In 1942 the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services, the result of a commission chaired by the economist Sir William Beveridge, defined want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness as the ‘five giant evils’ that British state intervention should tackle:

The Beveridge Report is commonly considered one of the seminal steps in laying the foundations for the welfare state in the post-war years. On the one hand, Beveridge's report highlighted a wide range of social needs; on the other hand, it provided interpretations and suggested solutions by means of adequate public interventions concerning income, health care, education, housing and planning, as well as employment. Several countries, in different political and economic settings, recognised several categories of social demand and produced a stratification of public ‘answers’ – both theoretical and operative – in order to satisfy them, according to changing priorities.Footnote ² At the same time such stratifications were representative of different interpretations regarding the roles of the many actors involved in fixing and guaranteeing a minimum acceptable standard of living.

If the definition of the ‘giant evils’ changed over time and differed between countries, the realisation of such needs produced relevant actions regarding not only the socio-political and economic spheres, but also the spatial one. From this point of view the traditions of the welfare state, intended as a political and socio-economic project throughout the twentieth century, could be observed from an urban perspective, as a sedimentation of different spatial solutions to collective demands. In a broader sense, we can read them as a spatial projection of societal models and as a public vision of the future via the physical dimension of cities and territories. Buildings such as hospitals, public schools and libraries, social housing settlements and community centres; open spaces and infrastructures such as public parks and gardens, leisure parks, sports facilities and mobility networks all represent an assembly of ‘urban objects’ that have played an important role in shaping cities both in physical and in symbolic ways, while effectively contributing to the transformation of spatial assets, urban hierarchies and everyday practices. We can look at these objects as a spatial legacy of ‘material and positive welfare’.Footnote ³

In the renewed debate on state welfare and on the negotiation between collective and individual rights, universal public actions and personalised demands, it may be noted that increasing attention is being given to the ‘built reality’ of welfare state policies which have accumulated inside and outside Europe over the last century.Footnote ⁴ If the relation between welfare and the city is most commonly observed in studies that focus on social housing and public neighbourhoods—an object of research well covered by urban studies—the research field has widened beyond the mere topic of housing in recent years. It now includes the material inheritance of public objects and infrastructures that punctuates cities and territories. This new focus of attention implies different issues and levels of analysis. The backdrop for these debates is the re-emerging debate on spatial justice and urban equity, with all its ethical and social implications.Footnote ⁵ More specifically, the literature has had to face the impelling question of the management and maintenance of the built legacy of welfare, a problem that is strictly related to property matters and to the overlapping of public, private and mixed sectors. The performance and flexibility of buildings and spaces, their current usage and the potential for renovation have been addressed by the topical debate between demolition and refurbishment. Finally, the aesthetic values embodied by many of these artefacts are still highly controversial and pose several problems concerning the conservation of modern architecture.

The five books discussed in the following pages provide a broad overview of these matters, dealing with the architecture and planning of public interventions throughout the second half of the twentieth century in different national contexts: Belgium, Italy, France, the United Kingdom and Sweden. All of them share the goal of re-reading an important period of European history and reformulating some judgments on its built environment: they do this by discussing the prevailing rhetoric on this subject, often ranging between stigmatisation and nostalgia. They delve into the political, professional and symbolic processes of spatialisation of welfare policies, covering a wide range of scales: from national planning to regional development, from social housing to public neighbourhoods, from specific buildings to the intimate scale of the domestic space.

In Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State, Michael Ryckewaert deals with the urbanisation process in post-war Belgium, focusing on the construction of the ‘infrastructural and business backbone’ that supported it. Despite the absence of ‘formal town planning initiatives’ (p. 10), the book argues that sectorial policies embodied some well-defined spatial models and discourses related to modern town planning and played a relevant role in shaping the Belgian territory. It is possible to read this process as a sort of ‘implicit urbanism’, where different ‘spatial economic development modes’ contributed substantially to the production – and reproduction – of space. These spatial paradigms – ‘spatial and urban models ruling the entire territorial decision-making process’ (p. 10) – were shared by planners and architects, as well as by a conspicuous range of actors, such as civil servants in public works administration, road planners, industrialists, politicians and economists. In particular the book focuses on infrastructural and industrial planning as the two underlying dimensions of the country's spatial assets, providing a much more nuanced interpretation of Belgian urbanisation, a process characterised by a marked suburban sprawl.

The book covers the period between the end of the Second World War and the international oil crisis (1945–73): government regulation, socio-economic context and spatial planning are the three terms chosen by the author in order to read the impact of the cyclical process of accumulation that took place during these ‘golden age’ years. The recognition of ‘a process of continuous adaptation and refinement of the spatial model used’ (p. 12) gives the author the chance to build a periodisation based on the different spatial models that, although overlapping one another, guided the transformation of the Belgian landscape. This framework divides the volume into four parts: the industrial reconstruction and economic recovery of the country after the war, the rise of national infrastructure policies, the centrality of Brussels as ‘the capital of the welfare state’ and the emergence of regional development. Each part is illustrated by several case studies.

The first section of the volume presents the background for planning and public intervention policies in the immediate post-war years. These pages highlight, on the one hand, the general rejection of massive state intervention in economic life; on the other hand, the continuity of discourses, images, tools and professional actors between the inter-war period and the reconstruction. These aspects favoured a process of ‘modernisation within the existing structures’ (p. 18), well illustrated by the cases of the destruction and reconstruction of the Leuven Canal (1940–7) and the expansion of the port of Antwerp (1945–56): two meaningful examples of the ambiguous position of both economic and spatial planning in the post-war years.

The national infrastructure policies promoted during the 1950s – with the substantial role played by the Socialist-Liberal government – are defined as ‘a Keynesian recipe mixed with an entrepreneurial approach and a measure of national unity’ (p. 65). They shifted the priorities of state interventions while reformulating short-term aims and long-term expectations. As the author argues, the construction of the infrastructure network (both waterways and roads) represented ‘the most important instrument for pursuing an urbanisation policy’ (p. 78) and in fact investment in infrastructures ‘was used as an instrument to industrialise the country and de facto to urbanise it as well’ (p. 72). The design of waterway and road networks largely determined the basic structure of the Belgian territory, and ‘in some instances, the two infrastructure networks reinforced each other to form infrastructure bundles’ (p. 159): the case of the linear urbanisation pattern supported by the combined industrial corridor of the Antwerp-Liège highway and the waterway of the Albert Canal is exemplary in this respect. These linear urbanisation patterns were deeply rooted in some recurring spatial models: if the visions proposed by the Russian ‘Disurbanists’ from the 1920s and the Ciudad Lineal explored by Arturo Soria y Mata from the late nineteenth century were the intellectual references for the linear urbanisation in the inter-war years, the Cité Linéaire Industrielle put forward by Le Corbusier during the 1940s represented the ‘guiding image’ for Belgian post-war planning, one ‘that helped to rationalise emerging settlement patterns into a coherent urban structure’ (p. 161).

The particular institutional framework involved in these decision-making processes was based on a ‘lean administration, with separate administrative offices’ (p. 153), rather than on a large centralised planning organism, in opposition to what happened in neighbouring countries such as France and the Netherlands. As the author suggests, the Belgian system favoured an interesting exchange between national and regional or local authorities, and partly gave decision-making processes a non-technocratic character, while ensuring mediation between the national infrastructural programme, local industrial development policies and spatial planning on the regional and local levels. The Belgian case makes for an interesting comparison with other European countries during those years, where the spatialisation of welfare policies was made possible under different conditions and with different levels of success. The book provides a well-documented point of view on the ways different networks of agencies and actors incorporated the ‘spatial project for the welfare state’, dealing with the ‘relationship between formally proposed models, implemented policy and actual urbanisation processes’ (p. 292).

In Città pubbliche the scale taken into account is still national, but the topic changes: we move from Belgian infrastructural and industrialisation processes to Italian social housing neighbourhoods. The book is the outcome of a research programme that involved six Italian universities, together with several researchers, local administrations, stakeholders and inhabitants.Footnote ⁶ During the last decade, the expression città pubblica (‘public city’) became increasingly familiar in the Italian debate on housing, spreading from the fields of architecture and town planning to a wider public. It refers to those public interventions of social housing that isotropically covered the country during most of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on housing programmes from the late 1940s to the end of the 1970s. The scientific co-ordinator of the work, Paola Di Biagi, introduced this expression in the mid 1980s. As she suggested in a recent volume: ‘I adopted the expression “public city” as a fertile metaphor for talking about ideas, designs and spaces of the contemporary city’.Footnote ⁷ The expression recalls the role played by the state in shaping Italian cities by means of public housing neighbourhoods built for low-income classes: these schemes were often meant as ‘model neighbourhoods’ with the purpose of distinguishing them from the existing city, while proposing a relevant collection of experimental efforts in architecture and urban design. At the same time the expression hints at a wider and more complex dimension where social housing represented just one of the countless sides of the public interventions that transformed the built environment of cities according to an idea of society.

The book has the shape of a sort of atlas that concentrates on eight Italian cities (Bari, Gorizia, Milan, Monfalcone, Naples, Palermo, Rome and Trieste) and eighty-two public housing neighbourhoods. It groups together urban realms that are very different from each other both in the quantity and in the quality of public interventions, as well as in local government traditions. One of the merits of the book is to make these cases comparable through some cross-cutting issues: the historical periods, subjects and actors involved, the relationship with infrastructural and environmental networks, and design and renewal programmes. The result is a sort of thematic catalogue that gives the chance to build up a comprehensive view on the matter in a long-term perspective. The presence of numerous maps allows a spatial image to be reconstructed of the impact of public housing programmes on Italian cities. The choice to use the plural ‘public cities’ for the title is meaningful in that it expresses the plurality of the voices involved and the backgrounds explored. The whole structure of the book is built on this plurality, privileging descriptive tools such as the atlas and the glossary, meant as ways to highlight the variety of sources, interpretations and design approaches. The main goal lies in the elaboration of what the book calls ‘orientations for observing’ (p. 12) and ‘strategies for planning’ (p. 94). The guidelines for the renovation and valorisation of such parts of the cities are described as a ‘sui generis manual’ that deals with ‘how to approach’ and not with ‘what to do’ (p. 9). The book examines the ‘public city’ as a laboratory for the future, while discrediting some commonplaces on public housing neighbourhoods: ‘not only periphery’ (p. 14), ‘not only public ownership’ (p. 15), ‘not only residential’ (p. 16). It suggests viewing it as a relevant part of a ‘common heritage’ (p. 17) that is worth looking at with new attention.

The stigma consolidated on public housing neighbourhoods is one of the main questions posed by Sandra Parvu in dealing with four significant large French housing estates built between 1954 and 1973. The title of her book, Grand ensembles en situation, suggests a double meaning regarding both space and time (situating grands ensembles/grands ensembles in situation). On the one hand her research is related to the context where these large housing settlements were placed and points to the local roots of these mostly centralised interventions; on the other hand it refers to the process of elaboration and implementation of administrative, professional and technical decisions, focusing in particular on the history of the construction site. This double perspective allows the book to provide an interesting point of observation on a phase of the life of these buildings that is usually overlooked by the literature that mainly focuses on other phases: the design, the policy-making procedures or the way the inhabitants live and transform these sites. The attention paid to the time of construction, which was marked by strong negotiations among different actors with different requests, helps to highlight the economic, political, formal and temporal shifts produced by the stakeholders in this crucial moment.

The narrow focus gives the author the chance to counter the consolidated image of the grands ensembles as an exclusively top-down intervention that was prejudicial for the autonomy of the territories involved: ‘did the projects implemented by the State effectively contribute to a simplification of the territory or did they instead increase its complexity?’ (p. 22). Following this path Parvu recognises the ‘terrain’ (ground) as the ‘paradox of grands ensembles’ (p. 23), in a sort of ‘spatial schizophrenia’ characterised by ‘a plurality of territorial rationales’ (p. 166). The book delves into the mostly neglected intermediate position between ‘the plan’ and ‘the place’, where the realm of the contexts, deeply rooted in the sites, had to cope with the abstract network-shaped images promoted in those years by the aménagement du territoire (territorial governance policies). The ‘operations, negotiations and exchanges’ related to ‘the realisation of each object’ (p. 22) are followed through four case studies: the grands ensembles of Briey-en-Forêt (1954–62), Bagnols-sur-Cèze (1956–61), La Courneuve (1958–1973) and the Zone à urbaniser en priorité (ZUP, priority urbanisation zone) of Bures-Orsay (1958–73). These provide a wide collection of the ‘hesitations and detours that occurred in the realisation of a great scale project’ (p. 171). They cover a wide range of the periodisation of ‘les Trente Glorieuses’ (the thirty glorious years) where the so-called ‘hard French’ – as Bruno Vayssière called it – represented the architectural language of the modernisation process, an architectural imaginary that is still highly controversial.Footnote ⁸ Such objects are observed in the articulated relationships among powers, focusing on spatial models, administrative and political actors at a central and local level, and retracing the web of an articulated network of professionals. The book seems to be based primarily on the already abundant literature on this topic, with the addition of sources such as national and local archives, architects’ and politicians’ archives, private papers and interviews with some of the protagonists of these stories. Nevertheless the sources used are not always clearly referred to in the book and it is at times difficult to follow the ways the research was constructed. Both in the introduction and conclusion, the author positions her book in the recurrent debate about the demolition and reconstruction of such grands ensembles that has once again come back into the limelight in France since 2000.

The issue of demolition brings us to another theme: the conservation of the built heritage of the intensive phase of public intervention in the building sector dating from the second half of the twentieth century. The debate on this topic is still mostly polarised between the categories of success and failure of post-war political and economic projects; and these categories are often connected to specific architectural images. In particular the idea that a strong correspondence exists between modernist style, modernisation process and massive state interventions has sometimes prevented a sensible judgment. Robin Hood Gardens Re-visions, edited by Alan Powers, deals with this problem in relation to the work of two of the best known architects of the British post-war years, namely Alison Smithson (1928–1993) and Peter Smithson (1923–2003). The object at stake is the Robin Hood Gardens estate, completed in 1972 in Poplar, East London. The book is the product of an ongoing campaign promoted by the Twentieth Century Society (C20) and is aimed at preventing the demolition of this council house complex.Footnote ⁹ The owner of the estate is the Tower Hamlets London Borough Council, the local authority that in recent years promoted a regeneration plan that proposes the demolition of the two slab-blocks and the green hill constituting Robin Hood Gardens. Admittedly, in the present condition, the complex asks for a consistent programme of refurbishment: ‘there is no wonder that residents feel desperate for action . . . A solution that improves their quality of life is urgently needed, but demolition is not the answer’ (p. 11), writes Catherine Croft, director of the Society. C20 has been campaigning since 2007 to have the complex listed by English Heritage, but the request was turned down in 2008, as well as a further appeal in 2009. Robin Hood Gardens estate poses a ‘controversial conservation case’: it raises the problematic question of ‘the boundary of “heritage”’ emerging from ‘post-war listing’ (p. 15), and it casts light on the considerable mismatches of perception, interpretation and expectation of groups and individuals involved in the conservation/demolition debate, such as local authorities, stakeholders, inhabitants and civil society. The book includes a series of supporting letters from notorious figures of the architectural international panorama such as Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, and it contains several contributions on the history of the site and complex, as well as on the significance of this building in the whole intellectual and professional work of Alison and Peter Smithson. The book is illustrated by pictures taken by the photographer Ioana Marinescu, and by a selection of pictures, plans and designs from the Smithsons’ archives. The central part of the book is dedicated to the complete transcription of the television documentary ‘The Smithsons on Housing’ directed by the two architects for the BBC in 1970.

The campaign promoted by C20 argues that the Robin Hood Gardens estate, composed by two slab-blocks respectively of ten and seven storeys, ‘embodies significant ideas’ developed by the Smithsons that are ‘absent from their other buildings’ (p. 15). These significant ideas include the so-called ‘streets in the sky’, where the exploration of the streetscape conducted by the Smithsons since the 1950s was interpreted by the design of the internal roads giving access to the flats. This is just one of the influential intellectual elaborations by the two British architects who were surrounded by a ‘continuing international reputation’ (p. 15) during the second half of the twentieth century and who played a recognised role in the post-war re-elaboration of the principles of the modern movement in architecture and urban design.

The modernisation issue in its relationship to modernism in architecture and design is the fil rouge guiding the volume Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, edited by Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. The exploration of ‘Swedish modernism’ is related to the rise of modern architecture as a vehicle of the ‘Social-Democratic model’. Positioning itself in the wider debate of architectural history on modernity, the book focuses on architectural and interior design, seen as expressions of a changing way of life where mass consumption and individualisation played a central role. The aim of the research is to provide ‘a more nuanced view of “Modernism” that shows to what extent it must always be understood on the basis of a local context’ (p. 25), as written by the editors in the introduction. The book collects a wide range of international contributions spanning from the ‘metaphor of “house”’ (p. 25), to ‘the role of an emerging elite consisting of architects and intellectuals, the “Social Engineers”, who were instrumental in shaping the idea of a rational social order’ (p. 26); from the domestic interiors in 1940s Sweden to the design of a ‘taste’ in ‘domestic consumption’ (p. 112) and the building of ‘modern leisure’ (p. 123). The research dedicates a strong interest to the symbolic and cultural aspects of the construction of the Swedish welfare state, presented as a mixed cocktail of idealized images, social representations and emerging sets of values, where family members constituted a cornerstone in the process of modernisation and in the diffusion of consumer society. Women's roles in this context are observed through the lens of interior design that emerged in the inter-war period – as explored by Penny Sparke in her contribution – and which strongly influenced the Swedish social imaginary in subsequent years. The tension between the universalistic ambitions of welfare state policies and the emergence of a ‘differentiated market and the construction of a personalised consumer’ based on ‘standardisation and personalisation’ (p. 74) is discussed in the essay by Helena Mattsson, who outlines the figure of the new citizen as a ‘reasonable consumer building on the concept of a “reasonable planned economy”’ (p. 74). In this context private space, as argued by the author, ‘was displaced into the centre of economical politics’ (p. 79). Such a superposition of the categories of needs and desires is observed mainly through the domestic scape: ‘in the Swedish welfare state the home became essential for the production of a new type of socialism and a new subject’ (p. 97). The welfare state is presented as ‘a family affair’ (p. 188), as Wallenstein states in his contribution, where the spaces of increasingly separated public and private spheres were the result of a socio-political project addressed to a ‘regenerated spatial order’ (p. 196).

All these books discuss welfare state traditions and their spatial legacies from different points of view. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of the factors involved in the processes of space-making, the spatial perspective on welfare state legacy represents a slippery field of research, for which it is difficult to provide a precise definition. This is apparent from the wide range of themes arising from the books: the architectural discourse of modernism with its symbolic and political implications, the spatial impact of economic planning, the societal and lifestyle models behind housing programmes, and the conflictual debates on common goods with their consolidated images and shared judgments.

The five books aim, in different ways and with different purposes, to question the categories of success and failure that have had a strong influence on the interpretations of the social, political and economic effects of the welfare state project. They show an increasing attention to the spatial dimension of the welfare state, observed through the lens of urban planning and architecture, through the exploration of the built environment and the analysis of spatial images that have guided the physical transformation of post-war Europe. Such attention is focused in turn on the past, the present and the future of this legacy, and respectively addressed through three prevailing themes: images, interpretations and strategies.

First, the close observation of the social representations and expectations that were embodied in images related to the house, the city or the territory constitutes a common starting point for the majority of these volumes: they all stress the important role played by backgrounds, prototypical narratives and more or less implicit references underlying welfare state programmes. Second, many books considered here insist on the need to make more complex the current interpretations of this urban legacy and make for a more nuanced reading of many of its aspects. They disassemble existing long-term interpretations by taking a closer look at processes and objects and by comparing different sources and situations: this allows them to question some consolidated images while formulating more suitable tools of analysis. Third, these books trace a possible strategy for the future of European cities, while selecting a number of thematic cores, both in a theoretic and operative dimension. They reflect on the heritage stratified in European cities and their surrounding territories by welfare state projects in terms of urban spaces, services and infrastructures, and show that reuse, recapitalisation and valorisation may represent a remarkable starting point for a ‘re-vision’ of the current urban agenda.