Mass Housing

<p><b>Shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2021 (The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain)<br></b><br><b>It will become the standard work on the subject. <i>Literary Review</i></b> <p/>This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing - high-rise low-rise state-funded and built in the modernist style - became a truly global phenomenon leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic 21st-century renaissance in the booming crowded cities of East Asia. <p/>Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social political cultural aspects of mass housing - particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. <p/>Exploring the relationship between built form ideology and political intervention it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA Soviet Union and a network of international outposts to its ultimate optimistic resurgence in China and the East - where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing or another 'great housing failure' in the making?</p>