New Tenements – Architecture for Urban Cohesion? [paper], Tenements, Tower Blocks and Collective Life [panel title]

I organise a panel, and I present a paper on this panel. Paper abstract: The drive for “new tenements” - dense medium-rise residences in the inner city that were built in many European countries since the 1970s - was accompanied by claims that these buildings would foster social cohesion, civic engagement, and participatory action that was allegedly absent in modernist tower blocks. My paper will analyse the discourse connected to these residences, as well as to the ideal of a dense, multifunctional, and socially integrative city that is connected to it. Based on examples in Glasgow, and Berlin it will show how the alleged civic value of inner-city residences was the product of the socio-political conditions in the 1970s and became subject to rapid change. While new tenements were first tied to the ideal of a collectivist life enabled by a benevolent welfare state, they were later seen as the architecture of neo-liberalism, connected to the idea of a competitive, socially and economically successful individual