With millions made homeless by the bombings of the Second World War, the focus of the West German authorities in the immediate postwar years was on physical reconstruction and the expedited production of large amounts of flats. Indeed, in the laws of the immediate postwar era that established subsidized social housing as a cross-party consensus and paved the way for the great housing drive of the 1950s and 1960s “the social” took a backseat. Housing was mostly designed following the functionalist principles of the interwar years and promised light, air, greenery and efficient traffic, but community qualities were taken for granted rather than specified or discussed.
It was not until the 1960s that architects and planners began to debate social concerns of the new housing estates. This happened as a reaction to the criticism of modernist design by observers outside the architectural or planning professions, including economist Edgar Salin’s Urbanität (Urbanity, 1960), sociologist Hans-Paul Bahrdt’s Die moderne Großstadt (The Modern Metropolis, 1961), journalist Wolf-Jobst Siedler’s and photographer Elisabeth Niggemeyer’s Die gemordete Stadt (The Murdered City, 1964), or psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich’s Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Inhospitability of our Cities, 1965).
This chapter will trace the evolution of the social housing discourse in the postwar period and its manifestation in built form, from the principle of “urbanity through density” that in the 1960s influenced some of West Germany’s largest housing estates to the ideals of small scale, diversity and participation in the 1980s and 1990s which, somewhat paradoxically, went along with the gradual disappearance of social housing.