Heritage Protection as Progressive Urbanism? Defending the Legacies of the Welfare State
In England the ‘Post-war listing’ programme has positioned state heritage protection as an unlikely advocate and defender (sometimes of last resort) of the diminishing material and symbolic legacy of the architecture of the welfare state from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (While & Pendlebury, 2024). The use of new architectural technologies and planning ideologies to develop public buildings, including worker housing, during the mid-twentieth century is an important moment in the planning and architectural history of many countries, operating under a wide range of social and economic systems. The legacies of this period are very different between different countries, but in many cases some examples of such buildings are being considered and protected as heritage. This opens-up important issues of how this period of planning history is framed, understood and valued within contemporary society. For example, do we consider material legacies of this period as important purely in terms of design, or is the social intent of the period of equal importance in our appreciation of such environments today?
The aim of this project is to extend the work undertaken by the researcher in England to the German context, in the expectation that the different political context of both the creation of welfare state architecture and its subsequent political positioning will have both elements of transnational overlap but also significant difference. Of particular interest in the case of Germany is the different histories – and trajectories – between the east and west of the country. A significant part of this process, alongside undertaking preliminary empirical research, will be to develop collaborative relationships with German researchers to enable a sustained programme of investigation, extending beyond the period of the Fellowship.
During his stay at the ZZF Professor John Pendlebury is a guest at the Leibniz Research Alliance ‘Value of the Past’.
John Pendlebury is Professor of Urban Conservation, Centre for Heritage, Newcastle University, UK. He researches on issues of heritage, conservation, development, planning and governance, focusing on the interface between contemporary cultural heritage policy and other policy processes, as well as undertaking more historical work on how conceptions of heritage have been balanced with modernising forces. Principal publications include Conservation in the Age of Consensus (2009) and the edited collections Valuing Historic Environments (2009 with Lisanne Gibson) and Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape (2015 with Erdem Erten and Peter Larkham). His most recent book, with Jules Brown, is Conserving the Historic Environment (2021).