Middle-Class Mass Housing Lexicon: Bosnia and Herzegovina

Working Group 2 MCMH ATLAS European Middle-Class Mass Housing LEXICON Els De Vos Selin Geerinckx Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta Editors Working Group 2 MCMH ATLAS European Middle-Class Mass Housing LEXICON This publication is based upon work from COST Action “European Middle-Class Mass Housing” CA18137 supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation. www.cost.eu Introduction Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Denmark Estonia France Germany Greece Hungary Israel Italy Lithuania Montenegro The Netherlands North Macedonia Portugal Serbia Slovakia Spain Switzerland Türkiye UK Northern Ireland 2 5 14 18 22 26 30 34 38 42 46 50 54 58 62 66 70 74 78 82 86 90 94 98 102 106 Introduction Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia INDEX Cyprus Denmark Estonia France Germany Greece Hungary Israel Italy Lithuania Montenegro The Netherlands North Macedonia Portugal Serbia Slovakia Spain Switzerland Türkiye 3 Introduction Els De Vos 4 5 Terminology of Middle Class Mass Housing During the collective meetings organized in the COST Action, the definition of Middle Class Mass Housing (hereinafter MCMH) came up again and again. This topic, although it was postponing other discussions, revealed a range of interesting cultural variations. We distinguished several approaches to the “middle class” , as well as different ways to define the housing of this multi-faceted social group1. Likewise, the topic of “mass housing” elicited various interpretations. Gradually, we came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to establish a single definition of MCMH in a continent as diverse as Europe, with its manifold histories, nationalities, cultures, languages, customs and urban planning. This publication aims to illustrate these different perspectives, highlighting the rich variety of housing cultures in European countries and regions. No middle class? In former Eastern Europe, during the Cold War, officially, there was no middle class housing. However, scholars did distinguish housing typologies that can be compared to MCMH in former Western Europe. In Estonia, for example, you had central collective farm settlements (kolkhoz), inspired by Scandinavian models; “these buildings are a rare example of the once hoped-for Soviet welfare in the Estonian countryside”, Epp Lankots argues. In Lithuania, such housing was inspired by cooperative apartment arrangements that were common in the entire Soviet Union, in which residents contributed with their own funds to housing construction and in return received an apartment that was larger or more comfortable than the standard houses provided by the state (Lithuanian coop- 6 erative apartments accounted for 18 percent of all new apartments in the 1970s, more than the Soviet average of 6 percent). However, instead of trying to establish a definition of MCMH, we came up with specific examples and contrasting themes that characterize MCMH in different countries. Lexicon Terms for housing type One example that illustrates regional and national housing culture is the farmhouse style. Different names are used for this specific typology, such as fermette in Belgium, Chalondonette in France and boerderette in the Netherlands. The Flemish, French and Dutch terms all refer to a type of middle class housing and have the same French suffix (-ette), which is a diminutive marker. painters such as Gust De Smet (1877-1943), Albert Servaes (1883-1966) and Constant Permeke (1886-1952), and writers such as Stijn Streuvels (1871-1969), Ernest Claes (1885-1968) and Felix Timmermans (1886-1947) during the interwar period. In the Netherlands the Dutch term boerderette has only been in use since 1980, appearing first in newspapers and 17 years later in texts on urban planning and architecture. In the latter publications it was also used as a derogatory term. In this lexicon, we present descriptions of MCMH from different countries, cultures and urban planning contexts. Additionally, we include specific terms that characterize MCMH or certain aspects of it. As Gaia Caramellino argues in the book Post-war Middle-Class Housing (2015, 33): “Words related to housing and dwellings are a powerful vehicle of cultural mediation and are central for the comprehension of unique forms of habitat, as well as expressions of specific social and cultural practices”2. This lexicon contains terms from several jargons and languages: popular, technical, professional, academic, institutional, architecture criticism, etc. Across the different countries, we see comparable terms crop up, which in turn have subtle (or not so subtle) differences. B oerderette and fermette have a similar meaning because they both refer to imitation farmhouses inhabited by non-farmers, which could be smaller than a farmhouse (but not always). In Belgium, fermette was initially used for small, abandoned farms that were renovated as single family homes, but later for new constructions with those characteristics3 . For realtors and inhabitants, the terms designate a popular, highly marketable style type that visually resembles a farmhouse. However, in the architectural discourse they are always used in a mocking or derogatory way to refer to tasteless “catalogue” houses, at least by architects who detest the tawdriness of the fermette. In Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, the French term fermette continues to be used because it gives these types of houses a higher standing (French was the official language used by the nobility and bourgeoisie, especially after the rejection of the Dutch monarchy in 1830). At the same time, the fermette can be distinguished from its Dutch variant primarily by the importance it acquired in Flemish residential culture. Even though the fermette bore a French name, it was praised in Flanders for its supposed "Flemishness." The fermette seemed to frame itself within Flemish peasant culture, portrayed by T he French word Chalandonnette did not originate from the farm, but from Albin Chalandon, the Minister of Infrastructure who launched a competition in 1969 to design vast, dense complexes of individual houses. As Yankel Fijalkow, Ahmed Benbernou and Yaneira Wilson explain, “the diminutive (-ette) from the term Chalandonnette expresses houses of low value, corresponding to a negative view of the middle classes and the ambition of the state towards them: hence, sam's suffit (that is enough for me)”. So while the suffix ‘-ette’ brings a certain prestige to the Flemish word fermette and the Dutch word boerderette (at least for the wider population), this is not the case with the French term. However, among Belgian and Dutch architectural critics and urban planners, the terms fermette and boerderette are always used in a mocking way. These examples show that approaching housing as a linguistic phenomenon reveals a lot of aspects and connotations of middle class mass housing. It demonstrates that a certain word can have one meaning for the masses and another for professionals, such as architects and urban planners. However, it also shows how countries sometimes borrow housing terms from other countries and give them their own meaning. 7 Terms for rooms The terms in the lexicon bring to the fore certain privi- leges or status symbols associated with the middle class. This can take the form of a second home that people own, such as the Vikendica in Bosnia-Herzegovina – a term coined in the 1950s from the English word “weekend”- or the “summerhouse” in Estonia. In Portugal it was common for middle class families to have a live-in servant, which manifests itself in the presence of a quarto da empregada (housekeeper’s room/bedroom) which was a small room/ bedroom specifically designed for the housekeeper. However, in the rest of post-war Europe, it was quite rare to have a live-in servant, as they had become too expensive. Terms related to class What seems to have been more common throughout Europe was the presence of a “guest room”, “best room”, “salon”, etc. Such rooms could be found in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, North Macedonia and Turkey. Often the French term “salon” was used, and mostly reflected a bourgeois concept of the home. The salon was literally a room equipped with the finest furniture, where the family received guests and showcased their social status and well-being. Until the early/mid 1960s it was also a place where the dead were laid to rest. In Portugal this room was called the television room. Nowadays the room has mostly disappeared in favour of the living room, which now serves as a room to receive guests but also to enjoy family life. What also became evident in discussing the lexicon during the Writing MCMH Workshop in Antwerp (0608/04/2022), was the changing reputation, and often also population, of the buildings. We noticed a transience or temporality in the buildings, whose reputation evolved over time. Housing once intended for the middle classes became deprived housing, while social housing that was renovated and sold to the middle class increased in prestige. Example of a guest room in a middle-class family home in Türkiye (© Sahibinden website: Autonomous, 2023; https://www.sahibinden.com/ilan/ikinci-el-ve-sifir-alisveris-ev-dekorasyon-mobilya-misafir-odasi-takimi-1062614830/detay) Terms for mass housing We The brochure introducing a pre-fab A-frame summerhouse “Raul” from the 1970s in Estonia. Architect Rein Randväli, EKE Projekt. (Source: Estonian Museum of Architecture) 8 mostly associate the term “mass housing” with high-rise projects, such as those in urban Spain, Italy and Portugal. However, this lexicon makes clear that the low rise was the dominant form for the middle classes in many countries, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Macedonia, Cyprus and the South of Italy. As Lidwine Spoormans points out in her description of Dutch housing neighbourhoods, “low-rise is mass housing in disguise”. There, massification happens in a horizontal way and is often self-built. A special case of the private initiative is the polykatoikia (meaning multi-residence) in Greece. This is “a building type produced mainly through the system of antiparochi (meaning in-exchange), a quid-proquo arrangement whereby a landowner offered their plot to a contractor in exchange for a number of apartments in the polykatoikia built by the contractor on the plot”, as Konstantina Kalfa explains. We also noticed that MCMH often had ornaments and architectonic details which added prestige to a certain building. The entrance hall, frontage and front lawn in particular received a lot of design attention. And of course, one couldn’t forget the large parking space, an indispensable part of the middle class way of living. Furthermore, we discovered terms that refer to a standard floor plan or the shape of that floor plan, and are associated with a certain social class. For example, the flour plan of a pistolgang (hallway) in Denmark literally has the shape of a pistol. The doorzonwoning (literally, sun-through house) in the Netherlands and Belgium has a living room that extends from front to back, with a large window on each side through which the sun shines in. The ordinary character of this housing type brings to mind the average “middleclass” family. 9 Notes Uta Pottgiesser, Wido Quist, Ana Vaz Miheiro, Dalit Shach-Pinsly, Els De Vos, Gaia Caramellino, Ines Lima Rodrigues, Kostas Tsiambaos, Müge Akkar Ercan, Yankel Fijalkow (eds.), Special Issue on Middle Class Mass Housing, Docomomo-Journal (April 2023). 1 Gaia Caramellino, Federico Zanfi (eds.), Post-War Middle-Class Housing. Models, Construction and Change, Bern: Peter Lang, 2015, 236-282. 2 Els De Vos, Hilde Heynen, “Shaping popular taste: The Belgian Farmers’ Association and the fermette during the 1960s-1970s”, Home Cultures, 4 (2007) 3, 237-260. 3 Doorzon typology in Nagele in the Netherlands, by architect Groosman(© HNI, photographer unknown). Right: typical ‘doorzon’ floorplan. Terms for techniques Finally, many construction terms from prefabricated or industrialized housing construction are included in the lexicon, such as placa, Plattenbau, panelák and panel. In Portugal, estate agents and middle-class house buyers use the term placa (plate) for “reinforced concrete slab”. The German term Plattenbau is quite common and refers to buildings that consist of precast concrete parts for walls and ceilings. Especially in the German Democratic Republic, the so-called Platte was a common sight and sought-after, as Lisa Kaufmann points out. In Slovakia, a prefabricated house or common block of flats was called a panelák, while in Hungary, panel was a pars pro toto for housing estates, regardless of the building technology and age of the estate, at least in colloquial speech. 10 Terms as an expression of culture What this lexicon presents is a broad range of terms that come from architectural journals, books, policy documents, technical specifications, urban planning, but also popular media and colloquial speech. This variety is not so surprising given that housing is entangled in so many aspects of people’s lives, as well as the building industry, architectural culture, bourgeois dwelling cultures, etc. To what extent does the everyday language on MCMH correspond with the technocratic terminology of housing? Is there a tension between these two categories of terms? And do the terms express the structure and systems of social stratification of MCMH? We hope that this lexicon forms a first step in the development of a methodology to study the concepts of MCMH. 11 MCMH-EU Lexicon 12 13 Bosnia and Herzegovina Anita Milaković Nevena Novaković University of Banja Luka Middle class mass housing, Borik neighbourhood in Banja Luka (© photo: Tomas Damjanović, 2021) 18 19 Single-family housing is a dominant residential typology in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The mass construction of privately owned houses began with the mass migration from rural areas to cities after World War II. However, it has never been the subject of a state housing program. Single-family houses were gradually constructed near city centres and on the remote periphery. Some houses were built without a building permit, but usually, they were similar in form and quality of construction to legally built ones. Dvorište Yard Primaća soba Living room A term that denotes the open space surrounding a detached house on a private plot. In common parlance, open spaces next to multi-apartment buildings are often referred to by the same name: dvorište. The largest room in the spatial organization of the apartment, intended for daily activities and used as a dining room on certain social occasions. Multi-apartment buildings from the 1950s and 1960s usually had two to four floors and were built as detached buildings on a green plot, often with fences. In these small multi-apartment buildings, open spaces were perceived and referred to as yards (the name and way of using open spaces were inherited from single-family housing). In the 1960s and 1970s, residential buildings and neighbourhoods became more complex, and the open spaces around them lost the characteristics of yards. However, the term dvorište was maintained and is often heard in everyday conversation when discussing the use of open spaces near residential buildings. Regarding the form typology, these are detached houses on private plots. Citizens, in many cases, build their own houses with the help of a master builder, family, friends and neighbours. Houses are often built and furnished in stages. The owners move in on the ground floor while the rest of the house remains unfinished. Some houses are left without a facade for years after the owners have moved in. The significant housing demand at the end of the 1950s was met with the planning and mass construction of multi-apartment housing, as in the other parts of former Yugoslavia. The planning and construction system developed from typical modest buildings into large-scale neighbourhoods of complex spatial features with educational, commercial, cultural and recreational facilities. Construction was financed by the state, municipalities and socially owned companies, with a mandatory contribution to the housing fund for every worker. Residents had a lifelong right to use apartments (occupancy right), although buildings were socially owned. Today, these buildings and neighbourhoods are valued for the quality of the spatial organization of the apartments and the abundant open spaces. Naselje Residential area, settlement A term that describes any compact set of residential buildings, regardless of size. The residential area is also “the place where I live”. People identify their place of living with naselje, which always has a unique name. The residential area is a spatial whole on the district or neighbourhood scale. This room is the family temple of social protocol. It is a room for receiving (= primati) guests, for entertainment, watching television and other social activities. It is usually equipped with sofas and armchairs, a small table and a wooden cabinet that covers the entire wall. The room is furnished representatively, not practically. Vikendica Weekend house A detached house surrounded by greenery, often outside large cities. It can be a prefabricated or solid construction and is a cottage type of house, modest in size and decoration. The term (coined by analogy with the English “weekend”) entered the vernacular in the 1950s. It became popular in the next decade when more people could afford a weekend house for themselves. It was a place to escape from the city and be “in nature” or “on vacation”. Also, for people who moved to the city from villages during accelerated urbanization, the weekend house was a way of staying attached to the homeland. From the end of the 1980s until the break-up of former Yugoslavia, the vikendica became an important status symbol for those who owned it and often a desired object for those who did not. Single-family middle class housing in Banja Luka (© photo: Tomas Damjanović, 2020) 20 21 Technical details Editoria! board Els De Vos Selin Geerinckx Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta Cover and backcover design vivoeusebio Gaphic design Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta English Proofreading Francisca Rojas del Canto The proofreading of the texts of the case studies was the responsibility of their authors. Edition 1st Edition Date December 2023 ISBN 978-989-781-864-6 Publisher lscte-lUL, Lisbon @The images featured in this book are the responsibility of the authors of the texts. This book was made within the CA18137 European Middle-Class Mass Housing [MCMH-EU], with the support of COST Association. Core Group CA18137; Ana Vez Milheiro (Ch1ir);Gaia Caremellino (Vice Cheir); MOnica Pecheco (GHS Representative); lnh Lima Rodrigue& (WG1 L.eeder); Kostas Tsiambeoe (WG1 Co-leader); Oelit Shach•Pinsly (WG1 Co· leader); Els De Vos (WG2 Leader, STSM); Yanloal Fijalknow (WG2 Co-leader); Uta Pottgiesser (WG3 Leader);Muga Akkar Ercan (WG3 Co-leadar); Yael Allweil (Science Communication Manager); Ahmad El-Amine Benbemou (Science Communication Co-menagar); Juliana Martina (STSM Co­ coordinatOI") and Marija Milinkovic OTC CG Coordinator).