Necessity the mother of indifference? A far cry from the period following World War II, when necessity was very much the mother of amazing invention as countries rebuilt housing following devastating wartime destruction.
Much of that truly remarkable innovation occurred in socialist-leaning countries. In the generally acknowledged centre of the universe — America — the biggest necessity was to build housing to reward returning soldiers with a little house of their own. So long as they weren’t Black1.
Indeed, following WWII, necessity across North America was never about housing. Instead, it was a growing and hysterical propagandizing against those soviet bloc and soviet influenced countries that comprised the Red Menace threat to American-dominated world order.
Out with the bathwater went the baby, in this case the birth, development and perfection of modular housing, which was the engine of rapid housing recovery elsewhere in the world.
A fascinating article by housing historian Anna Kats gets sidetracked right off the top with a good old socialist sneer at America’s perennially bad attitude towards the amazing modular housing success that rebuilt the USSR’s homes.
She needn’t have bothered. As a pre-baby boomer with a long history of being inundated by American propaganda about the Red Menace, Kats’s “everyone knows how badly America regarded Soviet invention” falls upon this author’s deaf ears, or perhaps his fading memory.
With modern North American socialists these days being young and curious, her jargon-filled putdown of USSR achievement was entirely unnecessary, even as it sacrifices Soviet housing — remarkable in its own right — on the altar of her own cherished baby.
That is/was the remarkable development of Yugoslavian modular home-building, which three-quarters of a century ago, achieved and promulgated affordable housing success that we are barely beginning re-discover today.
Don’t be put off by her opening, the heart of this article is truly fascinating. Read more in Jacobin: In Socialist Yugoslavia, Mass Housing Wasn’t Just Ugly Tower Blocks
There’s also a catalogue of the housing built in Yugoslavia at the Institut IMS Beograd, which includes floor plans and photographs: Male Kuće
Footnotes
- For more about this, see: A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America
