Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-04-17T05:00:00Z

In France, the professions of social worker and concierge both emerged in the early 20th century, and both responded to a central concern of social landlords: educating their tenants in the standards of “good living.” Danièle Voldman retraces the history of these community-based professions, and the role they played in supervising the working classes in social housing.
From the beginning of the 20th century, when the first social-housing tenants started to move into their new homes, both

- Essays / history, housing, social housing, public housing, tenants, profession, France, Paris

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-09-14T05:00:00Z

At the turn of the 20th century, the dramatically poor conditions of urban working-class housing was a cause of major concern in many cities, and would lead to the first social-housing experiments. Photography, then a booming new technology, was one of the means used to document this problem and raise awareness of conditions, as this book on working-class housing in Berlin illustrates.
Taking as their starting point a collection of photographs taken during the first 20 years of the 20th

- Reviews / housing, urban history, social housing, slum, Berlin, Germany, history, affordable housing, photography, working classes, blue-collar workers, manual workers, workers

Metropolitics

Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin