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The Swedish Social Services Act (SFS 2001:453) stipulates since 1982 that the municipal Social Committee should become well acquainted with the living conditions in the municipality. They should also participate in urban planning, and in cooperation with other public bodies, organizations, associations and individuals promote good living environments in the municipality. The development, planning and design of good living environments for older people is an endeavour of great complexity that demands collaboration between many actors. Housing and care for older people is an important area in which social servicesand urban planning could benefit from collaboration. Planning for older people has recently been indicated as urgent and necessary, especially in the light of changed demography in which the proportion of older people is increasing. A built environment that accommodates older people’s everyday needs embraces issues such as age-friendliness, care, socio-spatial inequality, inclusion, and innovation. This research program, CollAge, investigates cross-sectoral collaboration in Swedish municipalities between social eldercare, urban planning and Senior Citizens’ Councils as regards housing and care. With diverse qualitative methodologies the multidisciplinary team of scholars in social work, architecture and urban planning  explore how eldercare interventions and services are managed and understood in municipal urban planning and development, and how older people’s preferences can contribute to improved quality of care in social services and housing provision.  The ultimate aim of the programme is to develop a methodological tool – CollAge – to support, facilitate and structure collaboration between the three actors.

The Neighbourhood Unit of El Taray (Segovia, 1962-1964) was commissioned by the Cooperative Pius XII for an sloped site on the north-east edge of the citadel of Segovia. Given its fragmented layout around collective spaces as well as the way it makes use of aerial connections and galleries, the complex has been typically linked with the British Neobrutalism and the experiences of Team 10. However, beyond its adherence to a certain movement, we can state that El Taray is the consequence of a pressing need for adaptation to topography, to functional requirements and to material scarcity. These conditions will challenge the creativity of the young Aracil motivating him to devise a good number of advanced design solutions that sixty years later still prove their freshness and relevance. Notable among these is its socio-spatial scheme, an intricate network of significances and circulations that blurs the housing complex between the exterior and the interior, the distant and the close or the collective and the individual. This paper seeks to overcome the traditional reading of El Taray —from the idea of typology or the assimilation to contemporary architectural movements— to present a critical update that emphasizes its liminal condition as key for its social, material and urban sustainability. To this end, El Taray is linked to the present by being analysed from the notion of habitable system that spreads its influence to the community that lives in it and to the context in which it is inserted.

This book presents the history of modern architecture in Swedish housing. It is essential reading, especially at a time when a lack of accommodation is having such a brutal impact on Swedish society. However, this has not always been the case. Decisive public policies implemented during the 20th century led to an exemplary democratisation process of housing, unparalleled in terms of equality and inclusiveness. The first part of the book presents an overview of housing responses in Sweden. It dissects the housing question, describing it as a multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be addressed without considering social, political and economic circumstances. The second part compiles texts and materials from the exhibition Bo. Nu. Då: Bostadsfrågor och svar under 99 år (Housing. Now. Then: 99 Years of Housing Issues and Responses) held at ArkDes in 2016 and curated by Dan Hallemar. Based on the rich ArkDes collections, the book features examples of architectural solutions to the housing question from 1917 to the present. 99 Years of the Housing Question in Sweden brings together different perspectives, contributions, accounts and critiques from specialists and citizens alike, each illustrating in its own way how modern Swedish housing and society have developed and evolved hand in hand. The result is an important but relatively unknown discourse on the role of housing in the construction of the welfare state which offers vital lessons for today’s world.

In the three decades from the end of the Second World War to the first oil shocks —or rather from the national Swedish Housing Policy in 1945 to the end of Miljonprogrammet public housing initiative in 1974— advances in housing in Sweden have signalled a radical change in the evolution of Swedish architecture and cities. This was neither solely the work of architecture itself nor the talent of specific professionals, but rather the result of a series of complex phenomena that reflected a leap forward in the development of society. Sweden is not unique in its development. However, its contribution to the evolution of housing design in Europe is as significant as it is unknown. Innovations such as national housing policies, models of residential neighbourhoods, production-adapted design planning, as well as research on kitchens and the domestic space had an impact in Italy (the INA-Casa design manuals), England (its advocacy of the “New Empiricism”) and Germany (the building systems developed during the second half of the 20th century). Swedish architecture has also influenced the housing standards still in use in our homes today. However, it is difficult to find references to Sweden in the international historiography of modern architecture. The powerful connection between the housing question in the country and the development and evolution of Swedish society are, ironically, partly responsible for this omission. The deep and complex association between Swedish housing and Swedish society hinders a critical study of these contributions as isolated phenomena. This paper seeks to provide a continuous view of the housing public programmes in Sweden from 1945 to 1975. By resituating three decades of residential models on the pivotal notion of the “housing question”, the study unfolds a chronological description of the most relevant Swedish housing contributions within their social, cultural and urban context.

"Constructing Folkhemmet: A CriticalHistory" resituates 99 years of housing issues and responses in Sweden on the pivotal notion of the "housing question". It allows us to describe chronologically the most relevant Swedish housing contributions within their social, cultural and urban context.

In the USSR, against the backdrop of political change and social instability in the 1920s, the issue of housing for the masses was addressed by the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), under the leadership of Moisey Ginzburg. Their mission was not only to provide a solution to the lack of accommodation in the major cities of the country, but to redefine housing as a framework suited to a society transitioning towards a fully socialised life. The response was developed in three stages of design research, over a period of five years. The initial conceptual phase was formally presented by members of the OSA at the 1926 Comradely Competition, and focused on the housing question, with specific designs for communal houses. The second stage revolved around the scientific and methodological research of the Stroykom, developed in parallel with the designs for the new communal living units. The final stage took material form in six specific buildings, known as transitional-type experimental houses. One of these, the Narkomfin, gained worldwide recognition as a modern prototype of Soviet avant-garde housing, and has been widely researched as a result. However, to date no study has approached all three phases with equal scrutiny and methodology. This article offers a detailed account of the OSA's experimental design strategies for collective workers' housing between 1926 and 1930 under Ginzburg's leadership by examining original sources, as well as analysing and restoring the individual projects at each stage. It provides a new interpretation of the famous Narkomfin House and ideas on the first Soviet avant-garde housing project by reconstructing the complex research context in which the building, in tandem with other projects, was developed.

This paper examines the interconnection between Swedish non-institutionalized housing provision for asylum seekers and everyday domestic practices. Though not investigated, these emergent housing modalities bridge a gap in the provision of accommodation for adolescents facing relocation orders to other municipalities. Since 2015, volunteer homes in northern Sweden multiplied and underwent major architectural transformations to provide these youths with stable housing. The spatial transformations in the affected dwellings pushed the limits of architectural design and raise critical questions about the resilience of current Swedish housing design recommendations for the construction of ‘the Swedish home’.

Through an interdisciplinary examination of case studies, the paper addresses the spatial and social aspects of domestic architecture transformation. The specific research objectives are to:

1. investigate the conditions that led unaccompanied asylum seekers turning 18 to face an unstable housing situation and that prompted self-organized networks to emerge;

2. define the architecture of non-institutionalized accommodation for vulnerable youths provided by Swedish civil society;

3. determine how the architecture of the dwelling transformations relate to everyday domestic practices; and

4. understand how Swedish recommendations for housing design impact the way domestic architecture is transformed and used.

The methods used are prototyping, formal analysis, interviews, site observations, and discourse analysis. The paper contributes unprecedented analysis of the implications domestic space has on everyday life, shows how housing design relates to societal circumstances, and provides an interdisciplinary framework to revise the design and regulation of domestic space.

Published within half a century from each other, French manual The Corset Through the Ages (1893) written by Ernest Léoty and the Swedish housing investigation The Family that Outgrows its Home (1941) led by social researcher Brita Åkerman constituted two landmarks of the sexo-political discourses for the construction of the sexualized body and the regulation of gender and family politics. While the French corsetier presented the stay as a technological and social mold of the feminine body that had its routes in antiquity, Åkerman was amassing one of the most thorough collections of knowledge on residential spaces in order to penetrate and modify daily life and social relations within the Swedish domestic realm.

This article juxtaposes two apparatuses external to the body —the corset of the Victorian period and the Swedish research-based domestic space of the postwar years— that were aimed at regulating the feminine and masculine anatomy and its movements, imposed physical and sexual literacy and instigated procreative conducts. By looking into the scientific discourses governing each mechanism, their specific technologies and the instructional knowledge designed to deploy them, this study seeks to chart how orthopedic politics developed during the 19th and 20th century through disciplinary exoskeletons have helped to invent, map out and fix the somatic fictions of sexual epistemology that constituted the basis of the biopolitical modern regime.

Through a close reading of garment patterns, housing plans, scientific texts, how-to manuals and usage guidelines, the article discusses Foucauldian models of biopolitical power and the administering of life as a tool for architectural analyses. Based on this proposition, it reflects on the centrality of sex and sexuality in modern ortho-architectural apparatuses and rises critical questions about their intervention into the biological and social structure of our contemporary society.

What constitutes the architecture of urban dwelling? What shapes its limits? What hopes is it meant to fulfill?

Dwelling projects have always played a key role in the narratives surrounding urban identity. Indeed, the construction of urban identity is largely affected by a precise set of spatial configurations and material arrangements that coexist in a particular time and place. However, the architecture of dwelling in a city is not only constituted by the one that is actually built, even if the endurance of its particular aggregate of rooms, walls, and households might make it appear so. Looking into dwelling architecture through the lens of the technologies that produce it — including those that regulate it, preserve it, and validate it as a legitimate wish — reveals a whole new set of projects that overlap and enable those that visibly shape the urban environment.

This paper explores three of these technologies of dwelling and their role in the construction of the Swedish urban realm. Each technology is addressed in an essay that focuses on what it is and what it does in the city. The first essay, “Standards,” investigates the sources of Swedish national housing regulations and recommendations as a semiotic technology that delimits the admissible framework in which dwelling architecture can operate. The second essay, “Archives,” surveys the aggregate of human and non-human agents involved in the practice of archiving dwelling architecture as an architectural technology for collecting, recording, and preserving what has been agreed to be built. The last essay, “Urban Fiction,” explores the programs for housing supply issued by Swedish municipalities as a discursive technology that constructs legitimate urban imaginaries. The result is a multi-layered re-interpretation of the architecture of domestic space that problematizes urban dwelling as a tangible, concrete reality.

Norms and handbooks have played a key role in the design of residential rooms in Sweden since the 1940s. Ever since, changes in housing policies have led to varying definitions and regulations of residential rooms, allowing their existence, defining their configuration, and framing their performance. And yet, none of these rooms has been built; they are prescribed room types that belong in the pages of handbooks that validate the framework in which housing design can operate. What are these prescribed room types? What do they look like? Who and what do they include? Have they changed over time? In response to these questions, this article follows the evolution of a set of residential room types in the design handbooks that have accompanied housing policy bills in Sweden from 1942 to 2023. These manuals are not the law itself but operate as an interface for professionals and designers by reflecting the practical consequences of the norm. Diagrams, dimensions, texts, and references to housing literature vary from handbook to handbook to define the specific traits of each type of room. By studying these traits in relation to key moments of Swedish housing politics, the article reveals the role that norms and standards have played in the establishment of the regulatory regime in which housing design in Sweden operates today.

In this theme issue authors examine contemporary housing practices that outline a new social relevance of housing in the 21st century. Editors have selected articles that provide opportunities, solutions and reflections on this challenge. The contributions bring together real-life case studies, from contexts as diverse as the Swedish, Finnish and Japanese, that reflect on alternative routes of delivery, organisation and design ideas, as well as reflections upon the main inquiry: What are the housing questions for the cities of tomorrow?

In the scenario of instability and change that characterised the USSR during the 1920s, the group of constructivist architects led by Moisey Ginzburg were tackling the problem of the lack of housing for workers in large Soviet cities. The solutions provided by Ginzburg’s team were developed under the aegis of the Soviet platforms OSA and Stroykom. They were conducted in three successive stages culminating in the building of the Narkomfin House. However, the architectural modernity achieved in Narkomfin was associated to the advancements in the housing building sector made by their European contemporaries. This article analyses the actual connections between the building of this Moscow prototype and Western models that were beginning to be developed in Europe, especially in Germany. This conception repositions the research conducted by Ginzburg’s team within a process of complex and critical assimilation that integrated the new modern Western techniques.