38 CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 There are three world heritage sites in Berlin. You might expect to find, first, Museum Island and, second, the Palaces of Potsdam and Berlin, on the list. You might be more surprised by the third site – Berlin Modernism Housing Estates, six housing estates constructed between 1910 and 1933, principally from the period of the Weimar Republic. They are claimed to testify to innovative housing policies in a period when the city of Berlin was particularly progressive socially, politically and culturally. Together they ‘contributed to improving housing and living conditions for people with low incomes through novel approaches to town planning, architecture and garden design’, providing ‘exceptional examples of new urban and architectural typologies’, which ‘exercised considerable influence on the development of housing around the world.’ The heritage of social housing seems particularly important at a time of crisis in the availability of affordable, decent housing in many countries. From a British perspective, 20th-century social housing before 1979 – and the election of the Thatcher government, which heralded a radical break from postwar consensus politics – speaks to a period when there was a widely held political aspiration to provide decent housing for all. While the results were mixed, the best examples, now often given heritage status, show a scale of The last block of Robin Hood Gardens in 2024, awaiting demolition. JOHN PENDLEBURY Defending the legacies of the welfare state The fact that 20th-century welfare-state housing, often demonised, has increasingly been valorised as heritage may have wider political relevance at a time of housing crisis. A block by Walter Gropius for Interbau, Hansaviertel
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