From post-war modernisation to the ideal of the future: the large housing estates in the perspective of degrowth.

Abstract

Large housing estates built using industrialised technology were, and still are, an important part of the housing stock of many European cities (Rowlands, Musterd and van Kempen, 2009). In the face of wartime devastation and continuing urbanisation, their construction was often the only available way to meet the housing needs of a growing urban population. These estates offered residents a step-change in their living conditions, yet they became the subject of negative narratives (Zupan, 2021).

An in-depth study of the functional and spatial transformations that took place between 1990 and 2020 in six selected large housing estates located in cities of three former ‘Eastern Bloc’ countries (Brno, Wroclaw, Dresden) has led to interesting conclusions regarding the key urban indicators, the organisation of space and other factors influencing the quality of life in these estates (Porada, 2023).

I deliberately do not conceptualise the location of the case studies as ‘post-socialist cities’, as I share Hirt's (2016) argument challenging this conceptualisation as not well grounded in the actual evidence.

The results and conclusions of the research on housing estates are examined against the selected postulates of degrowth that relate to cities or urban policies (Cosme, Santos and O’Neill, 2017; Monbiot, 2020; Savini, 2021; Fitzpatrick, Parrique and Cosme, 2022). Degrowth is defined here as the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption to address environmental and social crises.

I will show that many of the solutions applied in large housing estates can support not only the postulates of degrowth but also other urban policies, such as climate adaptation plans. I argue that large housing estates, in many key solutions, can serve as a model for degrowth transformation in cities.