DETAIL 4.2018

From the editorial 4.2018

Affordable Housing and Its Qualities

Scarcely a week goes by without some new headline appearing about the disaster on the housing market. Alone in Germany, roughly a million more homes are needed today. Of the four million social dwellings that still existed at the end of the 1980s, only one and a quarter million are left nowadays. In many cases, affordable housing space is hardly to be found, and accommodation in many towns and cities is more expensive than ever. In Berlin, for example, rents have risen by 80 per cent over the past 14 years. Purchase prices for property – and not least those for housing – have risen to astronomical levels. In London, Paris and other metropolises, new record sums are registered every month. Housing has become a field of speculation for investors with great prospects for profit. What has happened over recent decades? Where is the enthusiasm with which politicians and architects implemented extensive developments in the 1960s and 70s like the Märkisches Viertel or the Gropiusstadt – both planned as new homes for 50,000 Berlin citizens? Why has the state largely withdrawn from the social housing field, and why are so many local authorities neglecting their responsibilities to provide sufficient affordable living space? In the current, April journal, we have addressed these and other ticklish questions. With the present issue of DETAIL we wish to show economical forms of housing and illustrate the fact that, despite the plight of the housing market, there are positive trends as well — with solutions that point a way to the future for urban planning and promotion and the architectural qualities of affordable living space. For precisely these qualities are ignored or neglected in times of exploding rents.