Trzy lekcje [Three Neighborhoods]

The essay deals with everyday life in modernist public housing neighborhoods through three case studies: the Pruitt-Igoe neighborhood in St. Louis (MO), main symbol of the alleged failure of modernist architecture; the Corbusian district of Firminy-Vert in Saint Etienne (France); and the Arlequin neighborhood in Grenoble (France). These neighborhoods were the subject of socio-anthropological researches that shed light on the relationship between designed space and lived space. After reviewing these studies the paper discusses the limits of narratives attributing modernist architecture an inevitable social failure. The main policy implication of such reading is that regeneration policies in modernist public housing neighborhoods should be sensitive to the specificity and uniqueness of their social realities, avoiding the simplistic and socially traumatic solutions that derive from the equation ‘modernism equals failure’.