TY  - GEN
AU  - Urban, Florian 
TI  - Tower and slab: histories of global mass housing
SN  - 9780415676298
U1  - 363.5 
PY  - 2012///
CY  - London
PB  - Routledge
N2  - Contents
Acknowledgments	ix
Preface by Mark Jarzombek                                                  xi                       
Introduction	1
Mass housing—between glory and shame    1
 Continuous principles: paternalism and standardization    2
 Seven historical narratives    4
Chapter 1:   Social Reform, State Control, and the Origins of
Mass Housing	7
Housing and the social question    7 
The origins of industrialized construction    8 
The modernist movement in the interwar period: the first mass housing developments in Germany, France, and England    10 
The post-war era: mass housing goes global    13
Chapter 2:   Mass Housing in Chicago	19
Anti-high-rise America    19
Tower blocks in the Black Belt    22
Equal dwelling conditions in a market economy    24
"Brutal buildings"    28
New York exceptionalism    31	
Replacing towers with pitched-roof houses    32
Exorcising the spirits of the past    35
Chapter 3:   The Concrete Cordon Around Paris	37
Victims of modernism?    37	Charity and control    41
Building a concrete cordon    44	
Sarcellitis: the mass housing disease    49
Improving the grands ensembles?    51
Cite de la Muette: mass housing and mass murder    53 
Mass housing and the geography of exclusion    55
Chapter 4:   Slabs versus Tenements in East and West Berlin	59
Battles over buildings    59
Organic concrete blocks    60	i
Fall from public grace    64
The "murdered city"    65
Blurred party lines    66
The "slab" in East Berlin    68
Demonic tower blocks, homely late-nineteenth-century
tenements    72
Reconfiguring old and new    73 
Ghettos for immigrants?    75 
The calm after the storm    76
ChapterS:   Brasilia, the Slab Block Capital	79
Order and progress: a new metropolis as a condenser for
modernization    79 
The superquadra    81
Egalitarian dreams in a polarized country    86 
"City of Hope" and modernist dystopia    88 
The "tower in the jungle"    91
 Pilot plan versus satellite cities?    92 
An architectural comeback?    98
Chapter 6:   Mumbai—Mass Housing for the Upper Crust	101
The tower and the slum    101
A metropolis on seven islands    105
Colonial precedents: the chawl and the apartment block    106
From independence to neoliberalism: housing in a mixed
economy    108
1993-present: the state as facilitator of housing    112 
"High-rise slums for the rich": the Back Bay land
reclamation    117
Why is there no prefabrication in India? 119 
Alternative approaches: sites and services 121 
Standardized upscale dwellings 123
Chapter 7:   Prefab Moscow	127
The industrialization of the Soviet construction industry    127
 Oxygen for the housing market    134 
Stratifications of a socialist metropolis    135




Privatization and differentiation    139
 Panel buildings in Russia today    141
ChapterS:   High-Rise Shanghai	145
The Shanghai skyline    145
The 1950s: standard design, individual construction    148
Modernist "new villages"    149
Prefab experiments    153
Structural reform: privatization and polarization    154
High-rise apartments for the privileged and for the masses    158
Tower block compounds versus historic alleys?    160
Shanghai: future capital of tower block housing?    165
Chapter 9:   Global Architecture, Locally Conditoned	169
Adapting the mass housing block to local conditions    169 
Ambiguous effects, contextual perception    172
 Flexible meaning, inflexible architecture    174
Interview Partners	177
Notes	179
Index	206

	

ER  -