← New Books Network
New Books Network
Miles Glendinning, "Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
01:20:50
An interview with Miles Glendinning
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:00]
Tito's Vodka Announcer
Tito's handmade vodka is America's favorite vodka for a reason. From the first legal distillery in Texas, Tito's is six times distilled till it's just right and naturally gluten free, making it a high quality spirit that mixes with just about anything from the smoothest martinis to the best Bloody Marys. Tito's is known for giving back, teaming up with non profits to serve its communities and do good for dogs. Make your next cocktail with Tito's, distilled and bottled by 5th Generation Inc. Austin, Texas. 40% alcohol by volume.
- [00:28]
Blinds.com Advertiser
Savor responsibly@blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you. Shop blinds.com Labor Day mega sale happening now. Save up to 50% site wide plus a free measure. Rules and restrictions may apply.
- [01:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Interviewer
Hello and welcome to New Books in Urban Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm your host Timmy Coyedro, a graduate student at the University of Vienna. I'm pleased to be speaking with Miles Glendinin, author of the book Mass Housing, Modern Architecture and State A Global History. He is the professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Schedard center for Conservation Studies. Also this book was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury. Miles, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Could you please share a bit of your biography and research trajectory that led you to mass housing? Where did your interest in this topic begin?
- [02:52]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, thank you very much. Well, I think it was actually quite a kind of complicated route to get to this book. Although I'm based an architectural or built environment design in the department at Edinburgh University. I don't really have a kind of exclusively or mainly architectural background. I originally did classics at university. I was particularly interested in Roman political history and the whole kind of thing of the sort of battles of interest groups and patrons and clients. But I also was interested, I've long been interested in 19th century architecture and I kind of shifted to architectural history with the idea of maybe moving into heritage and then did a master's at East Anglia with Stefan Matasias as my supervisor, which then got me interested in 20th century built environment and started doing some research and work afterwards with Stefan, particularly through looking most closely at Glasgow and in and at Hong Kong. I became interested in particular in post war like multispect story flats. That was about 1982 and I started a PhD at Edinburgh University which took about a decade to do on the kind of history of the building of multi story flats in Britain, which ultimately shaded into the book Tower Block that we did together. And most of the research for which was done in about 1987 or 1989, including ultimately a lot of interviews with kind of politicians and architects and civil servants and so on. And the main theme of that book which kind of to some extent established a bit of a, you know, the way that things went after that was a rebuttal of a book by somebody called Patrick Dunleavy which analyzed post war mass housing in Britain as from a kind of Marxist perspective of just being a plot by lots of kind of wicked capitalist groupings to crush down working class people. And instead the theme certainly of my bit of the tower block, but was a kind of to emphasize the regional and civic diversity in different cities and across Britain and the UK and to make a. To sort of give equal weighting to production and kind of organization of housing, the political aspects of housing as to design after that I sort of paused working on, on really on mass housing for about 15 years and worked on other things, including a history of Scottish architecture, that kind of thing. But then took it up again after about 2009 where I became involved again with, particularly with Hong Kong and Singapore. But then that kind of led to the decision to do also in parallel without a kind of global history, with kind of the same sort of emphases of diversity, geographical and political cultural diversity as in Tower Block have been within Britain. And also building on work that I was doing at the time with Dokomomo, the International Modernist Heritage Confederacy, where I became involved with or were chaired the Committee on Urbanism and Landscape and there were various initiatives about like an international heritage housing archive. So really it kind of. And that eventually led to the writing of this book which I think I was commissioned to do in 2016 and you know, got. Then it took about five years to do.
- [06:52]
Interviewer
Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I mean you. So many. I think even, even the start from your, your early history, your early engagement with the classics to like the fact that you were working on mass housing for a number of years in the Scottish and Hong Kong context being a focus, the, the shift to other domains. It, it really, I think does. The fact that this is the culmination of so many years of work on this topic is really reflected in the text. It covers such an immense ground surveying the global interwoven relationships of the modern state and modern housing of the 20th century. I mean, you had mentioned this was commissioned in 2016 and there was already somewhat of a prehistory in terms of the book Tower Block that you had mentioned working on. But I'm also curious if you could speak to how the logistics of this came together, given expanding from a couple of countries to attempting a global history is still quite a logistical undertaking. Could you just speak more about how you pulled this off?
- [08:08]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, one of the main things, the main components of research in the Tower Block book was a field search survey which in the case of that one involved identifying and actually visiting all, hopefully all multi story public housing blocks in Britain. These are blocks of six or more stories and taking photos of them and doing like a sort of basic, basic statistics of numbers and so on, which then got subsequently with a Heritage Lottery grant aided project got made into like a database called Tower Block uk. Now that then meant that the, you know, the logistics of this, this global project to some extent reflected that it was kind of built in from the beginning that there would be a fieldwork element in it. But that would be alongside a sort of desk based research thing which in this case was the tunnel, was a lot of archival research and interviews with sort of participants. In the case of this one, it was really more secondary reading. Luckily I do have a reading knowledge of most or basic reading knowledge of most of like Germanic Romance languages. And so, you know, I was able to in terms of European North America and one or two other Anglophone places, you know, Hong Kong and Australasia, I was able to kind of get very direct access to books on these articles on these places without having to just necessarily rely solely on Anglophone books, which can be a little bit limiting. And at the same time, with the aid of a British Academy travel grant that I got in about 2015 or something, I then did a kind of fill in travel program to a range of places that probably I couldn't have afforded to go to otherwise. Although I did actually have some research grants that I'd sort of built up over the years within the university I was also able to draw on. So I mean, I think the British Academy travel, I mean that allowed trips to Russia, the U.S. tashkent in Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. I think those are all the places that came under that grant when I filled in lots of kind of more in local European trips. And then you know that that kind of meant that you got an appreciation of the built environment equivalent to the policy sort of story that you could, you could find in the, in the, in the secondary material. So, you know, it was a sort of twin track thing. The. Rather than, as with tarblock, making the field survey thing into a kind of a comprehensive gazetteer. Obviously that wouldn't really be possible in a kind of global scale. But what I did instead was to use the. I took about 35,000 images on these trips and they're arranged into country groupings. They've been incorporated on a database called the Dokomomo International Mass Housing Archive, which is hosted by Edinburgh University on a website called Data Share. And these are kind of like. So it means that all the images taken on these global trips are sort of open access and freely available. But at the same time I was sort of then writing the book and trying to then pull together the themes, you know, from all the different places and trying to think of, you know, sort of regional global themes that, you know, that kind of stuff, you know. So basically in the book, you know, in terms of how long it was in the works, you know, probably about five or six years, but obviously it was built on the on top of a lot of prior trips, you know, earlier on in the decade.
- [12:26]
Interviewer
That does give color to this. And I know in the book you also have a quite a lengthy list of acknowledgments because as you, as you alluded to, there's a variety of people you interviewed, you spoke to, you know, research assistants and the like. So it is quite impressive undertaking. But to start to get into the content of the book, I was interested in starting with just getting a better understanding of some basic terms that you use. Starting from the title. Could you please define how you use the terms mass housing and modern housing in the text?
- [13:09]
Miles Glendinin
So. Well, I think I probably explained also in the introduction. It is quite an empirical definition and it's more defined by what it excludes rather. And it's not on the basis of any hard and fast economic, economic, you know, hurdle or income level or something like that. It's basically programs that are both significantly supported by the modern state, but which also are in terms of their built environment, fall under the general and very varied heading of the, of, of the modern movement. And so that's. So things that are one but not the other, you know, tend to be downplayed. So something like, so for example, I don't know, private apartment blocks in Sao Paulo or something like that, you know, they might be modernist, you know, but they're not really supported by the state at all. So really they're not included in the book or something like, I don't know, in South Africa, in apartheid South Africa, the locations with these little bungalow type buildings. Well, you know, that's very definitely a sort of state supported program with very definite state and ideological ideas. But the built form is kind of like, more like a garden suburb with little or garden suburb without the gardens and with small pavilion type of thing. So those are mentioned, but they're not really central to it. And the kind of thing that's sort of excluded and in particular the, I suppose that was seen as kind of a little bit like the other from the point of view of organized public housing is things like organized self help, the self built housing, which, and you know, I can come on to that a bit later, but which was something that did receive quite a lot of support from international agencies, but didn't really. It didn't really. It was often seen rather in opposition to government supported mass housing programs. It's a slightly fuzzy definition, but it is a very big and variegated subject, you know.
- [15:32]
Interviewer
And yes, a number of the things you, you touched on we can get into in greater detail later. Speaking of the introduction, still, you do position the book in contrast to some of the standard narratives that have been written on modernist mass housing development. Maybe listeners that have written had to have read Seen Like a State by James C. Scott as well as other other scholars. They really emphasize the standardization and homogeneity across contexts that were part of these projects. However you write, and I quote, this book is written from a very different standpoint. It is a history of one of the grandest of all modernist grand narratives written from a distinctly post modernist standpoint. Could you talk about what you meant by this and why you felt this book needed a different approach to what you had previously been reading?
- [16:38]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, yes, certainly I should first of all say when I said postmodernist, I don't mean like postmodern architecture, which is obviously a rather, you know, rather sort of limited like a phase architectural phase a while ago, but really more like postmodern culture or postmodernist cultural standpoint, which is to avoid a kind of unitary master narratives, you know. And again this is something I'm probably not defining it quite right. But you know that the book very heavily emphasizes diversity of multiple modernity as opposed to things like well, the caricature picture in the James Scott of the scene like a stage, you know, modernism as just being identical things march into the the horizon. And I suppose that also you know that was how to make sense of the geographical diversity, you know and and the the local cultural diversity which again implies that that avoidance of a sort of unitary picture which again was an approach that was that that was inherited from Tara Block of of emphasizing local diversity.
- [17:56]
Lowe's Advertiser
Save big during Labor Day at Lowe's get up to 40% off select major appliances plus buy more to get up to an additional 20% off shop even more savings with three stay green 1 cubic foot vegetable and flower garden soil bags for $10 this Labor Day. Take care of your home for less at Lowe's we help you Save ballot through 93 Sori Loffer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Selection varies by location. Select locations only While supplies/seelows.com for more details.
- [18:24]
Interviewer
In some ways the broad geographic and temporal scale of the book also lends itself to as you go through all the various cases, you really do emphasize both the while there are some macro trends, you really do emphasize the local context and local specificities which which which does come through as well. I guess A next follow on question is you also in the introduction describe as your methods taking an avoidance of an explicitly theoretical and Ideological framework, as you've already said, you're undertaking this in a more empirical dimension. What. What did make you to frame. Frame the book or undertake this study in these empirical terms? And were there any background text or thinkers that were influencing you even if you didn't fully adopt what you would consider an explicit theoretical standpoint?
- [19:36]
Miles Glendinin
Well, yes. So first of all, I suppose it is a slightly circular thing. I suppose if one's avoiding theoretical than having theoretical master text, I mean, one certainly wouldn't expect, you know, then in that case, sort of like, you know, French philosophers or, you know, the book to be influenced anyway by like Foucault or something like that. But certainly there are writers who have emphasized the idea of multiple modernities. I mean, for example, Shmuel Eisenstadt, well, you wrote his book with actually called Multiple Modernities. There are other, I mean, people with a bit of a foothold in the kind of theoretical approach, but who are capable, who have written about kind of locally specific cases and, you know, with sensitivity to that. So, for example, Manuel Castells and go. Their Shet K Me syndrome book on Hong Kong and Singapore. I think that kind of combines a, A, you know, kind of theoretical background, but with acknowledging the local specificity of Hong Kong. In. I mean, I do keep one foot in the. In the world. In the, in the world of ancient history. And there. There have been a number of writers who have recently sort of fought back against unitary narratives in the ancient world. There was a couple of authors called Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden, who wrote a book called the Corrupting Sea, which was about the Mediterranean and how, you know, Mediterranean culture in the ancient world was a series of kind of linked local sort of micro environments or even. I mean, there was a writer called John Colston who argued against the idea there was such a single thing as the Roman arm. Very often you hear people talk about the Roman army and the ancient world, the Roman Empire, but pointing out that there actually wasn't a single Roman army, the Roman soldiers didn't wear uniform, that kind of thing. So it's a sort of. I suppose it's a rather mixed bag of texts that are arguing for, you know, breaking up master narratives for whatever reason, I suppose, you know, but while retaining links and kind of thematic overview links or whatever.
- [22:09]
Interviewer
Yes, yes. So before you structure the book between charting this long history of the 20th century, since the 20th century is the main focus of the book, the. There are some antecedents that go back beforehand. Of course, as you chart it out, you have a brief prehistory of what were some of the drivers that led to the development of mass housing. And you speak to some of discourses of housing need, like how mass housing began to be justified and how a constituency began to be developed. Could you briefly summarize some of the threads that you see across context or just some of the key elements that went into some of the discourses about housing need that helped propel mass housing?
- [23:16]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, I mean, I think again, these to some extent differ according to what part of the world you're talking about in like Western countries. Well, obviously one of the issues is rural to urban migration, I mean, especially in places like southern Europe. And issues, demographic issues of sort of household excesses and household formation that can lead to then, you know, the claim of the concept of homelessness. And you know, in the. I mean, in most cases we'll probably come on to that later, but it's answered by just building a straightforward building of sort of state supported housing on the edges of cities. But in Anglo Saxon countries or Anglophone countries, there's a particular focus on the idea that a kind of inversion of the normal idea of the most prestigious bit of the cities being the inner areas and then the worst bare areas being the areas on the outskirts. And instead in the Anglophone countries and like in England or in US or whatever, the idea that the worst housing is concentrated in the inner areas around the city center and that therefore you have to have huge amounts of slum clearance or urban renewal, which is obviously something that's not really a very prominent thing in places like France or Italy or whatever. And then in the global south there's, you know, then issues of informal housing. Again, well, rural to urban migration in places like Singapore and so on. But then. Or Hong Kong even more, but, you know, linked to much, much bigger areas of informal housing in cities in Brazil or India. So the kind of discourse of housing need really differ, like everything else between according to where it is, you know.
- [25:13]
Interviewer
Right, right. But that does help to sort of set the stage as to. And yeah, this is a tension that will continue throughout this conversation as we try to talk across a book that covers such a broad topic. But it does help at least set the stage for some of the ways that these programs had been justified and put forward. So the next question is, I think you also emphasize a tension or a divergence between the stated rhetoric in favor of mass housing programs and what might be, whether it be the reality or maybe some other motivations that are downplayed. Could you talk briefly about Some of these divergences in some of the cases that you've identified in the book.
- [26:10]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, I mean, clearly there's a lot of rhetoric which is about social need. It's really about morality. It's about the scandal of the slums or the met, you know, slums as a menace or something like that. But the reality often being like political expediency. I mean, like for example, in Latin America that most like low income, most sort of publicly supported housing tends to be built for sort of not just employees of the state, but people who are sort of, you know, in some way that the government needs the support of rather than the other way around. So I think that's, you know, whereas possibly in some of the welfare state countries the rhetoric and the reality are a little bit more closely integrated. But that's really what I meant by that to some extent, you know.
- [27:08]
Interviewer
And in the book, obviously you have to make certain choices. And I think you acknowledge that the perspective of the inhabitants of the mass housing buildings or the lived experience, I mean, it's not a housing policy book either. Sort of trying to evaluate the success or failure of the housing establishments isn't a key concern or a key focus of the text. But I am curious to some degree from where the agency or the degree of locus of control of tenants and city inhabitants did play a role in this story. You can obviously get into the architects and the government officials that set this in motion. But I'm curious if you have thoughts on how either tenant advocacy or other ways that citizens were involved in these processes shaped or reflected some of their own diverse interests or if you've felt this is really primarily more of a top down trajectory.
- [28:31]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, certainly, yes, I think to answer the question, your final question, yes, you know, mass housing, public housing, as I deal with it is it's almost a slightly secular argument because it's almost defined. You know, one of the defining things about it is it's a top down thing organized by large organizations, you know, state supported organizations with very, with relatively little direct input by, if you like, like tenant groups or inhabitant groups. Now, you know, as some of the, the housing programs that have covered at the the end of the book, more recent ones, like for example, in Hong Kong, where, you know, increasingly there's a huge amount of public participation. So where housing programs have kept going into the present day age of, of public participation in all areas like that, then yes, it does come in. But in the 1950s and 1960s, I mean, the only contribution of tenants really and working Class inhabitants was just simply queuing up outside counselor surgeries saying when is my house going to get pulled down? When am I going to get a new house? It was a sort of supplicant kind of role and they were provided for. What in global south countries is always in the background though is aided self help, which has been by the, you know, Turner school of writing has been ascribed a lot of like a kind of moral superiority that this does involve people. But clearly that was very much targeted against in public housing and it produced rather different housing outcomes. So no, on the whole it's almost a defining point that it didn't do that. Direct participation wasn't really there.
- [30:36]
Interviewer
That was really helpful in that. And the way that this social shifts over time is also interesting to think about. So we're going to move the conversation more broadly talking across some of the questions of architecture and state policy. Given the structure of the book. We're not going to be necessarily diving systematically throughout the cases though it would be great to hear certain references to cases as makes sense. So keeping the conversation at this sort of higher level register. I was curious if you could. A key aspect of modernism is this idea of a faith in technocracy and experts to lead this systematized process of development and upgrading. Could you speak to what the implications of technocracy and this expert that modernization had on the rollout of the mass housing drive both in terms of the architecture that was developed as well as the policy logics that were implemented as well?
- [32:06]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, yeah, I think the faith in technocracy and experts, it is a major factor, but I think it was one thread in the story, but by no means always the dominant one. I mean many housing drives, for example, were quite low tech. And on the whole I think it would be more accurate to say that really mass housing tended to be dominated above all by. By organizers and politicians and kind of people like engineers or something who were not really there as technocrats, but really as forceful organizers. And this was certainly a theme that came out in Tower Block where there was a split between. In that. Between design and production. There were two. Two different parts of the book sections. And the design was, you know, if you like, kind of intellectualized approaches, including both architectural design, but also technocratic sort of buffins and all that kind of thing and the production, but the sort of practical people who just sort of like so called package deal, building contract so on, who just pushed aside the. A lot of the kind of theoreticians of system building. I think the key in under the Sylvie definition of the first and second worlds is having a well organized political and organizational system and well funded, which obviously many global south third world didn't have. Which then meant, you know, they weren't really able to mount such big housing programs. Now you know, technocracy as such as you know, is a sort of ideological element in that. But I don't think it was by any means the dominant one. I mean you would tend to get, I mean this is probably sort of jumping ahead a little bit, but kind of aims of things like prefabrication and building systems. Obviously they became very prominent in some countries and above all in the Soviet bloc where they really went overboard for those where they responded to specific problems like above all building industry shortages or in some cases poor construction quality and but in some cases also for sort of ideological reasons like in the ussr the kind of love of standardization and so on. So that's a kind of, certainly a sort of socialist technocracy, no doubt about that. Or in France the idea of, you know, the kind of excitement about again sort of technocracy, you could certainly say that applied in France and you know, those are, those two places actually kind of interacted quite a lot in terms of system building. But in many places you couldn't really describe the housing programs as being terribly technocratic. You know, I mean, certainly in, in Britain they weren't really technocratic. I don't really think you could really describe like a lot of public housing in the United States as being very technocratic. I mean sort of, you know, certainly not, not much system building and prefabrication Hong Kong building systems were introduced later on about in the 1990s or so as a way of sort of avoiding building building floors. But they weren't really central to the whole, the whole housing drive. So I think, you know, it certainly is a factor, but it's not a dominant one, you know.
- [35:58]
Interviewer
Yeah, that was, that was a helpful nuance and I think as you had touched upon, while not ubiquitous, I feel like in the popular imagination or to a layperson if you hear about mass housing or the state public, the state's drives for housing in the mid century, there's this idea of these very uniform buildings that all kind of look the same and there's this idea that even architecturally that there's this uniformity which I think you also, if I recall even from that kind of architectural standpoint you do emphasize the differences and the multi varied way that so called modern architecture manifested itself and, and the different designs and what have you maybe if you could just speaking on the way that within mass housing there were a variety of different architectural designs. I think of not just architectural designs in both form but also tenure. So Belgium was quite of an interesting example in. In the book. You.
- [37:33]
Miles Glendinin
You.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
It's a quite a stark example of a certain sociopolitical polarization within a country based on tenure. You you had a description of a. Of a so called conservative Catholic single family house which was. Had been contrasted with socialist rented flats. Could you discuss the implications of this social architectural division in Belgium and maybe also speak to. Did this type of division seem to reassert itself in other contexts as well as this ideological undercurrent between the. The within the mass housing context with it between single family homes and. And. And rental flats?
- [38:33]
Miles Glendinin
Well in Belgium obviously I mean that, that you know the, the tenure link and that the political divisions that that kind of reflected were also bound up with a particular system that was also found in the Netherlands which is called Versarling or Pillarization where. Where social provision was within the country was so vertically segregated into so called pillars by religious confessional grouping of Protestant, Catholic or secular socialist and with all kind of social provision including housing organized within those. Those groupings. And in Belgium that the particular form that Versailling took really reflected the whole issue about pro and anti clericalism. So on the one hand you had you know, socialists who were, you know, secularists and rejecting the church and they tended to then be to link to modern architecture. And there's one architect in particular, Renat Brahm who was you know, possibly a communist and was very much bound up with the promotion of the. The semi public rental housing and the Catholic and the homeownership went under a different regime and a different architectural form, the so called law. So you know there certainly you could say that was a very strong left right ideological divide. But on the other hand there are other places where I mean really like close at hand. In Germany for example, they're really. Housing tenure is not really a major. Or West Germany anyway is not a major feature that there's a kind of instead an emphasis on tenure neutrality and the notion of public housing as opposed to wicked private landlords or whatever is really not a major thing. In Britain there's a tendency of very bitter anti landlordism for various reasons like largely local sort of political reasons. And so the ideological divide, yes there's a bit of a left right one there, but it tends to be more pro and anti private rental housing. But certainly I mean the promotion of home ownership on the whole is associated with more sort of conservative regimes. But there are entire areas of the world where home ownership really is bound up with state intervention. And the two are virtually identical. I mean Singapore for example, which certainly presented itself as being a somewhat socialist state or in many places like in South America would be sort of taken for granted that housing, that the state intervened, state supported housing would be pretty quickly destined for sale to occupants. And likewise in Australia or New Zealand, you know, those sort of, you know, so it's a rather complicated the link between home ownership and public or private rental and the sort of political differences.
- [42:04]
Interviewer
Continuing on a bit. Not necessarily tenure, but more so the actual organizational logics. In certain countries the, the mass housing drive was channeled through very direct government provision of housing. Notably in a number of Anglophone countries there was, there was public housing like directly built by the government. Whereas in other context it was the public housing or the mass housing I should say was channeled through in a more arm's length manner through nonprofit organizations or state supported but not directly owned housing companies. Could you talk about some of the, the, the drivers of or local factors that may have led to this divergence in a few cases and speak about if you notice any trends in housing outcomes between the more direct versus indirect governments? Well.
- [43:19]
Miles Glendinin
I mean some of it was at a kind of macro political level. So I mean clearly the opposition of the first versus the second world and the kind of state socialist ideology. But even there's, you know, you have massive differences between countries where you have sort of this large scale sort of locally based provision like by so called local Soviets in the, in the Soviet Union and the situation in, in Maoist China where all, all housing like all other social provision was organized in so called danways which were like individual enterprises which is very, very fragmented and really almost terminated anarchic. But and then the within the global south, the general sort of weakness of the state and the lack of financial backing and foundations of the state that kind of, you know, under undermined a lot of, you know, attempts at public housing. But then equally there are lots of very local, you know, historical factors. Like in France for example, the post 1871 government aversion to having strong local political control of things after the commune and you know, either keeping things at arm's length or having central government agencies that could intervene directly as opposed to like in Britain, you know, the strong public local authority housing and weak, relatively weak central governments. And in some places you actually see sort of battles underway actively about the direction of which way Is it going to go one way or the other? So for example, in Norway after 1945, in Bergen, but not in Oslo and elsewhere, but only in Bergen, there was a huge battle about whether public housing was going to become orthodox public rental housing, sort of like municipal housing, or were controlled by CO ops. And eventually, as in the rest of Norway and as in Sweden, eventually it's sort of Bergen fell into line which was linked with the, the collapse of, of the local power of the Communist Party. So you know, there's a lot of local, locally specific factors.
- [45:43]
Interviewer
I'm curious how these reformers approach the intersection of housing with transportation planning and other related topics.
- [45:53]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, I think there was a bit of a division in many countries between sort of like planning progressives, people who were talking, who were keen on like urban decentralization and population overspill and so on. Obviously to them transport was very important, whereas to the sort of basic, the kind of more old fashioned municipal houses and that kind of thing, probably grand schemes of urban planning were less relevant and in fact almost seen as a little bit of a kind of a distraction really.
- [46:30]
Interviewer
I know you described the intimate connection between urban renewal and public housing, for instance, in the US context. And urban renewal is also quite like linked to the freeways and other transportation interventions and those, those are all happening at the same time. But as you, as you just said, it depends on the context talking about planning. It also leads one to think about land in general. And I'm curious how land supply and land ownership colored the shape that these housing drives took. In some countries where the state directly owned the land or land was socialized. I mean the Soviet Union for one example, versus in other European cities, Western European cities, where municipalities had come to the, to possess large proportions of the land in Vienna and Stockholm or another Scandinavian context. I'm curious how in the US context again where very much of a high emphasis on private property rights, which also colored how these, these eight entities got a hold of land and what procedures they had to. Could you just sort of talk broadly about what land supply and ownership meant?
- [48:14]
Miles Glendinin
Well, I mean clearly, obviously if there was a lot of land available, whether, because, whether because the place was a low density place generally. Like for example in the state of South Australia, for example, there was a big public housing program, but all very low density or where the state controlled land, as in the socialist bloc or in Singapore, there, you know, the pressure for higher and higher density is probably a bit less. Whereas somewhere like Hong Kong, where because of, you know, the growing sort of stranglehold of, for example of the private real estate tycoons that the. The sites for public housing become fewer and fewer and fewer. So you then get pressure for higher and higher densities. Now obviously then there are locational aspects as well. In countries where like continental countries where it's assumed that the location of public housing and the worst areas of existing housing will all be on the outskirts of cities and you have like a grandson BLE and Bidonville being knocked down and so on. That's a relatively simple task of land assembly. Whereas in the Anglophone country tradition of slum clearance and urban renewal, it immediately becomes very, very complicated. And the moment that land value starts going up, then it becomes virtually impossible to assemble sites like Hong Kong again. But even in London in the early post war period, you were already getting gentrification and in these previously rather low prestige inner areas starting to go up in value. So there's a sort of again, somewhat system specific situation.
- [50:13]
Interviewer
On the topic of immersing the grand ensembles in France, much of the, I mean the mass in mass housing is not just about the breadth and quantity but also oftentimes it's the scale of the housing and the number of units, the number of residents. And I think many of the most memorable or visceral projects are the ones that are truly massive. Could you talk about how this, if you will, inflation or this growth of the scale of the projects came about and what were some of the either economic or architectural and social factors behind that?
- [51:08]
Miles Glendinin
Well, I suppose the inflation in the size of projects. I mean some countries actually had that their words for mass housing were actually almost defined to certain specific levels. I mean the God ensemble in France was either defined as a scheme of over 500 or over a thousand dwellings. But no, I suppose that's completely bound up with the availability of land. If you have large sites that become available, then you can build large developments. If you have fragmented land supply, then you can't do that. Obviously you can build up. So in Hong Kong, getting very tall blocks on small scattered sites. But in terms of having large blocks with large numbers of blocks close together, that's going to be linked to having a decent land supply, whether by redevelopment in the slum clearance societies or by large scale acquisition on the outskirts really. And then you sort of from that you develop whatever is the appropriate, you think is the appropriate scale and design of large monumental planning, you know.
- [52:31]
Interviewer
Right, right. So there's the land supply element. I know in the Soviet Union case, you also do mention some of the ideological elements of of the monumentalism as well too. The next few questions I want to get at internationalism and mass housing. I think one theme that you repeatedly touch upon as you document the history is the vast amount of ideas exchanged and cross country influences among housing officials, architects, planners, intellectuals seeking to establish mass housing. Could you talk broadly about what the impact of international examples, building exhibitions and study visits abroad had on mass housing reform discourses domestically and the policy programs that were implemented?
- [53:32]
Miles Glendinin
Well, yes, I mean this is to some extent this is a little bit of a secular thing because a lot of the international proselytizing and contacts and networking was carried out by people who were. By professional groups, intellectual groups, things like, not only, you know, within, within the sort of frameworks of modern architecture and things like, you know, Team 10 and the CM and so on, but also planning, you know, planning interchanges and you know, affecting things like micro rayon planning or, or decentralized, you know, overspilled in new towns, those sort of things. What, what I think, you know, I found is really that the nitty gritty of housing organization and the people who actually organize, who did the, the, the housing programs. The kind of, the people who were in charge of the housing programs, whether they were like local counselors or kind of, if you like quantitative officials, they did a lot less of this. And so, you know, it's a sort of slightly, you know, people talking to each other and in effect it's a sort of discourse that just sustains itself as a discourse, you know, preaching to the converted sort of thing, but without necessarily really influencing the, you know, I mean, so. And that then perpetuates itself into historical records. So for example, his history writing about mass housing in Brazil. There are some marvelous books that have come up by an author called Nabil Bondouki and some co authors on the celebrated period of Brazilian housing design of both in. Specifically in the municipal housing agency in Rio, but also the, the so called providential insurance that the kind of employment linked housing societies up until the coup in 1964, the military coup, when the housing system was completely turned on its head and a much more sort of centralized and a more numbers orientated thing with something called the Banco Nacional de Habitassao was founded which lasted for about 20 something years. It built a lot, but there's virtually nothing been written about it because it's just seen as not interesting to architects. It's sort of associated with a military junta, that kind of thing. And yet it built a lot of housing in Brazil now probably though a bit of an exception to that is the impact of international housing policy exchange in proselytizing what you might call the opposition to mass housing which has aided self help, which benefited from a lot.
- [56:41]
Interviewer
Of.
- [56:43]
Miles Glendinin
Support from the World bank, the United nations, the un, UN Habitat for example, which again emphasized basic housing housing reconditioning as opposed to, and it was linked with a sort of general 1970s, late 60s, 70s reaction against big bang top down housing solutions. So there was a lot of international interchange on that. But that's really sort of like the opposition from the point of view of a lot of concerted mass housing, you know, but I mean certainly, you know, you, you, there was, you know, some, some programs did have a internationally influenced housing housing organization, but you know, probably not very common, you know.
- [57:42]
Interviewer
Yes, at least I know from the US context like Catherine Bauer and modern housing is among those in the earth context is often referenced. But again, I think it is interesting how as you're saying, the nitty gritty of actual life, how many of the people who are undertaking these programs were truly engaged with these international discourses versus that left to the intellectual, I just don't know.
- [58:18]
Miles Glendinin
I'm sure that Katherine Bar would have influenced some aspects of housing policy in the U.S. i mean her input I imagine in the 1949 Housing act and you know, prolet, you know, lobbying people and all that kind of stuff. I, I don't know really. But, but her influence on any housing, any specific housing program somewhere else. I don't know if it had any influence at all, you know, really. And there were there like people like that in Britain, you know, housing pundits who just produced books about, you know, but you know.
- [58:54]
Interviewer
So one, one you got kind of started to touch about the role of these international organizations sometimes through coercive needs of international aid and that entanglement. But I'd also curious about the more very directly coercive role of colonial role and how that influenced mass housing development in South Asia and Africa and other contexts as well as both influencing mass housing in the global South. But I think also in the, in the metropole, these engagements in either housing experiments or housing programs also can rebound back. So I'm curious if you could speak about this colonial period and well, I.
- [59:58]
Miles Glendinin
Mean colonialism as such. I mean you could argue, well it mainly through its extractive or exploitative aspects had an enfeebling effect ultimately by, by sort of producing decolonized states that were sort of weakened and not very economically strong and still, you know, in a semi subordinated role that they were therefore not able to really sustain viable programs for a long time. And the clearly sort of colonial relationships.
- [60:36]
State Farm Announcer
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [61:01]
Lowe's Advertiser
Bundle and safe. With Expedia you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front row we were made to quietly save you more Expedia made to travel savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [61:16]
Miles Glendinin
Did you know they could in certain specific circumstances assist in matter housing drives usually in the sort of physically not in the same physical form as in metropoles that they tend to be kind of more low rise and possibly individual dwellings, that kind of thing. But particularly I think this applies in Francophone Africa where there was a long sort of tail of. Of kind of decolonizing but sort of carry on colonial relationships in housing planning and shading from housing as a way of propping up French power in places like Morocco and Algeria in the 50s and up until the early 60s in Algeria to something that appeared to be much more decolonizing and particularly above all the programming Cote d' Ivoire in the late 60s and early and particularly in the 70s under Hufwe Buigny, where he got a whole range of French organizations and sort of like Ivorian sort of spin offs of them. So the SCEC or the SEC which is a kind of a kind of centralized consultancy of planning and development and there was sort of spin offs in, in Cote d' Ivoire of Sikogi and Soke fiha, they're sort of like Francophone sort of acronyms that for a number of years or the years of the sort of economic heyday of the regime, and particularly in Yupugan, the area in Abidjan built a lot of mainly low rise high density housing. But the moment that, the economic moment that the economy started tanking, the projects were dumped, you know. And so they didn't really have even in the the best circumstances they didn't really have a strong staying power. So I think on the whole and, and obviously in some cases then these organizations used their colonial experience back in France and particularly from Morocco and, and in architectural terms where the idea of the low rise courtyard houses and patio houses, these to some extent Affect shape by the work of Echosha in Morocco. But you know, I think probably on the whole the colonial rule and decolonization like kind of weakened the possibility of mass housing and opened the way again for the forced and particularly by US backed agencies that were very keen on the promotion of individual home ownership of. So the promoting the aided self help and the sites and services approach as a kind of polemically as an alternative, you know.
- [64:41]
Interviewer
Right. I mean one very vivid instance of mass housing was the South African case which is obviously influenced by the apartheid regime and this very intense spatial segregation by race and the broader racist ideology. That's one very distinct case. But I'm also curious guess in across context the role that mass housing was in propping up certain aims of spatial or racial segregation. And obviously racism was not always the dominant identity group. But just how could you kind of talk about how mass housing was wrapped up in that?
- [65:42]
Miles Glendinin
I'm sure it did but the only, the only problem is I'm not totally sure, you know, I, I don't think enough mass housing in my definition was built in these areas to really play an. Absolutely, you know, on the whole it tended to be built for government officials and so it sort of propped up, you know, kind of like new post colonial elites and and so on. But other than just in cases like Cote d', Ivoire, I mean certainly in India a lot of public housing was built and they're the kind of British kind of the housing authority model was adopted. And I don't think in India public housing probably could be said to be perpetuating a segregatory role. I mean the kind of cantonment and the you know, separation out of different residential areas became like a kind of into so called colonies became a way in which state employees were above all that they were housed. And that obviously had its roots in segregatory planning. But it really, I think public housing in India was a lot of it was built for government employees or sort of middle class people who, you know, and the people who were being kind of oppressed, if you like, were the people who were in the slums, you know. So I'm just not sure that there was enough of it. But then I've not really systematically gone into that.
- [67:24]
Interviewer
So we obviously can't go too far into the deep history of all of what's in the book. But I would like to spend a few moments on recent decades. Before we come up, could you talk about what led to the waning of the energy behind the mass housing drive in the later 20th century. Obviously there's a variety of aspects to that.
- [67:54]
Miles Glendinin
Well, I mean, clearly, yes, again this is really sharply divided between the first and second worlds. And in the first world it's the sort of, the kind of declining impetus of welfare state ideas and welfare socialism or whatever. And partly in some places due to his own success in actually doing the quantitative things it said it was going to do. And then in the second world it was the end of the state socialism about a decade and a decade and a half later and all combined with anti modern movement attacks. But obviously those then had two rather different outcomes in the western countries in some places, but not in all. It led to then the residualization, commodification, demolitions, and particularly when paralleled with the, in cases where owner occupation was being promoted and particularly in cases where owner occupation at the expense, direct expense of public housing was being promoted, like the right to buy in Britain. Whereas in socialist countries where you get mass individual privatization, something like the Hope sex program in the United States would be inconceivable because you can't, you know, when you have entire areas of cities that are all owned individually, where all the blocks are over, you know, you might get decay and a little bit of dilapidation, but what you, you can't get is, you know, where people are asset rich and cash poor, you, you can't get like mass demolition and the government doesn't have the money to do, you know, so, so really the consequences, the causes and the consequences are somewhat different. But in all cases it leads to a sort of privatization of some or another, but the effects of that are rather different. And I think, you know, in terms of what led some countries and cities to take, you know, destructive as opposed to constructive. I mean, I think to some extent its systems had a kind of confrontational approach where housing was a subject of strong political conflict. I mean in Britain, particularly England was one like that, where a lot of housing polemic and this, you know, the previous phase being each phase, rejecting a previous one as being absolutely as being the worst possible thing. And that then leads to a drastic tenural and architectural swing, lots of demolition, ditto the US and so on. Whereas in some places like in western countries like Scandinavia or Switzerland, where there is a non confrontational, where there's a sort of 10 year neutral housing system, you don't really get that. And then as I've said in the former socialist countries, then that doesn't apply at all.
- [71:01]
Interviewer
Yes, yes, the multifaceted very nature of it is both evident in its execution of the main period of the 20th century, but also in its waning eras. It always these very diverse pathways. So we've taken quite a lot of your time already and just had a few final questions to close out starting broad. I'm curious what you hope different audiences take away from this book and if there's any lessons you see for contemporary actors who are, are interested in some of the ideological or, or policy aims of these social housing drives that, that what they might draw from the text.
- [71:56]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, it's rather tricky to say because certainly in you know, the developed world because, because of the, the decisive thing that's changed is in, in so many countries the rise in the price of land and the spread of the, of, you know, speculatively driven home ownership in developed countries has led to, you know, the soaring price of land and basically the unaffordability of a whole lot of the programs that were and you know, and the shift in government support from supply to demand, you know, and demand side subsidies. So I'm not totally sure what lessons can be drawn from it. I think it's possibly more of a historical episode rather than something with lessons for today.
- [72:52]
Interviewer
And in terms of the projects that you have working on currently, could you talk about any future book projects or research since you've published Mass Housing?
- [73:09]
Miles Glendinin
Yeah, well, yes, actually is. No. And I've just published another book which is from it which was developed in parallel with that, which is this Hong Kong Public Housing. It's just literally just come out published by Routledge and that's a sort of much more kind of archive and sort of primary source heavy account and linking Hong Kong but that very much into the story of decolonization and sovereignty and all the issues about that over the, over the decades since the 1950s. I'm also hoping to do a rather smaller book about post war housing in London and then you know, a few other things. The, the, the book that I did a few years ago on the conservation movement, possibly doing a, a second edition of that with a co author. So, you know, I'm mainly books. I would say the projects are, you know, excellent.
- [74:10]
Interviewer
Excellent. Well, it's great to know if once listeners finish mass housing, they can go directly to your latest book on Hong Kong. Last question. I'm curious, curious if there were one or two books you might recommend to readers interested in learning more about mass housing and the topics that you're focused on.
- [74:38]
Miles Glendinin
Well, I mean one of the most terrific books published in relatively recent years, but it is in German is by an author and a publisher in fact called Philip Miser in of DOM books in in Berlin the aesthetic Der Plata which is like a kind of massive compendium about socialist socialist prefabricated housing. I mean he has done a number of spin off books and and fascicule type books in English. There's a recent one that he's written with a co author on mass housing in Ukraine which is really interesting and that kind of links up the history of housing in the in in socialist in in Ukraine as a kind of trying to disentangle it from Russia and showing what's distinctively Ukrainian in Soviet housing.
- [75:31]
Interviewer
Well I think this comes to the end of our conversation. I've been speaking with Professor Glenn et author of the book Mass Housing Modern Architecture and State Power A Global History the book was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury. I highly encourage listeners to check out a copy as well as the recent book that on Hong Kong that was published thank you so much for your time professor thank you Sa.