Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Public and private housing developments between 1940 and 1990 shaped the City of Madrid by differentiating urban area types according to social composition, location and development type. Spanish housing policies over these decades fostered public housing stock that, unlike in European cities, ended up being transformed into owned rather than rented homes; closely linking certain disadvantaged groups to the most vulnerable areas of the city. In this chapter, current processes of physical and social vulnerability are analysed using data from the 2001 and 2011 Population and Housing Censuses using a multivariate analysis. Our analysis differentiates between two stages of social housing estates in Madrid (under Francoism and in the democratic period) and private housing developments. These analyses show significant differences both in the trajectories of each of the types analysed in relation to contemporary vulnerability processes, as well as in the composition of the population that resides in them. Lastly, we examine challenges and proposals for the future of these urban areas, considering their social composition and the urban policies that seek to rebalance Madrid’s neighbourhoods and paying attention to the insertion of the immigrant population into the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of the city.

This chapter examines the case of large estates of social housing in Italy’s economic capital, Milan. Production of this housing occurred in the period of intensive industrialisation and associated urbanisation from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Development of these schemes occurred mainly in the periphery of the city, and led to land speculation and changed the social geography of the city. These estates initially housed Italian economic migrants attracted to Milan during the ‘economic miracle’, and since the 1990s have been the residence of a growing number of international migrants. Housing estates ceased to be developed after the 1980s, and a large part of the stock has been privatised since the 1990s. Today housing estates are more heterogeneous in terms of tenancy regimes and the social and ethnic groups who live there. The majority of the stock shows signs of (often serious) physical deterioration. The resident population has aged in situ, with ethnic segregation occurring in some residual parts of the stock. This chapter studies the evolution of these large social housing estates in spatial and social terms, using published and unpublished data from 1951 to 2017, pointing out their critical points and their potential.

Since the 1950s, Moscow’s housing development has been underlined by modernist planning schemes. From the 20th to 21st centuries, the quality and appearance of apartment buildings changed, but housing estates designed as coherent neighbourhoods not only remain the principal type of housing organization but are still being constructed in Moscow and its suburbs. Though the concept itself has not been challenged by policy-makers and planners, by the end of the 20th century it became apparent that early housing estates have become a problem due to poor quality of construction. In 2017, the Moscow Government announced a highly controversial program suggesting the demolition of housing estates built between the 1950s and 1960s. Our contribution analyzes the history of housing estates development in Moscow aiming to understand what has led to the adoption of the 2017 “renovation” program. If this program ends up being fully implemented, along with planned renovation of former industrial areas, the cityscape of Russia’s capital will be completely redefined.

This chapter provides a historical overview of the construction and renewal programmes of large housing estates in Paris and its surrounding suburbs. We examine neighbourhood level data on two large housing estates to provide insight into the processes of poverty and ethnic concentration within these sites. We also examine the impact of urban renewal programmes on demographic and physical change. We argue that while the urban form of the large housing estate is gradually disappearing from the housing landscape, poverty and ethnic concentration have not disappeared, and micro-fragmentation between different social levels has become more pronounced. By including individual residential trajectories and mobilities in our analysis—and going beyond the traditional gentrification/displacement nexus—we demonstrate that current renewal policies are at risk of creating new peripheries of exclusion and segregation at a regional level. At the same time, examination of the two case studies allows for a more nuanced perspective, which suggests that housing estates continue to play an important role in providing affordable housing and residential opportunities for local residents.

The housing estate is perceived to be one of the main symbols of the socialist regime in the former Eastern Bloc. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution, housing estates were to some extent rejected by the general public as well as neglected in spatial planning and policies. At the same time, Prague’s housing estates contained more than 40% of the city’s population, thus representing the most important part of the built environment within the city. The main aims of this chapter are to evaluate the specific development of Prague’s housing estates in the second half of the twentieth century, and then to explore the finer details of their inherent socio-spatial differentiation. The role of state and local housing policy is evaluated as the crucial factor in the current and future development of housing estates. The results are similar to those for many other CEE cities, and confirm that the transformation period had little impact on social structures within these residential areas and that the social mix sustains the main attribute of Prague’s housing estates. New housing construction and ethnic differentiation are the most important processes to have changed the social environment of housing estates in Prague during the post-transformation period.

In this chapter, we define the concept of housing estates in the Swedish context and provide some information about Stockholm and the historical background to the construction of post-war housing estates. The core research question will then be whether and to what extent initial conditions play a key role for later developments of an estate. Approaching this question, we first provide a statistical overview of developments from 1990 onwards, and then use examples from two estates in Stockholm, one built in the mid-1960s (Bredäng) and one built a few years later (Rinkeby), which now have similar problems of ethnic and socio-economic segregation but have arrived at this situation through very different trajectories. We will analyse these trajectories and identify the key moments leading up to present day convergence in terms of the social challenges facing the estates. Until 1990, the socio-economic situation in the 49 estates we analysed was not very different from the average situation in the Stockholm region. However, the economic crisis of the early 1990s had profound effects and initiated diverging trajectories where some estates continued to do well while others did not. We explain this diverging development with reference to tenure composition, geographical context and building period, all important for also understanding the geography of refugee settlement. This set of explanations is based both on the more structural analysis of all 49 estates and on the more detailed study of our two cases. We end the chapter with a discussion of 40 years of recurrent interventions and of how contemporary challenges are perceived and addressed.

Housing estates in the Tallinn urban region are interesting objects of research in many respects. First, as in other post-socialist European cities, the proportion of the population residing in socialist-era apartments is extraordinarily high here. Second, residential units in housing estates were originally state-built and run but are almost fully privatised today. Third, post-Soviet housing estates tend to be multi-ethnic, much like similar residential districts in many other European cities. This chapter reveals that Tallinn housing estates are experiencing gradual social decline: within the first two decades of post-socialism, a remarkable ageing of the population has taken place, the proportion of people with low socio-economic status has increased dramatically in some estates while others have succeeded in remaining relatively stable in this respect, and patterns of ethnic and socio-economic segregation have increasingly overlapped. Interestingly, this silent social decline is not acknowledged by contemporary urban actors. In the early transition years, institutional rearrangements were made (privatisation, new housing management and urban planning rules), but this was followed by a period of political neglect until the late 2000s. Although recent interventions (e.g. social housing projects, densification of housing estates by private developers, support for the renovation of panel buildings and rising community activism) have been more targeted, these policies remain rather chaotic generally. No vision exists for how the efforts of different actors and sectoral policies should stabilise housing estates in the longer run. There seems to be a race against time—although investments and efforts are being made to improve the residential quality of housing estates, this is not sufficient to counterbalance their ongoing stigmatisation and population changes.