This panel wants to research who were the residents that inhabited large housing schemes realized by private real estate developers throughout the twentieth century. Were these twentieth-century developers mainly producing a generic residential stock that could sooner or later meet any demand, whether truly residential or speculative in nature – or did they actively imagine that these new estates would foster a sense of ‘community’ beyond the individual household? To what extent did the future community of inhabitants co-determine the project developers’ choices for a specific housing typology and vice versa, both directly and implicitly? This panel tries to shed light on the question what kind of residents or communities real estate developers had in mind when building and selling their projects, ranging from solitary towers as vertical allotments to integrated urban development schemes. In short, what kind of (urban) society was imagined?

Furthermore, we want to investigate how these Middle Class Mass Housing Complexes related to the dominant housing policies in various countries. What role did the public sector play in determining the middle class residents of these complexes? Social housing complexes are characterised by explicit reformist socio-democratic choice towards lower income residents. The access to public housing was typically monitored by the state via various administrative conditions, such as income restrictions. However, a liberal approach of private ownership shaped a community in MCMH which is less explicitly defined and remains under-researched to date. It needs a different theoretical framework and opens up opportunities for a different research approach.

The session is interested in papers that experiment with terminology, concepts and methodological aspects of this ‘Imagined Community of Middle Class Housing’. More specifically, the session would welcome studies ranging from the ‘lived histories’ of inhabitants to ‘oral history research’ of personnel of development firms, in search of the the realities that where both produced and constructed by these housing developers.