So a UK mind, I would describe Oslo as a very, very, very, very big town in comparison to like,
for example, London at nine or 18 million, depending on how you count it and then Oslo 600000 people.
And up until the 1870s,
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,
which is, in my mind, kind of lots of villas, some shops and around and around the underground stations and stuff.
But it doesn't have the kind of squares and the more kind of European centric planning.
It's more of a kind of a very large sprawl of villas and housing blocks mixed and lots of good housing schemes.
And then East Oslo,
you have to come the workers districts and then these very ambitious post-war housing projects that build across the west of East Oslo.
It feels like a very big town to me.
This is the seventh episode of the Disobedient Buildings podcast and an AHRC funded project at the University of Oxford.
Our focus is on the everyday lives of people living in eating blocks of flats in three European countries the UK, Romania and Norway.
My name is Anna Ulrike Anderson, and today I take you back to Oslo,
where I speak with Tom Davies from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, talking about the preservation of post-war architecture.
By talking about the history of buildings with people and about the Connections that they have their different stories and narratives,
you start to break out of that singular narrative that can be quite negative.
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
to view communities as diverse groups of people as they are in other areas where these ideals then when when these buildings were built,
posed for the welfare state and the welfare ideas, the welfare state, the main agenda,
which is even possibly even stronger in no way because of everything that happened in the Second World War.
So the total devastation of large parts of the country and the pressing need before
that to improve housing time was in the U.K. what was regarded as slum housing.
There's a very strong drive, a very socialist drive straight after the war in both countries to just provide housing,
and you get a very strong group of architects and planners in no way is actually just providing new areas.
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.
But a lot of that comes from architects who was starting to work with the idea of
designing for community in that period and the idea of the rise of the individual.
So what starts to come in this kind of socialist welfare housing,
which is more about kind of good standard, very good, good standard interiors and layouts,
and high quality buildings for everybody as quickly as possible to improve housing conditions
and then a new direction that emerges in that's looking for individual and also the community.
It's a very complex period in the way that develops, basically that you get that socialist provision at the gaining diversification and individualism.
And then you start to see things like the grand ensembles of the 1960s won't be
housing with all the other amenities and wonderful things all mixed in together.
What I find so intriguing as well about your work is that it is the comparison between the UK and Norway,
which obviously we are very interested in as well.
And I wonder then how what did you some?
What did you find out then about this the difference between the UK and Norway when it comes to these buildings and the policies,
the housing models are totally different in the UK.
Council was built build housing and then tenants basically lease it from the council.
And then from the 1980s, you have the right to buy scheme, which then passes things over into private ownership.
It's got a very long story short in Norway, which is a kind of the main State House bill.
What was the State House built? It became a housing agency in 1939, the Jacob Christie chair,
and he's one of the two founders set up a model where it would be subsidised ownership housing.
So they were building large housing complexes with collective living models where people were then effectively,
they bought housing subsidised prices, which was ALEC, which was allocated to auctions when your housing is owned by somebody else.
So the council in the UK says you have leaseholders and you have tenants.
There's more of an exposure for the residents as a whole than when everybody owns their property.
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
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.
Building and leasing out housing to ownership and ownership.
Base model that that anchors all the people in the property is owning an individual
flats and you and their conditions in the mall the way you can't own more than one unit.
So it's impossible to speculate and buy up the whole building.
And when you're talking about large suburbs where there could be seven 800 900 units and stuff,
then it makes redevelopment very, very difficult in terms of speculative buy up and redevelopment in blocks.
It's really interesting to see how these very, you know, these very different systems come to play.
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.
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,
it's before into the council to do maintenance and supply things.
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,
you own it collectively as a group that you need to have good competence within the committee.
For example, the residents committee that you need to have enough people with skills to tackle things like planning issues,
maintenance with this brutalist buildings,
the buildings that are built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, even the buildings in the 80s are actually ageing,
you know, so it's how long a building lives and how much maintenance does come with them.
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.
All the management models or the housing models that it's built.
So that, for example, if you've got a council that owns your building,
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.
And then you get the kind of emergency maintenance. That's that simple fact that councils will do bits and pieces.
Sometimes they do it when they have to. Sometimes they do things in advance, but often it's a kind of a crisis.
Firefighting and the building has been left to park.
Building has been left too long and then they come in when they have to do and do what they've got money for.
And the same thing on the other side of it, when you've got residents committees trying to organise and maintaining their own buildings,
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.
So I wouldn't draw a distinction between newer buildings and older buildings, necessarily in terms of their longevity.
It's more the models and the way they managed that determines what state they're in.
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?
And so when you're talking about trying to conserve and manage the heritage significance of places that are living communities,
newer buildings and the idea that they they need to have flexibility to change,
use, update things improve, we're thinking more in terms of strategic heritage protection,
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.
So what what are the reasons that it was built?
What was the aim terms of particularly these ones that are very community focussed?
So there's no idea to create spaces that work for people and facilitate different aspects
of living from kind of private life to public life and then how that's developed over time.
And then how the communities have adopted them over time.
So the architects and planners often have quite quite clear ideas about this space could be used for this
and this space would be this good design in them often allow for flexibility in that in the design.
What's critical in the way that communities have adopted them while they've lived there is that those those intentions get subverted.
Spaces get used differently. That's where it needs to be from a community lens,
basically that you need to be talking to the community about their experience of the buildings, how they how they relate to them.
And then by talking about the origins of them and their planning intentions and what the ideas of the design were.
So that gives you that kind of evolution.
And so those intentions and how they how they change with that adoption and how we can then think about moving them further.
You were talking about how we do,
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.
There's this one photograph, and this is taken from the living room towards the west of Oslo.
And you see a very large windows, some plants in the window sill and then the door that opens up to the balcony.
And then in the balcony railing you have glass tiles.
And the original design for this block was that railing on the balconies was concrete,
so you didn't have the same light coming through into the balcony and into the living room.
And this was changed, I think, in the 90s. But at least it was changed.
You know, the blocks were built in the 60s, so for a very long time they had big concrete balconies.
But then when they needed to update them,
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.
And I think you know the. It's a nice example of exactly what you're saying, but you know, these buildings,
they do change, it's the idea of managing the changes that you're making.
It becomes a consensus based thing. There is a consensus based thing.
And then if you're building buildings that are built for community,
it makes sense to me that know community should be making those decisions in terms of updates and changes and improvements.
But you temperate by having these, the historic understanding of the buildings and sense of place,
the way that in older areas of cities that people living really look to the nice wooden old wooden house.
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.
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,
people saw it and planned it and when was the best we can do.
So we asked those of people to write us letters and answering the questions, What are you worried about?
There's a letter that I received from one of the participants who was describing me worried about, you know, the city's changing.
Where are the the population that are over 50 years old in Oslo, you know,
and he's answering and saying, you know, yeah, they all live outside of Oslo.
And I think it's always something interesting about the idea of these four buildings that were built, some of them in the 60s.
And although you do, you have habitants who have lived in the buildings since then.
There are fewer and fewer.
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.
And then there's a few things that the way the housing was built in, post-war housing was built, particularly in East Oslo.
You have all these suburban schemes, which are basically providing upgraded much better housing.
London and other UK cities don't have set their post-war housing is about repairing this city,
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,
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,
move people out here, then we'll knock down the houses and rebuild them.
And then that doesn't happen. And you end up with the kind of the gap for the hiatus of the 70s.
While the city renewal programme gets moving and they start to get that in community pick up,
the work really look like it's developed and other areas gets developed into a kind
of 19th century block renewal and shifting over to collective ownership models.
And he was still here, stayed other people moved in. The housing wasn't as attractive as new high standard housing and suburbs.
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.
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.
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,
meet partners have one child or whatever, then relocate somewhere much bigger.
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
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,
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.
Yeah, we're getting better at recognising the kind of the diversity and complexity of communities in post-war post-war housing.
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,
there's a period where that phase of development and the people who live in, it's the communities in it are then tested.
It's tested of it and kind of does it. Where does it fit into our narrative, you know, into our collective narrative before?
Make sure there a lot of things that are valuable are better understood before they're lost.
Thank you for listening to the Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by myself and produced by Jack Soper.
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.
In the next episode in Inge Daniels, Gabriela
Nicolescu and myself offer some concluding remarks on our first series of the podcast for the Disobedient Buildings project.
First up, the welfare state.