Modernist mass housing is one of the twentieth century’s most widespread architectural schemes. Not only in Paris or Chicago, but also in Hong Kong, Mumbai or Brasilia, home for millions of city-dwellers is a modernist apartment block, built under the general aegis of the state, often as part of a vast, systematised development.

In this global building programme, two driving currents in the production of the twentieth-century built environment converged with thunderous force: the tempestuous architectural and ideological utopianism of the Modern Movement, and the wide-ranging increase in state intervention. But beyond this ‘great confluence’ of modernism and the state, mass housing connects us to other themes of twentieth-century architecture, including egalitarian concepts of ‘community life’ and mass culture, and strategies of social-economic-scientific modernisation.

Discussion of these issues has hitherto focused on the well-known, ‘canonical’ policies and interventions of modernism and state power in housing, especially in post-war Europe, North America and the USSR. In this session, by contrast, we seek papers that investigate the wider impact of this ‘great confluence’. Elsewhere in the world, some of these assumed certainties of mass housing in Europe and North America do not hold true – the linkage to left-wing or at any rate welfare-state regimes, the focus on low-income and rental housing as opposed to home-ownership, and the association with standardised or industrialised construction. We invite papers that evaluate these differences, as well as the impact of the trans-national flow of European and North American ideas. Contributors are encouraged to set architectural form in the context of intellectual history. This may include questions of ‘other modernities,’ cross-cultural transmissions and adaptations, architecture as an instrument of power, or the tension between global culture and regional identity.