My project investigates the 22 housing estate projects built between 1945 and 1958 by the communist regime in Bucharest in order to house the workers and represents the chronological continuation of my Ph.D. research which analyzed the social housing policies between 1908 and 1948. These 22 projects housed more than 30.000 inhabitants. As the topic is currently investigated by other scholars (especially architects), I will focus on the research of the social features of housing, less appealing for architects, but at the core of the housing question in all the former communist countries. My Ph.D. research concluded the failure of the social housing policies before 1945 in terms of the distribution of housing to the working class. I will use this as a hypothesis and investigate to what extend the new regime continued or corrected the previous housing policies. Consequently, the methodology investigates the intentions of the reformers, the means of construction and the distribution, together with the features of daily life in these new housing estates.

A full-length study is available here.