Housing Standards 2004/2005
Financing Housing and Refurbishing Housing Estates

5. The Refurbishment of Housing Estates in EU Countries

Chapter five presents the history of European prefabricated housing estates, which, as mentioned in the introduction, "were not a communist invention, despite the fact that many people believe otherwise". Among the points mentioned is the key role that the Swiss architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, otherwise known as Le Corbusier, played in their development. He and many other architects and urban planners, advocates of so-called architectural modernism, believed in their day that architecture played a deeper social role and had the capacity to change society itself by means of architectural form and urban planning. Their ideas were realized after the Second World War, when countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain invested massively into the construction of housing in multi-dwelling buildings (the majority of which later began to be built using the technology of prefabricated sections). Some time after the initiation of mass housing construction using "industrial methods", however, a number of unexpected problems began to surface. One problem was the actual quality of the construction complex itself, which could not satisfy the requirements of its inhabitants, and especially it became evident that some of the cautionary predictions made by critics of architectural modernism were coming true. In the interwar period, critics had already begun pointing out that high-rise buildings with numerous dwellings form create physical barriers between people, and the physical distance between the dwelling units and the outdoor environment set aside for children's play complicates communication between mothers and children. Ensuing developments in Eastern and Western Europe then diverged. In Western European housing estates a process of social marginalisation set in, which involved the concentration of the unemployed and families with social problems in this housing, a rise in criminality and drug dependency, and increases in all the associated negative effects. Conversely, in the countries of Eastern Europe, the spirit of functionalism survived up until the fall of the communist regimes at the end of the 1980s, and housing estates became a standard form of housing for the "middle classes" of the population, maintaining its social heterogeneity and, but for some exceptions, escaping the process of social marginalisation.

This historical excursion is followed by descriptions of different programmes for the refurbishment of prefabricated housing estates in Western European countries - France, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands - and in selected Eastern European countries - Slovakia and Estonia. This chapter then proceeds to look at the general criteria of efficiency and effectiveness in the refurbishment process of prefabricated housing estates. As demonstrated on specific examples from selected Western European countries, efficiency (social targeting) usually involves the "concentration of financial resources in a limited number of refurbishment projects aimed at effectuating complex and deep changes to certain areas within a limited scope of space". In this sense targeting usually means also concentrating on the refurbishment of the worst affected housing estates. An important feature of the refurbishment processes in advanced countries, which is intended to contribute to their efficiency, is the participation of the inhabitants themselves in the refurbishment of their housing estates. Their participation in the refurbishment process can take an entire range of different forms and is usually arranged by means various methods, and it fulfils a number of functions, and these are mentioned in the text. In connection with the efficiency of refurbishment projects in the economic sense of the word (Pareto's concept of efficiency) mention is made of the multiple sources of financing refurbishment projects in advanced countries, the presence of control mechanisms for the use of public resources, and the ex-post evaluation of the efficient use of the invested resources by independent institutions directly at the request of the subsidy provider. The chapter concludes by presenting examples of two complex refurbishment projects for prefabricated housing estates - the Bijlmeer housing estate in Amsterdam and the Ballymun housing estate in Dublin.

Owing to the limited amount of space in this text, more detailed conclusions from the chapter devoted to the issue of the refurbishment of housing estates in the countries of the EU will not be presented here.