Lecture #6 | Miles GLENDINNING | a modern vernacular? mass housing as a place-specific global and local heritage
This lecture, based on Miles’s research for his recent book, Mass Housing – Modern Architecture and State Power, a Global History, and for his upcoming history of public housing in Hong Kong, explores the potential of the heritage of state-sponsored mass housing as an unexpected expression of local collective cultural identity and community solidarity, in contrast to the traditional preconception of mass housing as alienating, homogenous, and ‘the same everywhere’. The lecture begins with a historical overview of the very diverse ways in which mass housing programmes originally sprang up in different locations, both within Europe and beyond, exploring this diversity through a number of specific case studies. It continues by discussing how this surviving heritage is often now becoming intertwined with community resistance struggles against housing regeneration, privatisation and low-income displacement, including case studies from Scotland of campaigns to preserve public housing ‘tower blocks’ from demolition.
Miles Glendinning is Director of the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies and Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has published extensively on modernist and contemporary architecture and housing, and on Scottish historic architecture: his books include the award-winning Tower Block (with Stefan Muthesius), The Conservation Movement, and Mass Housing – Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History (Bloomsbury, 2021). Other planned books include a history of public housing in Hong Kong (Routledge; likely publication 2024) and a history of postwar housing in London.
Organised and funded by Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and Brussels Academy.