Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.ru7rfu>
Abstract
The choice of a collective type of housing imposes itself on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the « Glorious Thirties ». This choice, and the rejection of individual houses in the GDR are often viewed as the enforcement of an egalitarian political ideology, i.e. a project of social and political engineering. Now, when one focuses on the housing experts, on the social practices and on the perception of the necessities of the economy, one can understand why two very different economic and political systems resort to building relatively similar forms of housing, and also how the status of the individual house evolves in the GDR. This latter is regarded and experienced until the construction of the Berlin Wall as a premium for the holders of some valuable economic competence in order to entice them not to emigrate, becomes politically disqualified during a decade and finally will be ‘rehabilitated’ in the 1970s and 1980s when « self-construction » will be identified as a deposit of resources to be tapped.