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So a UK mind, I would describe Oslo as a very, very, very, very big town in comparison to like,

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for example, London at nine or 18 million, depending on how you count it and then Oslo 600000 people.

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And up until the 1870s,

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it's a relatively small city and it's grown so rapidly in a short period of time that you end up with kind of the old west Oslo,

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which is, in my mind, kind of lots of villas, some shops and around and around the underground stations and stuff.

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But it doesn't have the kind of squares and the more kind of European centric planning.

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It's more of a kind of a very large sprawl of villas and housing blocks mixed and lots of good housing schemes.

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And then East Oslo,

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you have to come the workers districts and then these very ambitious post-war housing projects that build across the west of East Oslo.

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It feels like a very big town to me.

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This is the seventh episode of the Disobedient Buildings podcast and an AHRC funded project at the University of Oxford.

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Our focus is on the everyday lives of people living in eating blocks of flats in three European countries the UK, Romania and Norway.

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My name is Anna Ulrike Anderson, and today I take you back to Oslo,

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where I speak with Tom Davies from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, talking about the preservation of post-war architecture.

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By talking about the history of buildings with people and about the Connections that they have their different stories and narratives,

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you start to break out of that singular narrative that can be quite negative.

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The accepted narrative on post-war housing up until a few years ago was not the most positive and is by doing that that we're starting

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to view communities as diverse groups of people as they are in other areas where these ideals then when when these buildings were built,

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posed for the welfare state and the welfare ideas, the welfare state, the main agenda,

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which is even possibly even stronger in no way because of everything that happened in the Second World War.

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So the total devastation of large parts of the country and the pressing need before

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that to improve housing time was in the U.K. what was regarded as slum housing.

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There's a very strong drive, a very socialist drive straight after the war in both countries to just provide housing,

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and you get a very strong group of architects and planners in no way is actually just providing new areas.

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And then within that, the kind of the brutalist thing which brutalism is really a tricky term and not an easy one to pin down.

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But a lot of that comes from architects who was starting to work with the idea of

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designing for community in that period and the idea of the rise of the individual.

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So what starts to come in this kind of socialist welfare housing,

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which is more about kind of good standard, very good, good standard interiors and layouts,

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and high quality buildings for everybody as quickly as possible to improve housing conditions

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and then a new direction that emerges in that's looking for individual and also the community.

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It's a very complex period in the way that develops, basically that you get that socialist provision at the gaining diversification and individualism.

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And then you start to see things like the grand ensembles of the 1960s won't be

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housing with all the other amenities and wonderful things all mixed in together.

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What I find so intriguing as well about your work is that it is the comparison between the UK and Norway,

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which obviously we are very interested in as well.

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And I wonder then how what did you some?

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What did you find out then about this the difference between the UK and Norway when it comes to these buildings and the policies,

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the housing models are totally different in the UK.

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Council was built build housing and then tenants basically lease it from the council.

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And then from the 1980s, you have the right to buy scheme, which then passes things over into private ownership.

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It's got a very long story short in Norway, which is a kind of the main State House bill.

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What was the State House built? It became a housing agency in 1939, the Jacob Christie chair,

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and he's one of the two founders set up a model where it would be subsidised ownership housing.

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So they were building large housing complexes with collective living models where people were then effectively,

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they bought housing subsidised prices, which was ALEC, which was allocated to auctions when your housing is owned by somebody else.

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So the council in the UK says you have leaseholders and you have tenants.

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There's more of an exposure for the residents as a whole than when everybody owns their property.

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And so the poorest block or collectively one of the collective living model that was set up in Norway is going to be starts in the

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thirties with a shift that goes on when all boss is created that they moved from what was more akin to the UK system of the state.

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Building and leasing out housing to ownership and ownership.

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Base model that that anchors all the people in the property is owning an individual

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flats and you and their conditions in the mall the way you can't own more than one unit.

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So it's impossible to speculate and buy up the whole building.

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And when you're talking about large suburbs where there could be seven 800 900 units and stuff,

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then it makes redevelopment very, very difficult in terms of speculative buy up and redevelopment in blocks.

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It's really interesting to see how these very, you know, these very different systems come to play.

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I mean, both in in what is built and how that is being built, but also when it comes, you know, preservation and and maintenance.

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That's something I've been looking at quite a lot, actually, because obviously you have this thing that when the council owned your building,

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it's before into the council to do maintenance and supply things.

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But then with with the ownership model, if it's boring. Slog where you over the right to live in a building that you don't own the building,

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you own it collectively as a group that you need to have good competence within the committee.

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For example, the residents committee that you need to have enough people with skills to tackle things like planning issues,

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maintenance with this brutalist buildings,

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the buildings that are built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, even the buildings in the 80s are actually ageing,

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you know, so it's how long a building lives and how much maintenance does come with them.

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But the thing with the kind of the idea of ageing I used to architecture, I think a lot of the challenges are same as any buildings.

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All the management models or the housing models that it's built.

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So that, for example, if you've got a council that owns your building,

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you largely don't have any money or aren't interested in maintaining and maintaining properties, then things don't get done for long periods of time.

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And then you get the kind of emergency maintenance. That's that simple fact that councils will do bits and pieces.

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Sometimes they do it when they have to. Sometimes they do things in advance, but often it's a kind of a crisis.

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Firefighting and the building has been left to park.

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Building has been left too long and then they come in when they have to do and do what they've got money for.

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And the same thing on the other side of it, when you've got residents committees trying to organise and maintaining their own buildings,

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to be honest, all residents committee here haven't done anything for quite a few years, which is why we've got a lot to do now.

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So I wouldn't draw a distinction between newer buildings and older buildings, necessarily in terms of their longevity.

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It's more the models and the way they managed that determines what state they're in.

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It's an incredibly complicated picture. The cool part of the Ph.D. is looking at what kind of strategies can we have protecting heritage?

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And so when you're talking about trying to conserve and manage the heritage significance of places that are living communities,

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newer buildings and the idea that they they need to have flexibility to change,

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use, update things improve, we're thinking more in terms of strategic heritage protection,

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rather than kind of saying, OK, we need to make sure that no materials change. You're looking more at the essence of the place.

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So what what are the reasons that it was built?

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What was the aim terms of particularly these ones that are very community focussed?

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So there's no idea to create spaces that work for people and facilitate different aspects

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of living from kind of private life to public life and then how that's developed over time.

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And then how the communities have adopted them over time.

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So the architects and planners often have quite quite clear ideas about this space could be used for this

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and this space would be this good design in them often allow for flexibility in that in the design.

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What's critical in the way that communities have adopted them while they've lived there is that those those intentions get subverted.

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Spaces get used differently. That's where it needs to be from a community lens,

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basically that you need to be talking to the community about their experience of the buildings, how they how they relate to them.

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And then by talking about the origins of them and their planning intentions and what the ideas of the design were.

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So that gives you that kind of evolution.

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And so those intentions and how they how they change with that adoption and how we can then think about moving them further.

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You were talking about how we do,

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we do adopt and and how people who who live in the buildings might think very differently about the original plans than the architect might have done.

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There's this one photograph, and this is taken from the living room towards the west of Oslo.

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And you see a very large windows, some plants in the window sill and then the door that opens up to the balcony.

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And then in the balcony railing you have glass tiles.

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And the original design for this block was that railing on the balconies was concrete,

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so you didn't have the same light coming through into the balcony and into the living room.

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And this was changed, I think, in the 90s. But at least it was changed.

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You know, the blocks were built in the 60s, so for a very long time they had big concrete balconies.

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But then when they needed to update them,

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the wood itself in the board in the cooperative decided that they wanted more light in and they did want more the glass instead of the concrete.

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And I think you know the. It's a nice example of exactly what you're saying, but you know, these buildings,

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they do change, it's the idea of managing the changes that you're making.

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It becomes a consensus based thing. There is a consensus based thing.

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And then if you're building buildings that are built for community,

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it makes sense to me that know community should be making those decisions in terms of updates and changes and improvements.

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But you temperate by having these, the historic understanding of the buildings and sense of place,

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the way that in older areas of cities that people living really look to the nice wooden old wooden house.

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Everybody knows that as a very strong identity and a very strong character, the people who live there are very aware of the history of their area.

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So by kind of promoting that story with post-war housing where you talk about the importance of this project didn't just happen overnight,

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people saw it and planned it and when was the best we can do.

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So we asked those of people to write us letters and answering the questions, What are you worried about?

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There's a letter that I received from one of the participants who was describing me worried about, you know, the city's changing.

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Where are the the population that are over 50 years old in Oslo, you know,

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and he's answering and saying, you know, yeah, they all live outside of Oslo.

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And I think it's always something interesting about the idea of these four buildings that were built, some of them in the 60s.

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And although you do, you have habitants who have lived in the buildings since then.

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There are fewer and fewer.

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Oh, how you know, when it comes to communities and and protecting communities, then also obviously making sure it is an area that welcomes all ages.

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And then there's a few things that the way the housing was built in, post-war housing was built, particularly in East Oslo.

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You have all these suburban schemes, which are basically providing upgraded much better housing.

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London and other UK cities don't have set their post-war housing is about repairing this city,

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and it's kind of more of an urban dentistry of kind of going in and kind of knocking down an area and redeveloping one project within an area,

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and then it connects more to the neighbouring areas. Whereas Oslo is more kind of we've got all this expense to build and we'll build new projects,

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move people out here, then we'll knock down the houses and rebuild them.

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And then that doesn't happen. And you end up with the kind of the gap for the hiatus of the 70s.

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While the city renewal programme gets moving and they start to get that in community pick up,

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the work really look like it's developed and other areas gets developed into a kind

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of 19th century block renewal and shifting over to collective ownership models.

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And he was still here, stayed other people moved in. The housing wasn't as attractive as new high standard housing and suburbs.

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It's those challenges of trying some rent and you want to improve conditions in an area and regenerate areas, but then you don't want to gentrified.

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You don't want to take it over into an eye into what we're seeing a lot in this area at the moment where it becomes.

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We've got a very high turnover of residents in our building, the other buildings in the area that people move into a few years,

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meet partners have one child or whatever, then relocate somewhere much bigger.

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What's going on with post-war housing at the moment that we've gone through a period where there was the kind of racism is big about concrete and that

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a kind of poor quality prefab construction and things that there's been a lot of say a lot of mistruths have been kind of re-evaluated in the last 10,

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15 years or so. And there's also with the kind of high, high profile cases of communities fighting redevelopment and things like that in London.

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Yeah, we're getting better at recognising the kind of the diversity and complexity of communities in post-war post-war housing.

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But then I suppose that's probably the same with every epoch, isn't it, that every period of housing and redevelop a new development,

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there's a period where that phase of development and the people who live in, it's the communities in it are then tested.

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It's tested of it and kind of does it. Where does it fit into our narrative, you know, into our collective narrative before?

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Make sure there a lot of things that are valuable are better understood before they're lost.

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Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by myself and produced by Jack Soper.

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If you want to hear more, go to our website WWW Disobedient Buildings, dot com or search for a podcast where you normally find your podcast.

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In the next episode in Inge Daniels, Gabriela

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Nicolescu and myself offer some concluding remarks on our first series of the podcast for the Disobedient Buildings project.

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First up, the welfare state.