Introduction

The previous chapter gave an account of the historical development of large housing estates, referring also to the problems of these estates in the process of their ‘natural’ development. This chapter features a separate discussion of the period of privatisation (starting in the early 1980s in Great Britain and continuing on a large scale in the 1990s in the post-socialist countries), since this highly political process has had a profound effect on the future perspectives of the housing estates in these countries.

As previously outlined, the large housing estates, which are the subject of this book, have a range of elements in common. The estates were built at the same time; they were built by either a local government authority, or the state, or not-for-profit organisations; and they represented contemporary, state-of-the-art, professional architectural and engineering views on residential development. The estates also had their differences: some were the first, or even the only, modern not-for-profit housing available in a period of recovery after the Second World War and in economies with no tradition of social-rented housing; others were a new element in established social- and public-rented housing provision. In these cases the estates did not necessarily offer the most desirable dwellings or locations and this drawback often became more apparent over time. In some cases this generation of public and social-rented housing was targeted at different social groups and had a different place in the policy agenda: rehousing households from urban renewal or slum housing neighbourhoods rather than meeting general housing needs.

All these elements of similarity and difference existed when the estates were built. The standing and quality of these estates, however, is not purely attributable to these initial characteristics. The history of maintenance and repair has affected the quality and attractiveness of the estates. At the same time the characteristics of the households living in the estates has changed and it has been argued that in some countries these estates have been more profoundly affected by the process of residualisation than other estates.

This chapter is concerned with a further element in the changing nature of these estates: the changes in patterns of ownership and control associated with privatisation.