We are glad to announce the new series of the GUDesign network online seminars entitled Cooperative House-Building Practices in the Aftermath of WWII of the Thematic node Housing People, Shaping Cities.

Co-ordinators: Panayotis Tournikiotis and Konstantina Kalfa

In the aftermath of WWII and during the era of global economic expansion pressing housing demands in Europe and beyond were met by the well-established pre-war policy of housing blocks. Next to these state-led schemes, however, housing was also realized by cooperatives engaged in ad-hoc practices of house-building and real estate exploitation. An indicative example is the case of the Greek postwar city. Rural migrants that vastly increased the Athenian and other Greek cities' population between 1950 and 1970, found themselves transforming the city through a popular contract of exchange of land for new apartments on this land, known as antiparochì. Antiparochì spread the typical modern-inspired mid-rise apartment block, the polykatoikìa, creating a sense of progress, prosperity and modernization, from the level of everyday facilities to the overall image of the city.

GUDesign Seminar ‘Cooperative House-Building Practices in the Aftermath of WWII’ gathers researchers who draw on similar house-building practices, which expand our perception of the possible strands and forms of architectural modernity and the subjects that produce and/or consume it. The Seminar seeks to advance beyond theorizations of historical instances of small-scale enterprise and cooperative house-building practices, idealized as spontaneous and bottom-up approaches to housing or, at the antipode, criticized as failed attempts and incomplete transitions to modernity. It, instead, aspires to develop critical stances toward the framing of such examples of home-making which led to different forms of urbanization. The examination of the administrative, political and economic context and the impact of Cold War politics are here crucial for the understanding and comparative examination of the different cases. Our aim, in this seminar, is to critically revisit and investigate patterns of similarities or map out structural differences between the various cities and countries, and between the various periodizations of history.

For the seminars’ abstracts please see the attachment. For all further details please visit the website: https://gudesign.org/thematic-nodes/housing-people-shaping-cities/

https://www.archetype.gr/housing-people-shaping-cities