Abstract
This book is a much-needed English addition to literature on the problem of reconstruction and housing in post-war Europe, where millions of refugees, homeless and displaced people created an extraordinary demand for housing. The case described and analysed by Pilat is the Italian ‘Ina-Casa’ plan that operated between 1949 and 1963. The book is divided into three parts: the development and operation of the plan, the results of the plan, and its reception and legacy, and is augmented by an abundant and good selection of figures and diagrams. Three case studies are examined in detail: the Tiburtino Ina-Casa in Rome, Borgo Panigale in Bologna and Villa Longo in Matera.
As the author summarises clearly in the introduction, the need for employment and housing after the war was a mass emergency in Italy. Two million habitable rooms were destroyed during the war, four million were damaged and Fascism had left a legacy of slums in many cities. Additionally, more than two million of the country’s 45 million citizens were unemployed. The construction industry was identified as the ideal sector in which to rapidly create jobs. The Ina-Casa plan was approved at the end of February 1949, after six months of harsh political debate between and within the Christian Democrats (DC) who were proponents of the law, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) (Istituto Luigi Sturzo, 2002). The main issue was funding, which was initially to be raised through a compulsory tax on employees, but was later augmented to include a tax on employers. On the other hand, the state gave the biggest financial contribution. In two seven-year stages, in approximately 5000 different municipalities, this plan resulted in the construction of over 350,000 new homes and an average of 7.8 million working days (giornate operaio) annually (Beretta Anguissola, 1963). In the first stage, the state was fully in charge of construction, in the second stage the state was granting financial assistance for construction. This is a kind of intervention clearly inspired by the Keynes and Beveridge approaches, but reinterpreted within a post-war Catholic solidaristic doctrine and the political will to build a large consensus from below, together with the promise of full employment and the protection of private property, in an environment encouraging families to manage their savings (Istituto Luigi Sturzo, 2002). The author describes clearly the development of the Ina-Casa plan, also relying on an extensive bibliography in Italian (Di Biagi, 2001; Istituto Luigi Sturzo, 2002).
Pilat correctly mentions the debate of that period on urban development and the questions about how cities should grow: ‘What are the responsibilities of government when planning and managing such growth?’. ‘What are the rights of the citizenry in the face of powerful developers?’ (p. 76). In many aspects, such as the quality of the architecture, the Ina-Casa plan was a success.
But let us assume that the responsibilities and goals of the government can be defined by the outcome of the plan. In fact, despite all employed persons paying the monthly contribution to the plan, only one of every 20 received accommodation from the Ina-Casa. As a result of the plan, 50% of housing was allocated to families of white collar workers, and 50% to families of blue collar workers, despite the latter being in a much greater number and needs. In acting in this way, a part of the DC consciously sees the middle class as the new relevant social and political element to be supported. ‘Initially, half of Ina-Casa homes were to be rentals and the other half purchased by the new residents. Overtime, however, residents renting Ina-Casa homes applied to purchase those homes in significant numbers, with the result that, each year, a larger percentage were owned rather than rented. […] Thus, the Ina-Casa plan provided a means for the reigning Christian Democrats to realize their goal of “Not all proletariats but all proprietors”’ (p. 183). The same plan contains the seeds of the future housing problems, the idea of favouring property ownership over renting, of controlling people through debt and clientelism, but this is a topic outside the scope of the book.
The success of the Ina-Casa plan in terms of providing good quality housing has to be contextualised and the examples of Bologna, Matera and Rome offer some answers to the previous questions. The Bologna case created a compact neighbourhood self-contained and close to the idea of community building that some planners and architects had in mind. Matera was a much more difficult operation to provide housing for the thousands of poor living in the Sassi, cave dwellings carved out of the tufa hills. Unfortunately, the forced evacuations of the inhabitants from the Sassi did not necessarily justify continued segregation in the suburbs, similarly to previous fascist policies that enforced eviction to design cities by class. Some of the interventions of the Ina-Casa, in particular in Rome, ‘entered’ in the Italian imaginary. The Tiburtino neighbourhood was defined as a new Jerusalem by Pasolini (1959), who in 1962 shot part of the movie Mamma Roma showing an Ina-Casa apartment in Torre Spaccata. In the case of Rome, the decision of where building the Ina-Casa neighbourhoods represented a huge concession to speculators (Insolera, 1993). As Insolera pointed out, despite the pragmatic justifications for building Ina-Casa quarters on the periphery, there was, in the immediate postwar period, an opportunity to reshape the organisation of Italian cities; an opportunity that was largely missed (Insolera, 1993). If the location of the Ina-Casa neighbourhoods within cities represented an Achilles’ heel of the plan, the same cannot be said for the architectural work.
Indeed, additional interest for the reader is brought by the development of the second part of the book. The Ina-Casa intervention deserves merit for a search of good quality in housing, in an attempt to minimise the divide between architecture and planning, by for example incorporating more structured sociological conceptualisations such as envisioning the working class families and the evolution of the gender roles that would have affected the way of inhabiting. We are far from previous popular housing results, for example the case of San Saba neighbourhood that is the best example of popular housing project ever done in Rome, but for some aspects the Ina-Casa plan produced and offers appropriate cases in point such as some of the best examples of Neorealist and Organic architecture. The architecture originated from the refuse of technology (associated in the past to futurism) and industrial building standards, with the aim of creating a ‘new’ tradition, in reaction to Classicism and Modernism which were associated with Fascism. The debate on the building style to be adopted is relevant because it was not an exercise in aesthetics, but a discussion about reinventing traditions through geography rather than the history of the specific sites; through a reflection on the relation between building typology and urban morphology, through the development of self-sufficient neighbourhood units. Interestingly, also the influence of international movements, such as Sweden’s New Empiricism, or the discussion that favoured the conceptions of Patrick Geddes, the German siedlungen, the cité industrielle by Tony Garnier, were considered by the planners and a critical approach, that is refusing the monotony of tower blocks or similar housing schemes, contrasted the influential vision of Le Corbusier.
With very few exceptions all of the most famous Italian architects contributed to the plan: Ludovico Quaroni, Mario Ridolfi, Bruno Zevi, Adalberto Libera, Carlo Aymonino, just to name a few of them. These architects were animated by the idea that modern architecture had to abandon the path of producing art as a personal expression and build with the neighbourhood the main theme of that time. These were times when ‘The home, it was believed, had the power to shape the behavior of its inhabitants’ (p. 150). Architects such as Quaroni believed ‘in the power of the environment to affect the behavior of its residents’ (p. 150).
Overall, the book is well researched and well written, providing copious examples of how planners and administrators wanted to preserve and display class and regional differences rather than to promote a vision of Italy where all citizens would live equally in similar dwellings, promoting equality among classes. The only reservation I have is that the conclusion could have debated in more detail the incredible fluctuation of opinion regarding the plan over the last decades. Maybe the section on the critical reception of Ina-Casa is slightly biased, based mainly on the ideas of Zevi, in favour, and Tafuri, against. A change of the reception and evaluation of this plan that is definitely related to the change of the available critical tools, to the failure of successive social housing projects and to the possibility of more articulated opinions (Secchi, 2001).
That said, the book is an excellent read for those venturing into urban studies in general, into the relation between planning and architecture and reflecting on the patterns of social relations of urban neighbourhood life in particular. The book contains valuable considerations worth taking into account in the (lack of) current social housing debate on the necessary connections of welfare, architecture, urban planning, legislation, organisation and administration, financial and design. Summarising the words of Robert Fishman, Pilat rightly reminds the reader that: Though style can affect the reception of housing, it is but one part of a complex equation that includes public policy, legal, demographic, economic, and social issues. The successes or failures of government interventions in housing markets can be attributable to the interactions of any number of these various factors. In this context, the success of the Ina-Casa plan stands out and warrants reconsideration. (p. 9)
By chance, the author of this review spent the first years of his life one block away from the Tiburtino Ina-Casa in Rome. I still remember the perception, as a child being taken for a walk, of something different in terms of sky, trees, colours, roofs compared to the adjacent part of Via Tiburtina with high-rise buildings and heavy traffic. This book gives me back a brief but articulated analysis of that feeling of diversity, originality and respect that current urban landscape has often neglected. The book is fascinating not only because of its comprehensive analysis of a huge social housing initiative, but because of the analysis proposed that goes deep into the whole intersection of knowledge that emerged from the creation of the Ina-Casa plan, a plan designed to offer jobs more than housing, able to build neighbourhoods in a different, probably more sustainable way, than successive interventions.