Shaping Collective Life in Twentieth Century Belgian Social Housing

Abstract During the twentieth-century the rise of social housing programs triggered two specific architectural transformations: firstly, the process of rationalization of the domestic realm; secondly, the integration of residential units with open spaces, civic buildings and services. The latter became central to spatially structure the relation between autonomous individual living patterns, the social needs of everyday life and the political/ideological implications of this relation. The paper discusses the transformation of social housing projects in Belgium during the twentieth-century focusing on two cases, the garden settlements in the 1920s and the Modernist neighborhood units of the 1950s and 1960s, where the question of collective life became central. Acknowledging the opposition between “community” and the “social” throughout modernity, the paper interrogates how these cases attempted to reconfigure urban and architectural principles in light of the shifting value of collectivity in housing.