Jennifer Mack: "Creepage and Seepage in the Modernist Suburb That Never Was"

Abstract

Modernist designers of the mid-20th century envisioned new utopian environments built from the ground up, imagining a totalizing project. In Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, such design ideals combined strategically with welfare-state social and economic reforms, and mass housing construction through governmental initiatives rapidly transformed the housing stock. Yet by the late 1960s, journalists and politicians portrayed modernist neighborhoods as unequivocal “failures,” drawing causal links between their “ugliness” and social problems like crime, alcoholism, and unemployment. This triggered innumerable renovations. Today, longing for the modernist suburb that never was – a space of environmental control and mid-20th century social conditions – continues, with anxieties about them materialized through privatizations, extreme makeovers, and even demolitions.

In this seminar, I explore histories of modernist suburbs through creepage (such as the persistence of punitive discourse) and seepage (such as the arrival of “unplanned” humans and nonhumans) to ask why such suburbs are still evaluated according to impossibly hegemonic ideas about architecture’s power over nature and people. I reconceptualize suburban modernism in Scandinavia as a practice of built environmentalism deeply rooted in, affected by, and produced through both human and non-human actions. Through alternative histories, scales, and actors, I suggest a more forgiving view of the present and the need for new modes of intervention into the “problems” of modernist suburbs.