Post-War Middle-Class Housing. Models, Construction and Change
Edited by Gaia Caramellino and Federico Zanfi
Bern, Peter Lang, 2015

Essays by: Eveline Althaus, Anahi Ballent, Wouter Bervoets, Gaia Caramellino, Filippo De Pieri, Els De Vos, Lionel Engrand, Débora Félix, Filipa Fiúza, Marie Antoinette Glaser, Chiara Ingrosso, Jonathan Massey, Luca Molinari, Daniel Rincón De La Vega, Susanne Schindler, Matthew Soules, Juliette Spertus, Ioanna Theocharopoulou, Marijn van de Weijer, Marieke van Roij, Ana Vaz Milheiro, Rogério Vieira de Almeida, Federico Zanfi.


Stefano Graziani, Milan, 2012
Post-war middle-class housing played a key role in constructing and transforming the cities of Europe and America, deeply impacting today’s urban landscape. And yet, this stock has been underrepresented in a literature mostly focused on public housing and the work of a few master architects.
This book is the first attempt to explore such housing from an international perspective. It provides a comparative insight into the processes of construction, occupation and transformation of residential architecture built for the middle-classes in 12 different countries between the 1950s and 1970s. It investigates the role of models, actors and policies that shaped the middle-class city, tracing geographies, chronologies and forms of development that often cross national frontiers.
This study is particularly relevant today within the context of «fragilization» which affects the middle-classes, challenging, as it does, the urban role played by this residential heritage in the light of technological obsolescence, trends in patterns of homeownership, as well as social and generational changes.

This book was conceived and realized within the research project “Architectures for the Middle-Class in Italy, 1950s–1970s”, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research through the “Firb-Future in research” programme. The website of the research project is here.