RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

The very term ‘social housing’ is a floating signifier that is often confused with affordable, state-driven, and cooperative housing. Its lack of clarity has prompted both a rich critical literature, and a fundamental mistrust from both the general public and architect alike, especially after the demise of the welfare state. This research aims at redefining social housing as ‘housing not for speculation, and removed from the market’. Following this definition, it traces a genealogy of case-studies that exceed the agency of the modern nation-state, showing how early cases of philanthropy and cooperation—from Waqf in Egypt to the Venetian Scuole Grandi—put forward forms of non-commodified housing in very different contexts. While the topic of social housing is an enduringly popular one in architectural literature, the tunnel-vision attitude of contemporary historiography is to focus exclusively on the XXth century, while this essay attempts a recasting of the very terms at play that allows a much deeper historical long durée reading.

The research shows the ambivalent nature of social housing—both paternalistic exercise, and genuine attempt to cater to the population—arguing for the possibility of non-commodified housing to find a place even in the conflictual landscape of the contemporary western city. Its methodology combines typological close-reading—including the extensive redrawing of case-studies—with a political critique of the actants at play, arguing that it is impossible to separate spatial organisation from the social ambition that drove any project of non-commodified housing. Its key innovation consists in the enlargement of the historical and geographical scope of traditional historiography on social housing—a broadening that also allows a reframing of the very concept of social housing.