The architect Le Corbusier had a dream so dramatic and forceful that it influenced far too many people, including those responsible for constructing a wave of North American public housing.
Too bad that Le Corbusier’s vision of apartments towering high above vast green spaces didn’t really reflect what actual people needed from their recreational space. Among its perceived failings, those public spaces were uncomfortably overlooked by hundreds upon hundreds of anonymous windows. In U.S public housing, more brazen souls learned to take advantage of these spaces, sometimes in the service of criminal drug culture.
By contrast, a Soviet necessity to rebuild following WWII included the same high-rise solution. But Le Courbusier’s green spaces between the high rises were missing in the glut of Soviet ‘public’ housing that was essential to recover from wartime housing damage.
Was the ‘un-Le Courbusier’ Soviet solution fit for purpose?
A highly biased view from the west gorged with anti-communist Cold War propaganda, picked apart as ‘soul destroying’ the grey concrete high-rises so essential to the Soviet housing recovery. However, western critics neglected to note or mention that there was a conscious effort by Soviet communist planners to site these structures in neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods designed multi-use spaces were deemed essential to provide local community resources that are so lamentably missing in North American public housing neighbourhoods today.
New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has made a public argument for deliberately shrinking the mis-imagined green space between existing public housing projects. Her solution? More public housing.
Affordablehousingaction.org is hardly in a position to complain about the provision of more public housing — given than no other alternative proposal seems to be effective in digging much of the world out of an ever-deepening housing crisis.
But if this poorly utilized green space is to be developed in a valuable way, is more public housing the best solution?
Howard Husock, writing for The American Enterprise Institute, thinks not. Hardly surprising that a right-leaning think tank, while supporting the ‘de-greening’ of Le Courbusier’s wide open spaces, does not favour Adrienne Adams’ vision of ‘more public housing.’
Instead Husock is leaning towards using these spaces to create more robust and dynamic neighbourhoods. It seems that the American Enterprise Institute, after more than 75 years, is playing catch-up with Soviet neighbourhood planning objectives! Needless to say, however, Husock’s neighbourhood is well larded with home ownership and free enterprise business opportunities.
Still and all, his proposal does offer a view on the integration of public housing into more successful neighbourhoods as an alternative to further saturating a historically unsuccessful public housing monoculture with more of the same.
Read more at the AEI: Banishing Le Corbusier’s Ghost
Postscript: A recent post touches on some of these issues in a European context and in particular, with a green perspective. Can aging high-rises offer important climate-change-green advantages if Soviet era public housing is preserved? Its repetitious and often modular construction can, it is proposed, more easily and economically modified to satisfy climate change requirements.
A further irony: in former Soviet client states (Poland, for example), former public housing is now privately owned, apartment-by-apartment. It makes for a nightmare of negotiations to refurbish the conveniently cookie-cutter older high-rises Try: Why North American Public Housing Might Be Too Valuable To Tear Down
Post postscript: In Canada, Toronto also has large public housing sites that were built in the Le Corbusier style. Two have recently been replaced with mixed income housing. Each of the rent geared to income homes that was demolished has been replaced with new homes that have deeply affordable rents. The redeveloped sites now also have streets that connect them with the city’s grid street pattern that Husock admires. Toronto’s example is an opportunity to understand how developing mixed income housing on pubic housing sites works out in real life. Try: Strategies That Erode Housing Security: Part I – Social Mix
