The Housing Question

Aglomerado de Serra, Belo Horizonte

With one and half billion people, about fifteen percent of the world’s population living in precarious urban conditions, addressing the housing crisis should be at the top of the global political agenda. Of course, governments and philanthropic organisations make grand rhetorical gestures to this effect. But resolving such profound socio-spatial inequalities, is largely inconceivable as long as urban development is dominated by unregulated land speculation and the construction industry by capitalist contractors for whom company profits will always take precedence over long term social value. Which is how last week, in a totally unexpected trip down memory lane, I  found myself giving a presentation on the history of the Soviet construction industry as part of a seminar on prefabrication in Brasil, (Pré-fabricação na construção: da genealogia à economia política.)  It was odd to trawl through notes and essays written over the last thirty years about the history of the Soviet Avant Garde, Stalin’s monumental building programme,  and what was the most significant chapter in the modern history of the Soviet city that followed the 1955 decision to industrialise the construction industry. The mass production of prefabricated concrete was considered the only viable solution to the acute housing crisis and within the space of a few years the first generation of five storey prefabricated apartment blocks, the piati estashniye, rolled off the production line. From Minsk to Vladivostok the face of the Soviet city was irrevocably transformed and for the next thirty years the construction industry remained structured around factory prefabrication. By 1989, 90 percent of all new housing in Moscow was built out of concrete panels. There were two principal mechanisms for transforming the construction industry, the five-year plans that set targets for all aspects of building production, and the House Building Combines, Domo-Stroitelniyi Kombinati, DSK, that united construction workers, architects, and engineers in a single organisation. It was a comprehensive programme that whatever its faults, and there were many, radically improved the living conditions of the vast majority of the population. What lessons though does the Soviet experience have for Brasil and other countries in the global south? First, that a generalised qualitative and quantitative transformation in housing conditions is impossible without the socialisation of land and the means of building production either through state organs, or for example, decentralised networks of cooperatives. Second, it requires a system of national social and economic planning. And third, massive investment in modern forms of prefabrication that use all the possibilities opened up by digital production techniques and innovations in timber, lightweight steel and hybrid building systems. Several contributors to the seminar went to great lengths to point out that contrary to popular belief, the Brasilian construction industry is highly industrialised and its history is littered with experiments in pre-fabrication. In other words, the knowledge exists, the technology exists, but what is absent is the political imagination and commitment to make it happen. We face an impasse. The idea of a sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron, so is the idea that a building industry and housing sector dominated by myths of free markets can offer a solution to the environmental and social challenges that we collectively face. The implications of this are clear…