The New Socialist Man in the Plattenbau: The East German Housing Program and the Development of the Socialist Way of Life

This article argues that the importance of housing and the urban environment in East Germany in the second half of its existence grew in tandem with a new vision of socialist society and the means that the state should employ to create it. The East German Housing Program, inaugurated in 1971, made space the primary category in which individual and social transformation was envisioned, replacing the pedagogical processes that had originally stood at its heart. In doing so, architects and urban planners drew on three strands of urban planning that have often been seen in conflict in other contexts: the Soviet concept of the Mikroraion or socialist neighborhood, the modernist housing ensemble of Le Corbusier, and the new urbanism of Jane Jacobs

Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965–1989

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s. Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, I argue that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War