A Study on the Social Background and the Structure of Post-War High-Rise Housing Provision in Britain

This paper overviewed the history of high-rise housing provisional structure emerged as the main method of the public sector housing in UK, and analyzed the social interaction between the agents involved in the structure of solving housing shortage problems in relation to the postwar city reconstruction. Since World War II, public sector housing in the UK has been provided in the form of new urban development and redevelopment of central urban areas under the strong central government’s intervention with housing subsidy policies. During this period, the public sector s housing supply supported by the central government, was especially achieved through the construction of high-rise apartments. Construction of high-rise apartment blocks in the public sector shown as the boom of the 1960s, was driven by the central government s housing policy initiatives combined with the influence of modern architecture and the construction industry’s industrial drives for industrialized housing. In addition, complexity of political, economic and social factors accelerated high-rise construction boom due to the shortage of residential land, the limitations of the traditional housing supply system and the use of housing subsidies to local governments. After the collapse of Ronan Point high-rise block in London in 1967, the government s public housing policy centered on high-rise apartments began to take a sharp turn. In the late 1960s, a series of research found that high-rise block construction did not help reducing housing cost of land price per housing unit, and also that high-rise construction costs were not effective in achieving high-density housing supplies. After the war, the public sector s housing provision in the UK was characterized by the type of housing and its supply system, but it should be noted that this is not simply a matter understandable from the physical aspect of housing density due to lack of land. Rather, major impetus for the high-rise housing construction boom results from the multi-layered complexity of modern ideology of architecture, political interests of central and local governments, economic share of construction companies and they should be understood as a cross-section of the sociality of housing supply and consumption.