European mass-housing welfare landscapes

Abstract

Our everyday encounters with green open spaces, with landscapes, include spaces right where we live. This is particularly true for the large proportion of the European population that lives in post-World War II mass housing complexes, given that most of these estates-often subsidised by welfare state initiatives-were planned and constructed as built volumes situated in open green areas. These housing complexes may furthermore be connected spatially or by pathways to large-scale park systems as a result of the extensive public planning and design that occurred in European welfare states in the decades following World War II. Despite the scale and omnipresence of these everyday landscapes for living, they have hitherto remained largely understudied beyond rather bold and generalising narratives. Yet, they form the focal point for this special issue of Landscape Research, which presents 'welfare landscapes' as a new research field and provides new knowledge, primarily from Denmark and Sweden but complemented by contributions from the Netherlands and Romania.Housing played a prominent role in the European post-World War II rebuilding phase, in which many states sought to reorient their societies after the devastation and turmoil of the war, aiming at ensuring the 'good life' for all citizens (Blanchon, 2011;Swenarton et al., 2015;Wagenaar, 2004). By means of fuelling industrialisation and providing welfare services and goods, the recovery was structured as an intertwined process of increasing production and consumption. In this context, housing was central to the distribution of welfare and thus gave material form to various ideas of welfare. These ideas had developed over the first half of the twentieth century and reached their peak after the war. Sustained by the USA's Marshall Plan, a large-scale restructuring of the built fabric in Northern Europe turned predominantly rural economies into thriving industrialised nations spearheaded by urban centres. This urbanisation was built upon a cluster of values, encompassing housing for all, the healthy city, the just and democratic city, strong communities, equal and easy access to nature, and the raising of children in a good environment. In other words, it was incidental that planners decided to locate mass housing estates in green environments and to mould these landscapes with huge lawns, places for play, and places for recreation. The term 'welfare landscapes' emerged out of the 'Reconfiguring Welfare Landscapes' research project in 2015, designating the shared open spaces of post-World War II housing estates (University of Copenhagen, n.d.). That project emphasised the significance of the open spaces being highly constitutive of post-war urbanisation and as major cultural, social, and political artefacts of the mid-twentieth century. And it has contributed to the emerging research field focusing on welfare and the built environment (Avermaete & Van Heuvel, 2011; Mattsson & Wallenstein, 2010;Swenarton et al., 2015) emphasising the significant role of their open spac...

Investigating Spatial Criteria for the Urban Landscape Assessment of Mass Housing Heritage: The Case of the Central Zone of New Belgrade

“…As already explained, these housing estates have similar origins, comparable development paths, and face similar issues today; future research should aim to develop universal methods for mass housing heritage assessment with a holistic-interdisciplinary yet flexible approach in mind. Still, this is quite a challenge due to the fact that there is a lack of methodologically oriented research conducted on mass housing heritage assessment and still very limited literature on the topic, as such research studies mostly focus on describing a case study rather than explaining the evaluation process [29][30][31]90]. The lack of transparency in heritage significance considerations has also been noted by other authors [42,91].…”

“…Still, there is a lack of methodologically oriented research conducted on mass housing heritage assessment [29]. In this work, we aim to address the problem of the expanded scope of values and include still underrepresented disciplinary knowledge of landscape architecture in assessments of this type of heritage [30,31].…”

Reimagining landscape: Materiality, decoloniality, and creativity

“…Rabung and Toman, 2022; Pitkanen and Farish, 2018; Woodward, 2013), and research in post-industrial and post-World War II landscapes (e.g. Humphris and Rauws, 2021; Braae et al, 2021; Van der Schriek, 2020).…”

Improved equality of human exposure to greenspace in the 21st century urbanization

“…The two effects (destruction and construction of green space) can also occur periodically, and is not always strictly chronological. Different parts of cities developed under different political and economic conditions often display different patterns of greenspace, for example, highly planned systems of public local parks in the post-World War II cities; intensive street-tree planting during the rst half of the 20th century; private green spaces in ancient city quarters, very little green space in period of informal urban expansion, and so on [29][30][31][32] .…”