CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 39 INFRASTRUCTURE A housing block in Siemensstadt by Hugo Häring, one of the estates forming the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates World Heritage Site. ambition, generosity and social priority that is difficult to imagine in the contemporary world. In England the postwar listing programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases examples of such buildings are being formally protected as heritage. This opens up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued in contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today? The potential consequences of heritage protection for social housing – and its potential to contribute to more progressive urban outcomes – was the focus of my fellowship in 2025. The aim was to extend the work we have undertaken in England to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare-state architecture and its subsequent political positioning would show elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany are the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. My first task, focusing on Berlin, was to understand something of the history and heritage status of the city’s social housing. While Berlin’s history of innovation in social housing came to an abrupt stop under national socialism, it returned with force in both Berlins in the 1950s. In West Berlin, this was exemplified by an international competition for the Hansa Quarter. The International Building Exhibition (Interbau) of 1957 includes social housing blocks by eminent German architects, including the returning Walter Gropius, and international figures such as Arne Jacobsen, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, although perhaps the most famous consequence of the exhibition was built elsewhere – the Le Corbusier reworking of the Unite d’Habitation. The counterpoint in the east, with an equal level of ambition but very different architectural approach, was the monumental series of blocks aligned along Stalinallee (now Karl Marx Allee), influenced by socialist urbanism and classicism. The combined innovation of new social housing methods and typologies from east and west has led to unsuccessful attempts include them on Germany’s tentative list of future world heritage sites. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the large-scale construction of social housing continued in new forms in both territories until the wall’s fall in 1989. In part this took the form of large-scale peripheral estates. In the west these were pushed out to the south (Gropiusstadt), the west (Falkenhagener Feld) and, most monumentally, to the north (Märkisches Viertel). In the east the later peripheral estates were grouped around the areas of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Hohenschönhausen. Although not yet generally defined as heritage, a few buildings in these estates have been given monument status. Alongside the construction of peripheral estates there were also redevelopment efforts to social housing in the inner city. The best known of these is another International Building Exhibition (IBA) which ran in West Berlin during the 1980s, using the concepts of ‘careful urban renewal’ and ‘critical reconstruction’. International celebrity architects on this occasion included Rob Krier, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi, representing a distinct postmodern turn. Some of these works now have heritage status. Although German reunification and, in the case of Berlin, the stitching back together of a divided city are to be celebrated, reunification led to the cessation of significant social housing building programmes in Berlin, albeit a decade later than with the conservative, neoliberal political turn in the UK. The reasons for this are not simple, but initially housing demand was
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