Els De Vos

Public parks in Ghent's City life: From expression to emancipation?

Abstract With three empirically based and theoretically framed case studies, this paper contributes to the understanding of how public spaces, more specifically urban parks, can mediate between different subgroups of society, such as women, seniors, gays and skaters, and how gender related connotations play an important role in these respects. This study draws upon a comparative analysis of three parks in Ghent, Belgium. The elements of analysis are the physical morphology, history, signification and the use by different kinds of park visitors. The article shows a new approach to design of public spaces.

Living with High-Rise Modernity: The Modernist Kiel Housing Estate of Renaat Braem, A Catalyst to a Socialist Modern Way of Life?

ABSTRACT Public housing of the reconstruction period is generally considered a poor imitation of the modernist housing of the interwar period. The pressing housing shortage and the urge for rapid reconstruction initiated the rationalization of the construction process. Still, postwar housing production has often been blamed for having turned into a purely technocratic and pragmatic undertaking and for having lost the leftist ideals in which the modernism of the Modern Movement was engrained—providing all people with decent housing. Complaints of drabness, disorientation, inhuman vastness, isolation, and monotony have been raised. For many protagonists in the housing debate, high-rise projects have been consistently perceived as being maladjusted for families with children. However, does all postwar housing fit that picture? Was life in a high-rise apartment really that harmful for families with children? What did those kinds of buildings do to their inhabitants? By means of a Belgian case study—the modernist, well-promoted high-rise public housing blocks of the avant-gardist Renaat Braem at the Kiel Estate—the article questions this picture. Going from the macro-scale of Belgian postwar housing policy to the micro-level of the home of two occupants of Braems apartments, I reveal the interactions and tensions between the opinion of some politicians, design discourses, the architecture of the building, and the living practice of the inhabitants.ABSTRACTPublic housing of the reconstruction period is generally considered a poor imitation of the modernist housing of the interwar period. The pressing housing shortage and the urge for rapid reconstruction initiated the rationalization of the construction process. Still, postwar housing production has often been blamed for having turned into a purely technocratic and pragmatic undertaking and for having lost the leftist ideals in which the modernism of the Modern Movement was engrained—providing all people with decent housing. Complaints of drabness, disorientation, inhuman vastness, isolation, and monotony have been raised. For many protagonists in the housing debate, high-rise projects have been consistently perceived as being maladjusted for families with children. However, does all postwar housing fit that picture? Was life in a high-rise apartment really that harmful for families with children? What did those kinds of buildings do to their inhabitants? By means of a Belgian case study—the moderni...

Trams or tailfins? Public and Private prosperity in postwar West Germany and the United States

De Vos reviews Trams or Trailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States by Jan L. Logemann

Socialist Housing in the Eastern Bloc: Lynne Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity

Since the archives from the communist period have been thrown open, eastern Europe’s experience of the cold war has received a lot of scholarly attention. At the same time, postwar housing in the whole of Europe, as well as in America and Canada, has become a point of particular interest because the home played such an essential role during the impoverished postwar period, for citizens as well as for policymakers.1 Thus, there have been a number of studies, from several disciplinary angles, on postwar housing in the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States.2 The same is true for studies on housing in the Eastern Bloc. In An Archaeology of Socialism (2000), anthropologist Victor Buchli studied the successive home cultures in the famous Narkomfin Communal House, designed by the constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg and engineer Ignatii Milinis and built in Moscow in 1930 for the workers of the People’s Commissariat of Finance. Similarly, architectural historian Greg Castillo showed in his marvelous book ColdWar on

Uncanny and In-Between: The Garage in Rural and Suburban Belgian Flanders

Starting in the 1950s, postwar Belgian Flanders was a site of emerging and complex relationships among the car, garage, house, street and users. This article explores the shifting meanings of the garage in connection with the concepts of “domestication” and “domesticity.” We question how the garage, as a newly configured spatial entity separated from or integrated within the home, is indicative of the gradual domestication of the automobile, and how its gendered use and meaning are co-productive with ongoing investments in domesticity. Studying the garage as a means to domesticate the automobile sheds light on many social and cultural aspects of recent history: the shift from rural to suburban lifestyles; upward social mobility; the transformation from the car and the garage as typically masculine areas to their appropriation by other family members; and the complicated ways in which the car itself modified house design.

Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (review)

220 ity of young women. He provides considerable detail about the planes and the technologies used to fly them. But this is more a book for the general reader than the advanced scholar. While the details of aviation history and technology provide a fascinating backdrop to the world of girls’ fiction, it’s unclear if the author opens new avenues in those fields. Rather, his strength is in exploring the intersections of gendered culture and aviation, helping to illuminate the role of technology in shaping gender. It brings together many apparently disparate concerns and so provides a fascinating angle to think about young women and technology in American culture.