In Vienna after WWI and Berlin after WWII, the provision of mass housing not only was a response to a dire social need but also served as a key lever for building variants of socialism and liberalism. Zooming into the interplay between political ideologies and the production of space, this book shows that ideologies, understood as political beliefs that underpin everyday life, are never simply ‘written’ into space but that their meaning is made and re-made, negotiated and contested, and sometimes cunningly subverted in and through space.

How people live was – and continues to be – a profoundly political question that involves negotiations of, and decisions on, norms and ideals of citizenship, freedom, equality, property, democracy, gender, and family life – negotiations and decisions that come with legacies that shape the present. What these legacies are in light of the current return of the housing question as a social and ecological question will be the focus of the presentation.

Margaret Haderer holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. Currently, she works at TU Wien at the Institute of Spatial Planning. The politics underpinning the built environment as well as the latter’s transformation towards greater sustainability are her two key research foci.

Sponsored by: Department of Politics Seminar Series Graduate Diploma in European Studies The City Institute at York University.