‘Monsieur, I have a wife and child, a house and a garden, et alors?’, Sıla Karataş

Abstract: The Marshall Plan, officially operated from 1948 to 1952 for reconstruction and development in Europe and non-European countries such as Turkey and Switzerland, marks the Cold War economic-political and foreign policy of the US. Referred by its bureaucrats as “the democratic way of self-help and cooperation”, the Marshall Plan publicized notions such as mutual aid, self-help, cooperation, democracy, and freedom to build the Western Bloc against the so-called “Soviet threat”.
Devoting specific attention to labour affairs to prevent strikes and communist tendencies, the US engaged in workers’ housing production in Marshall Plan countries through financial and technical assistance programs. Introducing the notion of “free labor” towards “non-communism” and exporting the New Deal manner of housing through labour advisers and housing experts, the US assisted labour unions in founding housing cooperatives. Be detached, twin or row in form, a house with a garden offered an archetype for the “good life” of the “free labor”. Promoting a pre-industrial community and nuclear family life in an industrial setting for wage workers, the US instrumentalised workers’ housing as a subtle mechanism for postwar Americanization. This presentation attempts to portray the Marshall Plan’s workers’ housing program put into practice in France and Turkey in a strongly similar layout. It argues that the reincarnation of the garden suburb as a self-built, single-family housing against the state-led multi-family housing of the interwar Europe and postwar USSR led to a paradigmatic shift in housing development as well as design, construction, and domestic life.
Casting an authorship to workers in not only land provision but also construction, this housing model pioneered the current real-estate development, as it channelled inhabitants into informal systems of capital and property development through construction. The presentation discusses this postwar typology of house with a garden referring to housing for miners, textile workers, heavy industry workers and for construction workers built by the US-assisted labour union activity in France and Turkey.