Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Ideologies through Space
- 2 Municipal Socialism and Housing in Red Vienna (1919–1934)
- 3 Short-Lived Great Berlin : Tabula Rasa and the Reinvention of Nature (1945–1949)
- 4 Divided City I: East Berlin and the Construction of Socialism (1949–1970)
- 5 Divided City II: West Berlin and the Reconstruction of Liberalism (1949–1970)
- 6 Conclusion and Postcards from the Past
- References
- Index
6 - Conclusion and Postcards from the Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2023
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Making and Remaking of Ideologies through Space
- 2 Municipal Socialism and Housing in Red Vienna (1919–1934)
- 3 Short-Lived Great Berlin : Tabula Rasa and the Reinvention of Nature (1945–1949)
- 4 Divided City I: East Berlin and the Construction of Socialism (1949–1970)
- 5 Divided City II: West Berlin and the Reconstruction of Liberalism (1949–1970)
- 6 Conclusion and Postcards from the Past
- References
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The conclusion summarizes the main findings and establishes a relationship with the present, in which the housing question as a key social question makes a prominent return – especially in Berlin, but also in Vienna. Instead of concluding with ‘lessons’ from history, which the author doubts that the past provides, the book concludes with Benjamin-inspired, postcard-like messages from the past whose purpose is to trigger reflection on the present. What are the scopes and limits of state and market-based approaches to housing? How private is the unbroken dream of the privately owned, single family home? How emancipatory is community-driven self-provision of housing? How can we account for the unbroken relevance of what a non-sexist city and dwelling may be like?
Keywords: return of the housing question, state- and market-based approaches to housing, community-based self-provision, non-sexist city
The relationship between political ideologies and the production of space was the key focus of this book. It involved taking a closer look at competing promises of a new society to come – socialist and liberal ones – and their actualization, contestation, and subversion through the ‘politics of dwelling’. ‘The residential is political’ argue Madden and Marcuse in (2016, p. 1) – a way of thinking about a key everyday space that this book not only endorses but refines: the residential is a key site for making and remaking (sets of) political beliefs and thus a battleground for political ideas that is as useful in understanding the history of ideas as the more commonly studied ‘great books’ of ‘great thinkers’ (Freeden 2006, p. 8–9). Whereas the history of ideas traces and reconstructs concepts by the study of texts, the socio-material history of ideas that was pursued in this book looks at what becomes of ideas when they ‘hit’ space and what becomes of spaces when they are ‘hit’ by political beliefs.
Political ideologies, as one core message of this book suggests, are never simply inscribed into space but are instead made and remade, negotiated, and subverted in space. The second core message of this book is that the residential was and continues to be a profoundly political question that involves norms and ideals of citizenship, property relations, gender, and family life, as well as norms and ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rebuilding Cities and CitizensMass Housing in Red Vienna and Cold War Berlin, pp. 163 - 178Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023