The fall of the giants

by George Μ. Chatzistergiou

It is a fact that the post-war building in Greece, one of the fundamentals of the overall operation of contemporary Greek society, has yet to be fully assessed in social, economic and technological terms. This serious approach is substituted by the generalized, clichéd and hence unproductive recriminations about “concrete destroying our cities”, etc. Despite all this denunciatory rhetoric, the post-war model of development continues to reign to this day (for better or worse), not only through the dominance of the existing products of the 1960s and 1970s but also through the absolute currency of its ‘principles’ (not thought out yet existing) in the way in which we continue to build today.

Any all-round assessment will have to include a study of the way in which other European countries handled the issues of post-war building. The greatest contribution of such comparative approaches is that they would probably draw the debate away from the usual stereotypes. In this respect, the book of Anne Power is a milestone. Her Estates on the Edge is an exemplary comparative study of the current state of twenty ‘mass housing’ complexes in five countries in northern Europe (France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Ireland). The estates under study –among the most challenging places of community living in Europe today– are a very small part of a huge venture after World War II, state-conceived and undertaken, which aimed to solve the housing problems of low-income people in northern Europe in a decent and modern way. These high-rise buildings were built mainly in the 1960s in the best intentions, yet just a couple of decades later they had become synonymous with decline and failure. Today, the conditions in these areas constitute a serious political problem. It is not only that “residents in these estates do not lead a normal life”; the foul living conditions breed a major, dark threat against the normal life of the entire society. In the 1980s, when it was clear that the “long-standing social contract by which the rich gave financial support to the poor in exchange for social peace was no longer valid” (Munchan, 1992), such estates in both England and France became hubs of serious riots and uncontrollable acts of violence.

The author Anne Power is involved in these matters both theoretically, as Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, and in practice as member of committees which influence government decision-making in this field. The book thus talks mainly about the efforts to stop the decline of these housing estates before they become like the ghettos in American cities, those tragic as much as fearsome areas “where not even the police will venture”.

The Greek case

All this vivid historical ‘tour’ of an entire sector of post-war construction in Europe provides to the Greek reader a fertile field for reflection and an alternative way of looking at our own ‘affairs’. Below we shall briefly consider some characteristic points.

For instance, our home-grown wisdom blames the disaster of Greece’s post-war development on ‘anarchic building’. This is an abstract generalization which suggests that if buildings had been made according to some (what?) principles laid down by the state, our cities would have faired better. Yet the case of the northern-European housing estates, which resulted into demonstrable teratogenesis, was a quintessential example of “building according to principles”. Down with principles, then? Certainly not. The religious preservation of the famous British countryside through the designation of extensive green zones around the cities and the preservation and revitalization of historical city centres are two real-life examples of the potentially beneficial effect of state intervention. The conclusion, to go back to the Greek case, is that if we wish to talk about it seriously we must abandon our vague aphorisms and carefully define each concept we use. “To theorise is not the same as stating one’s general views; it is a systematic affair” (Avgoustinos Zenakos, 2002).

From a purely architectural view, the Estates give us one more opportunity for reflection. At the time of their construction, these projects had been hailed as the utter application of Modernism, not in one of its stylistic versions but as the thoroughbred movement of Bauhaus which invested the principles of architecture with a radical social content. The contemporary general and specialist press were full of praise for these modernistic urban developments: “Towers of Democracy”, “shining ocean-liners of progress”, tall buildings whose flat roofs formed the “highways of the skies”, and so on. The decline of the Estates and their resultant social stigmatisation brought down with it society’s views of such buildings. Characteristically, the erection of tall buildings in Britain has practically ceased since the 1970s. But were Modernism and concrete (which was denigrated as the material used in these buildings) the true culprits of this disaster? Of course not. After all, the tall buildings in London’s “good areas” are still much sought after. The point here has is about the limits of ‘pure’ architectural theory: no style of architecture and no method of construction is enough to ‘raise the standards’ of a social group when the more general circumstances and prospects for this group are poor. It is these circumstances which ultimately determine the standard as well as the character of the buildings.

The Estates and the “not – haves”

This last point may also describe the limits of Anne Power’s approach, especially where she examines the possible ways of maintaining the Estates. Could the story of the Estates be the chronicle of an inevitable disaster? That is, did the social design of the Estates incorporate from the outset a ‘ghetto logic’, even in the sense of a well-meant charitable gesture by the state towards the ‘not-haves’? The same line of argument could apply to the current situation: is it possible to deal with the tragic state of the Estate without first examining and debating the grounds for preserving these terrible urban complexes? In other words, can one deal effectively with dismal housing conditions without studying and openly discussing the future prospects in European countries today of the ‘not-haves’, many of whom are economic immigrants? These problems are not confined to the Estates or to distant European states; they are critical points in an inescapable debate about the future of Greek cities as well.

Anne Power

Estates on the Edge. The Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe

Mc Millan Press, pp 420