Miles Glendinning’s Mass Housing is a monumental history of one of the most comprehensive global enterprises of modernity: radical modernization through housing for the vast majority. It covers a long period, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, offering a renewed historiography of modern architecture revolving around mass housing. This comprehensive work is based on archival and field research of state-produced mass housing on four continents, encompassing varied political economic contexts and languages, with attention to emergencies, deep transitions in state apparatuses, and political economy. The result is a grand narrative, echoing Peter Hall’s Cities of Tomorrow (2014), Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961), and Lawrence Vale’s From the Puritans to the Projects (2000), works that have had immense impacts on the discipline of urban history.1 Following this tradition, Mass Housing is as ambitious as its inspirations.
Mass housing is a perplexing object of inquiry for architectural historians,...
University of California Press