Social housing estates — as developed either by local states (viz. public/ municipal housing) or voluntary sector housing associations — became a prominent feature of the twentieth century urban landscape in many Northern European cities, and also to a lesser extent in North American and Australian cities.1 Many of these estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, “slum clearance” programs especially in the postWorld War II heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. Old, overcrowded, slum areas of private rental housing were demolished to make way for new modernist housing blocks and estates which provided physically improved and affordable rental housing for workers and their families. In both Northern Europe and North America, the estates were created at a time of considerable optimism both in terms of town planning and modernist architecture, and also in the capacity of welfare states to build and manage mass housing projects (Campkin, 2013; Urban, 2012).

The heartlands of social housing in capitalist societies have been the large, industrial — now in many cases ex-industrial — cities of Northern Europe in 1 the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, and West Germany where there was extensive social housing provision, often, although not exclusively, in the form of monotenure estates. In some cities, these estates were largely located in inner-city areas, as for example in London and Amsterdam, whereas in other cases the estates were predominantly built in the suburban periphery, for example on the outskirts of the major Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the grand ensembles around Paris, Copenhagen, and West German cities such as Cologne and Dusseldorf (Power, 1997; Turkington & Watson, 2015; Urban, 2012; Whitehead & Scanlon, 2007).