre’s concept, 
extending Marx, of le droit à la ville (‘the right to the city’) and Chombart’s theory of 
spatial organization as the mapping of a priori cultural concepts.
Social theory of a quite different sort figures in the chapter by Dirk van den 
Heuvel, which focuses on one of the most prominent international networks of the 
Trente Glorieuses, Team 10. Van den Heuvel shows how the concept of the ‘Open 
18 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
Society’ with its inclusiveness and egalitarianism, as promoted by the philosopher Karl 
Popper, informed the thinking of this group. Despite the contradictions involved, Jaap 
Bakema, Aldo van Eyck and Alison and Peter Smithson sought to develop a parallel 
concept of ‘openness’ in their housing and city plans of the 1950s and 1960s, resulting 
in radical forms of publicness in which the relationship between public and private, 
collective and individual, was re-defined. One of the most spectacular of these was the 
Kasbah housing development in Hengelo designed in 1969 by van Eyck’s protégé, Piet 
Blom, which was built under a special welfare state programme allowing for experi-
mental housing. With its vast covered open space at the heart of the project, it was to 
be a radical agent for a new sociability that was eventually smothered in the suburban 
context of its realization.
The welfare state was predicated on high levels of consumption, for both economic 
and ideological reasons. What scope did this allow to the architect? Helena Mattsson 
examines one of the most famous Swedish new towns of the 1960s, Skärholmen, and 
reveals how it was conceived and organized around shopping. Mattsson shows how 
Sweden’s ‘corporatist’ version of the welfare state gave the leading economic interests 
– chambers of commerce, road associations, retail bodies, etc. – a direct role in the 
formation of state policy, whereas architects were unrepresented. In the design of the 
new town of Skärholmen accordingly it was the major business interests and the building 
industry that made the main decisions, with the architects largely left on the side.
The agency or otherwise of the architect is also explored in Florian Urban’s study 
of the Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin. In the 1950s and 1960s West Germany 
undertook a major programme of building large housing schemes on the edge of 
its cities. In 1968 almost overnight one of these, the Märkisches Viertel, became a 
cause célèbre, depicted in the popular press as the worst kind of nightmare estate. But 
as Urban shows, this was not the result of decisions that the architects had made – 
very little attention was given to matters that were under their control – but rather 
stemmed from issues of location, and public transport and local politics. While the 
Märkisches Viertel was portrayed as a symbol of the failure of the welfare state, it was 
not so much the design as the wider process of production which was under attack.
The process of production associated with the welfare state, with its monolithic 
nature, bureaucratic structures and statutory requirements, created a role for architects 
that many found deeply unpalatable. To architects of this view, how much better, it 
seemed, to sidestep the entire welfare state and instead to ‘do it yourself ’. As Caroline 
Maniaque-Benton shows, this was the thinking of a number of architects in France 
who saw in the counterculture of the USA a model for making architecture free 
from the constraints of state-funded industrialized production. Inspired by American 
counterparts, publications such as the Catalogue des ressources provided both the vision 
and the practical know-how to enable French architects to bypass the welfare state and 
create their own version of the California countercultural dream.
National and international
The relationship between national and international, and the role of international 
exchange and expertise, forms the focus of the final section of the book. Tom 
Avermaete’s study of the ABTAT group of architects around Le Corbusier shows 
 Introduction 19
that they too were influenced by the USA, in this case by the ‘total’ approach to 
development and construction developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose 
works they went to visit in 1945. But this group, which included Georges Candilis 
and Michel Ecochard, was also profoundly involved in an international relationship of 
another sort, namely that between France and her colonies and protectorates in North 
Africa, where many of them were working in the 1950s. Avermaete shows how ideas 
and practices developed in the colonial context of North Africa both drew on, and 
fed into, the debates about the design of housing and new towns in France that were 
to be a defining feature of Les Trente Glorieuses.
The relationship between the indigenous and the imported is also a theme in Mark 
Swenarton’s study of innovation in welfare state architecture. Here the focus is on 
the housing designs of the young PatrickHodgkinson of the mid-1950s and the role 
they played in the development in Britain of an alternative to high-rise. Like many of 
his contemporaries, Hodgkinson was strongly attracted to the housing designs of Le 
Corbusier, but he was also deeply attached to what he saw as the indigenous English 
tradition, notably of building cities that were high-density but low-rise. Swenarton 
shows how in his student work at the Architectural Association, and later working 
with Leslie Martin, Hodgkinson sought to combine these two elements, transforming 
the Unité d’habitation from a skyscraper to a groundscraper, thereby creating an influ-
ential new type of urbanism that was neither ‘modern’ nor ‘traditional’.
Questions of national identity form a sub-text in Luca Molinari’s study of archi-
tectural ideology in Italy in the late 1960s. The focus is on two canonic projects, 
Giancarlo De Carlo’s Matteotti village and Aldo Rossi’s Gallaratese 2. Molinari shows 
how, confronted by what was regarded by Italian architectural culture as the impov-
erished housing production of the Italian welfare state, De Carlo and Rossi sought 
radically different means of restoring authenticity to the agency of architecture and, 
thereby, to the housing production of the welfare state: in the one case by engaging 
the populace directly in the design process, in the other by creating a monument in 
the city. The failure of both projects, Molinari argues, illustrates the impotence of 
Italian architectural culture when confronted with the realities of rapid urbanization 
and the demands of the welfare state.
The final two chapters of the book engage explicitly with the colonial and postco-
lonial dimensions of the welfare state, exploring the complex relationship between 
welfare states and colonial regimes in terms of both policies and architecture and 
problematizing the oppressive character of architectural and urban projects in both 
territories. Michelle Provoost’s study focuses on the architectural ideologies at play 
in the design of new towns in West Africa, both before and after independence from 
Britain. In the 1940s and 1950s Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew worked on welfare state 
projects both in Britain and in Britain’s colonies, especially the new town of Tema in 
the Gold Coast (Ghana), where their approach was notable for the attention it paid 
to the cultures and customs of the population. But following independence, they 
were replaced at Tema by Constantinos Doxiadis, whose designs focused on universal, 
rather than indigenous, requirements. Provoost argues that whatever the prefer-
ences of ‘educated’ architectural opinion, at Tema it was the ‘top-down’ approach of 
Doxiadis rather than the ‘bottom-up’ approach of Fry Drew that proved the more 
popular and successful.
20 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
With the last chapter we move to south-east Asia, where as noted above some of 
the features of European welfare states are re-emerging in the very different context of 
the sunrise economies of twenty-first-century capitalism. Miles Glendinning focuses 
on two of the ‘little tiger’ economies of south-east Asia, Singapore and Hong Kong, 
and explores the international exchanges, largely stemming from British colonial rule, 
that have shaped their housing policies and production. Glendinning shows how the 
promotion of economic efficiency has led the governments of these Asian states to 
adopt social housing programmes that draw on European experience but without any 
of the ideology of the welfare state. Will this be the story of the twenty-first century: 
welfare state building without the welfare state?
Notes
 1 C. Quiring, W. Voigt, P. C. Schmal and E. Herrel, Ernst May 1886–1970, München: 
Prestel, 2011; A. Vidler, James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive, London: Yale UP, 2010; 
M. Crinson, Stirling and Gowan, Architecture from Austerity to Affluence, London, Yale UP, 
2012; S. Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 
2005; H. Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation, London: Routledge, 2008; 
M. Risselada and D. van den Heuvel, (eds.), Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present 
(1953–1981), Rotterdam: NAi, 2005; T. Avermaete, Another modern: the post-war architecture 
and urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods, Rotterdam: NAi, 2005; C. Blain, L’atelier de montrouge, 
Paris: Actes Sud, 2008; H. Ibelings, Van den Broek en Bakema 1948–1988: Architectuur en 
stedenbouw: de functie van de form, Rotterdam: NAi, 2000. Thanks are due to Adrian Forty, 
Hilde Heynen and Ed Taverne for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the introduction.
 2 S. Williams Goldhagen and R. Legault (eds.), Anxious Modernisms. Experimentation in Postwar 
Architectural Culture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001; D. Rouillard, Superarchitecture, 
Paris: Villette, 2004; R. Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate 
Space, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005; F. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after 
Modernism, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007; M. Crinson and C. Zimmerman (eds.), 
Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, London: Yale UP, 
2010.
 3 G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 
For the current state of the art, see F. G., Castles, S. Liebfried, J. Lewis,, H. Obinger, C. 
Pierson The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford UP 2010.
 4 The exception that proves the rule is the chapter ‘New Brutalism and the architecture of 
the Welfare State: England 1949–59’, covering the Independent Group, the Smithsons 
and Stirling, in K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames & 
Hudson, 1980, pp. 262–268. Recently architectural history and theory have moved towards 
greater engagement with interdisciplinary debates but even here little attention has been 
paid to the welfare state. See C. Greig Crysler, S. Cairns and H. Heynen, The Sage Handbook 
of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, 2012.
 5 K. van Herck and T. Avermaete (eds.), Wonen in Welvaart: woningbouw en wooncultuur 
in Vlaanderen, 1948–1973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006; M. Ryckewaert, Building 
the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State: Infrastructure, Planning and Architecture 
1945–1973, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011; H. Mattsson and S.-O. Wallenstein, Swedish 
Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, London: Black Dog, 2010. For a 
discussion of culture and the welfare state in the Netherlands, see K. Schuyt and E. Taverne, 
Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: 1950, Prosperity and Welfare, Assen: Uitgeverij Van 
Gorcum, 2004 (Dutch original: 2000).
 6 See T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel (eds.), ‘The European Welfare State Project: 
Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings’, themed issue of Footprint, 9 (2011).
 7 H. Heynen and J. Gosseye (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference of the 
Architectural History Network, Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor 
Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012, 543–567.
 Introduction 21
 8 In addition to the contributors to this book, participants in the symposium included José 
António Bandeirinha (University of Coimbra), Adrian Forty (University College London), 
Elain Harwood (English Heritage), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University) and Laurent 
Stalder (ETH Zurich). Wolfgang Voigt (German Architecture Museum) was prevented by 
illness from attending.
 9 Thanks also to Hilde Heynen for her contribution to this.
10 See also T. Avermaete and D. van den Heuvel, ‘ “Obama, Please Tax Me!” Architecture and 
the Politics of Redistribution’, in Footprint 9, Autumn 2011, 1–3.
11 For example, the English Heritage exhibition Brutal and Beautiful: Saving the Twentieth 
Century held in the Quadriga Gallery, London in 2013.
12 See A. Powers (ed.), Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, London: Twentieth Century Society, 
2010; D. vanden Heuvel, M. Mesman, W. Quist, B. Lemmens (eds.), The Challenge of 
Change. Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern Movement, Proceedings of the 10th International 
Docomomo Conference, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008.
13 R. Morton and A. Ross, Construction UK: Introduction to the Industry, Second Edition, Oxford: 
Blackwell, 2008, p. 94.
14 See, for example, I. Peng and J. Wong, ‘East Asia’, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, 
656–670; J. Doling, ‘Housing Policies and the Little Tigers: How Do They Compare with 
Other Industrialised Countries?’, Housing Studies, 1999, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 229–250.
15 A placard at the protests reads ‘We want schools and hospitals, not FIFA standards’ (www.itv.
com/news/update/2013-06-21/brazil-we-want-schools-and-hospitals-not-fifa-standards). 
See also http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/americas/brazil-protests-favelas
16 We follow here the definition of the welfare state as offered by amongst others P. Flora, 
(ed.), Growth to Limits. The Western European Welfare States since World War II, Berlin: De 
Gruyter, 1986, vol. 1, xii.
17 This notion of Great Transformation is coined in K. Polyani, The Great Transformation 
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
18 See for instance G. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America and 
Russia (New York: Wiley, 1971) and J. Alber, Some Causes and Consequences of Social Security 
Expenditure Development in Western Europe, 1949–1977, San Domenico, Italy: European 
University Institute, 1982.
19 I. Gough, ‘European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries’, 
in A. A. Dani and A. de Haan (eds.), Inclusive States: Social Policy and Structural Inequalities, 
Washington DC: World Bank 2008, 62; C. Pierson and M. Leimgruber, ‘Intellectual 
Roots’, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, 38. See also M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes: 
the Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain, London: Heinemann Educational 
Books, 1981, and J.-L. Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for World War 
II, London: Yale UP, 2011.
20 F.-X. Kaufmann, Die Entstehung sozialer Grundrechte und sie wohlfahrtsstaatliche Entwicklung, 
Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003; Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, 7.
21 Castles et al., Oxford Handbook.
22 W. Arts and J. Gelissen, ‘Three worlds of welfare capitalism or more? A state-of-the-art 
report’, Journal of European Social Policy 12 (2), 2002, 139. See also Esping-Andersen, The 
Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
23 Gough, ‘European Welfare States’, p. 48.
24 Gough, ‘European Welfare States’, pp. 43–54.
25 Ibid., p. 40. Castles et al, Oxford Handbook, pp. 586–642.
26 See M. Kautto, ‘The Nordic Countries’; B. Palier, ‘Continental Western Europe’; M. 
Ferrera, ‘The South European Countries’; and F. G. Castles, ‘The English-Speaking 
Countries’, in Castles et al., Oxford Handbook, pp. 586–642.
27 Gough, ‘European Welfare States’, p. 53; J. Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses: ou, La Révolution 
invisible de 1946 a 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). For the ‘golden age’ and its collapse in 
the crisis of the 1970s, see E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 
1914–1991, London: Michael Joseph, 1994, pp. 257–286.
28 I. Gough and G. Therborn, ‘The Global Future of Welfare States’, in Castles et al., Oxford 
Handbook, p. 705.
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-06-21/brazil-we-want-schools-and-hospitals-not-fifa-standards
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2013-06-21/brazil-we-want-schools-and-hospitals-not-fifa-standards
http://www.edition.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/americas/brazil-protests-favelas
22 Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel
29 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), pp. 
198–199 and 216–217.
30 M. Fraser, John Bull’s Other Homes: State Housing and British Policy in Ireland, 1883–1922 
(Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1996), p. 299.
31 D. Thomson, Europe since Napoleon, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966, pp. 358–359.
32 J. N. Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), p. 62; S. Beattie, A Revolution in London Housing: 
LCC Housing Architects and Their Work 1893–1914 (London: Greater London Council/
Architectural Press, 1980).
33 N. L. Prak, Het Nederlandse woonhuis van 1800 tot 1940 (Delft: Delft UP, 1991); N. de 
Vreeze, Woningbouw, Inspiratie & Ambities. Kwalitatieve grondslagen van de sociale woningbouw in 
Nederland (Almere: Nationale Woningraad, 1993).
34 M. Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem: Architecture, Housing and Politics 1900–1930, 
Garston: IHS-BRE 2008, pp. 85–86.
35 International Labour Office, Housing Policy in Europe, Geneva: International Labour Office, 
1930, pp. 44–45.
36 C. Bauer, Modern Housing, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, pp. 299–301. Bauer’s 
figures should be treated with caution.
37 Swenarton, Homes fit for Heroes, pp. 100–101.
38 Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem, p. 92.
39 W. A. Chafe (ed.), The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies, 
New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
40 Y. Hirdman, ‘The Happy 30s: A Short Story of Social Engineering and Gender Order 
in Sweden’, in Mattsson and Wallenstein, Swedish Modernism, pp. 66–67; and in the same 
volume H. Mattsson and S.-O. Wallenstein, ‘Introduction’, p. 16. See also Hobsbawm, Age 
of Extremes, p. 107.
41 For an introduction to the role of housing in welfare state regimes see J. Allen, J. 
Barlow, J. Leal, T. Maloutas and L. Padovani, Housing and Welfare in Southern Europe 
(London: Blackwell, 2004); J. Kemeny, ‘Comparative housing and welfare: theorising the 
relationship’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 16, no. 1 (2001), pp. 53–70; 
and P. Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
42 Some researchers in the field of housing policy have argued that, despite the initial promise 
represented by the rapid expansion of social housing after the Second World War, it has 
more recently emerged as a distinctively weak pillar of public welfare provision – ‘the 
wobbly pillar under the welfare state’, as Torgersen’s (1987) widely quoted metaphor has 
it. See U. Torgersen, ‘Housing: the wobbly pillar under the welfare state’, in B. Turner, J. 
Kemeny and L. Lundqvist (eds.), Between State and Market: Housing in the Post-industrial Era, 
Gävle: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987, pp. 116–126.
43 On these various leisure programs see: M. Falcoz and P. Chifflet, ‘La construction publique 
des équipements sportifs. Aspects historique, politique, spatial’, Les Annales de la recherche 
urbaine, 79 (1998), pp. 14–21.
44 B. Vayssière, Reconstruction-Déconstruction, Paris: Picard, 1988.
45 K. Schuyt and E. Taverne, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective: 1950, Prosperity and 
Welfare, Assen: Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 2004.
46 See Chapter 12.
47 T. Avermaete, ‘A thousand youth clubs: architecture, mass leisure and the rejuvenation of 
post-war France’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 18, no. 5 (October 2013), 632–646.
48 See P. Rosanvallon, La Crise de l’État-providence, Paris: Seuil, 1992; R. Coopey and 
N. Woodward (eds.), Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 1996; Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 403–418.
49 The Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth (1972), was a key document, with Rachel 
Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) being an early predecessor.
50 See also J.-L. Violeau, Les architectes et Mai 1968, Paris: Recherches, 2005; F. Turner, From 
Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital 
Utopianism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
51 J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961. 
In parallel in Europe there was the move in the 1960s to empower tenants within the 
 Introduction 23
production process: see N. J. Habraken, De Dragers en de Mensen, Het einde van de massa 
Woningbouw, Amsterdam: Scheltema& Holkema, 1961 (English version: N. J. Habraken, 
Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, London: Architectural Press, 1972) and J. Turner, 
‘The fits and misfits of people’s housing’, RIBA Journal, vol. 18, no. 2 (February 1974), 
14–21. See also C. Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 2011.
52 In the end, armed force broke this resistance. See V. Mamadouh, De stad in eigen hand. 
Provo’s, kabouters en krakers als stedelijke sociale beweging, Amsterdam: SUA, 1992.
53 See Chapter 6.
54 V. Ligtelijn and F. Strauven (eds.), Aldo van Eyck, Writings. Volume 2: Collected Articles and 
Other Writings 1947–1998, Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2008, pp. 32–42.
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PART I
Cultures and continuities
Figure 2.0 Karl Ehn, Karl Marx Hof, View of forecourt, 1927–30 (Georg Mittenecker, 2012).
2
FROM RED SUPERBLOCK TO GREEN 
MEGASTRUCTURE : MUNICIPAL 
SOCIALISM AS MODEL AND 
CHALLENGE
Eve Blau
The structure and provisions of the Austrian Welfare State were shaped under extraor-
dinary circumstances in the context of a radical programme of municipal socialism 
known as ‘Red Vienna’ in the period between 1919–1934.1 The urban and socio-
spatial focus of that programme – and the role assigned to architecture and urban 
design in realizing it – remained a reference, challenge, and standard against which 
the postwar Austrian social welfare programme was measured and, especially in the 
decades following the Second World War, found wanting. Red Vienna was not only 
the measure but also the model for postwar Austrian social welfare, a model that had to 
be rescaled to the postwar political and economic conditions of the Second Republic 
through a process described by officials as ‘Austrification’. In the immediate postwar 
decades Austrification involved abandonment of the vital connection between social 
programme and urban architectural form that had been forged in interwar Vienna. 
That connection was only re-established in the 1970s by a generation of architects 
educated after the war whose anti-functionalist polemics, ‘architectural actions’, 
and calls for a return to ‘urbanity’ in the late 1960s inaugurated a new episode of 
typological innovation and urban engagement in Austrian housing design, and led 
ultimately to the (at least partial) rediscovery of the architectural instrumentality and 
urban spatial politics of Red Vienna.
The Austrian experience provides both an unusually long historical lens for 
examining the relationship between architecture and the welfare state, and a unique 
perspective on how that relationship was impacted by the very different political 
conditions and geographies which prevailed not only within Austria but also in 
Europe in the inter-war and post-war periods. One of the determining conditions 
of Austria’s nascent welfare system in Red Vienna was Vienna’s inter-war status as a 
state (Bundesland) of the federal Republic of Austria. According to a constitutional 
amendment, ratified in 1921, Vienna, in addition to being the capital of the newly 
established Republic of Austria, became a federal state of the Republic. This gave 
the municipality unprecedented constitutional independence: Vienna could legislate 
as both a city and a state; it also had access to federal funds and could levy taxes as a 
28 Eve Blau
municipality and state – all of which gave Vienna extraordinary political and financial 
resources and made it possible for the city to govern and finance its programme.
At the same time, however, Red Vienna was also under constant siege from 
political opposition within Austria. Throughout the period during which the Social 
Democrats governed Vienna, 1919–1934, the municipality was a socialist enclave 
in a country ruled by a rabidly anti-socialist, conservative, and clerical Christian 
Social political majority. The Social Democratic policies and architecture of Red 
Vienna therefore took shape not only within the context of a socialist programme 
of municipal reforms, but also in the midst of highly charged, and often violent, 
political conflict between right and left.2 Austria itself was also embattled during that 
period: the new republic was economically and politically isolated after the dissolution 
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Precluded from political union or Anschluss with 
Social Democratic Germany by the terms of the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919, and 
surrounded by the hostile successor states of the former Empire which erected high 
tariff barriers, the rump state was also cut off from essential supplies of food, coal and 
raw materials as well as markets for its own industrial products.
The Austrification of Vienna’s social welfare programmes after the Second World 
War involved not only a systemic scaling up from municipal to federal policies and 
programmes, but also a fundamental ideological, political, and economic reorientation 
and adjustment to conditions that were radically different from those that had prevailed 
in the inter-war period. In May 1955, when the Allied occupation ended, Austria was 
granted full independence as a free, sovereign and democratic state, and in October 
of that year Austria declared its permanent neutrality. The Second Republic was 
governed almost continuously from 1955 to the late 1970s by a coalition government 
formed of the two largest federal parties: the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the 
Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), with important political posts split evenly between 
the parties.3 Vienna was once again, as in the pre-war period, administered by the 
Social Democrats. Interestingly, the city also retained its dual constitutional status as 
municipality and federal state, as well as its position as the nation’s capital. Vienna was, 
and continues to be, the seat of the municipal, state, and federal governments. But the 
Central European context in which Red Vienna and Austrian welfare systems first 
took shape had ceased to exist with the binary division of Cold War Europe. Austria, 
newly part of western Europe, saw itself as strategically positioned on the border 
between East and West: a bastion of western democracy, which was still actively 
engaged in trade with its Warsaw Pact neighbours.
Culturally, however, Austria was resolutely oriented toward the West. In archi-
tecture this had long been the case. Since the late nineteenth century, Viennese 
architects, most notably Adolf Loos, had (as Richard Neutra put it) an ‘unrequited 
love’ for Anglo-American culture.4 In Viennese architectural culture, ever since Loos 
launched his attack on the hide-bound conservatism of Viennese culture and society 
(of which the historicist architecture of the Ringstrasse was emblematic) in the 1890s, 
‘the West’ and in particular Anglo-American modern culture, portrayed as techno-
logically advanced and embodying democratic values and practices, had figured as 
the critical ‘Other’ [Das Andere] of Austrian (‘eastern’) cultural backwardness.5 In the 
1950s and 1960s the compulsion toward ‘westernization’ of Austrian culture took on 
new internationalist perspectives and points of reference, cultural as well as social. In 
 From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure 29
architecture these ranged from the Situationists to Archigram, the Metabolists, and 
Team 10.
Red Vienna: municipal socialism as model
The birth of the Austrian welfare state coincided with that of Austria itself. With the 
defeat of the central powers in the First World War, the empire of Austria-Hungary 
dissolved into the new national states of Central Europe – including the ‘residual’ 
Republic of Austria – ratified by the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919. Vienna, the 
capital, emerged from the war diminished and on the edge of economic collapse and 
famine. No longer the seat of a vast empire but, instead, of a small cluster of rural 
and alpine provinces, Vienna was still a metropolis of almost two million inhabitants, 
a number