TY - JOUR
T1 - The road to upward mobility
T2 - Urbanity and the creation of a new middle class in postwar west germany
AU - Staub, Alexandra
N1 - Funding Information:
The Economic Cooperation Administration was a United States Government agency funded by the Marshall Plan and set up to administer the European recovery program. In the summer of 1951, the Federal Republic’s Ministry of Housing and the ECA Mission jointly put out a request for proposals in which architects and building contractors would work together to submit binding offers for new housing projects to be located in fifteen West German cities: Aachen, Braunschweig, Bremen, Frankfurt, Freiburg, Hannover, Kaufbeuren, Krefeld, Lübeck, Mainz, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, Reutlingen, and Stuttgart. The cities had been selected according to economic criteria: all had industries considered “important for Germany’s development” and the desired housing was designed to accommodate workers for those industries. Future residents were restricted to those perceived as serving the country’s economic recovery: skilled workers who could not find appropriate work where they were living or whose jobs were a considerable distance from their homes.
PY - 2014/5
Y1 - 2014/5
N2 - In the years after World War II, West Germany (after 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) experienced a severe housing shortage coupled with a demand - unambiguously conveyed by the occupying powers - to "modernize" and socially restructure. With war-torn cities needing extensive repair, politicians and planners made choices that affected not only the physical but also the social landscape, with the federal government ultimately using urban policy in an attempt to redefine identity and help shape a new middle class. This article traces this process by examining three postwar policy directions - suburbanization, urban high-rise housing, and automobile ownership - both as an economic driver and as a first toehold on the ladder to upward mobility. I argue that not only did these policy foci fundamentally change the FRG's urban landscape, their physical manifestations became central to the nation's often-acrimonious debate over societal modernization.
AB - In the years after World War II, West Germany (after 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) experienced a severe housing shortage coupled with a demand - unambiguously conveyed by the occupying powers - to "modernize" and socially restructure. With war-torn cities needing extensive repair, politicians and planners made choices that affected not only the physical but also the social landscape, with the federal government ultimately using urban policy in an attempt to redefine identity and help shape a new middle class. This article traces this process by examining three postwar policy directions - suburbanization, urban high-rise housing, and automobile ownership - both as an economic driver and as a first toehold on the ladder to upward mobility. I argue that not only did these policy foci fundamentally change the FRG's urban landscape, their physical manifestations became central to the nation's often-acrimonious debate over societal modernization.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84899566655&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84899566655&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0096144213516081
DO - 10.1177/0096144213516081
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84899566655
SN - 0096-1442
VL - 40
SP - 563
EP - 584
JO - Journal of Urban History
JF - Journal of Urban History
IS - 3
ER -
