Harmony versus uniformity

Transcription

1 Harmony versus uniformity Peter Michalovic Housing for the most part determines real human life in a direct or indirect way. It is consumed by all people. Dwellings in the whole scale of manifold forms can be said to be the basic unit of social space for the human, the main social function of which is housing proper. The level of importance our people attach to housing.within their value structure, is reflected by the fact, that they connect the housing sphere with their self-realization. In the housing sphere the foundation of the value orientation, models of life activities and attitudes and principles of the realization of human relations develop. These basic standards of the way of life affect human behaviour to an important and sometimes decisive extent. They guide his endeavour in his whole active life. In the highly developed states the housing need belongs today to the socially recognized and solved needs. It is a case of a primary need, the value significance of which is rising. This fact is most important, as the set of known human needs is not finite. Needs develop, emerge and expire. At the same time, when new higher needs arise, the basic needs grow and attain a new quality. Today the need of health services, the need of maintaining a high-quality living environment, the need of the human work to be approved as the main way of people's self-realization are included. Since the beginning of the fifties the state ensures and regulates in its housing policy the saturation of the housing need in the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic. The predominance of extensive development tasks of the national economy in the period

2 of socialist construction became fully apparent in this area. The one-sided orientation onto the solution of material conditions of social life resulted in the predominance of material life values and aims in the developing way of life. For the planning practice, however, the housing need was reduced to the number of flats needed. The further development of our society, mainly in the seventies, was connected with a large-scale, extensive development of housing construction. As a result of this process, a high rate of housing need satisfaction has been reached (over 90 % of the households). Now one can say, that the solution of the housing problems is at this stage only a question of large urban agglomerations (Prague, Bratislava, Bmo... ), mainly as a result of the migration and continuing shift of a part of the rural population. Housing need can't be exhausted only by allotting people flats. The flat is only a means, the material condition for satisfying the housing need. Of course, the shape of a flat, its characteristics and parameters really affect the living processes in it. Housing, however, can't be reduced to this factor. The particular component parts of the complex and highly developed housing needs singled out and became independent gradually, as a product of the developing division of labour. They form a sophisticated structure of partial needs, fulfilled by a complexity of special activities. By the several social layers, groups, social subjects, they are adopted in a very different way. The mentioned partial needs can be subdivided into the following groups: a) basic, elementary needs (existential, biosocial, reproduction) - regarding to the literal preservation and further development of human life; b) socio-economic needs - concerning the maintaining of the functional qualities of the housing environment, processes of preparing to work, and working activities;

3 C) socio-cultural needs (secondary, development) - together with interest-depending self-realization, realization of human relations and communication, education, cultural development and so on.(l) This grouping is however rather abstract. In reality those need groups overlap one another. As a whole, however, they motivationally encourage people to perform activities pursuing their interests. The housing stock of Czechoslovakia is reproduced by contracted housing construction, which represents the productive activity of building enterprises, and by individual construction, mainly of family houses. The branch of housing economy consists of three components parts: - municipal housing economy - for the sake of simplicity we can include also flats distributed by enterprises - 37 % of the housing stock according to the census from cooperative housing economy - 13 % of the housing stock - individual housing economy, family houses - 50 % of the housing stock. Both the forecasting and the long-term planning of housing construction demand proceed from the expected development of census households. The social aim consists in providing every household with an independent flat, every person with an independent room. It is also necessary to create the conditions for an efficient exchange of flats, which requires, that their amount nationwide, exceeds the total number of households by roughly thousand, so giving the possibility for the continuous modernization of older flats. The achievement of these goals requires the erection of nearly 1 million of flats by the year 2000.

4 This volume of new housing construction seems to be real and, in the long term, it is permanently distributed between the mass or contracted construction of 720 thousand new flats and the individual construction of family houses, i.e. 280 thousand flats. (2) The economic intensity of housing construction, of the reproduction of the whole housing stock is high, and is increasing worldwide in the context with the rising standard of technical equipment and hygienic service facilities of housing. At the same time, it is necessary to build the whole structure of regular public service. The continuous growth of building costs results also in financial participation of the citizens in construction and use of the flats. The elementary differences in the financial share of the citizens result from the different statistical subvention rate according to the several forms of construction: Provision form percentage share of citizen of state municipal construction cooperative construction individual construction of family houses 94 Source: Report on the realization of the housing policy conception for the 6. Five-Year-Plan, FMTIR, , (quoted according to 3) A decisive trait of capital construction is the erection of extensive housing estates with multi-storey dwelling houses by the technology of panel construction as a result of the industrialization of building industry on a given technological basis. From the qualitative point of view an evident type bipolarization of the most frequent forms of housing developed: housing estates

5 and family houses. To a far less extent there are housing types, which from the architectural and technical points of view represent qualitative intermediate stages, namely older reconstructed and modernized flats and housing construction with traditional technologies in urban centres. The qualitative difference between a flat of the mass housing construction and in a family house can be characterized by the aver e living area: in the mass construction it amounts to Y 73 m, the basic floor area of new bui t family houses comes near 1 to the prescribed standard of 120 m.(4) These differences are deepened in addition by the present architectural conception of the habitable room - free, unhindered passage through the hnctionally differentiated interior, between the interior and exterior living environment. From among the architects and urbanists there sound alarming challenges to change the approaches to the mass housing construction. They result from the desire for doing useful creative work and realizing the social consequences of the present "serial" production. The reasons are often seen in the technical and production basis of the contracted construction, which is only oriented to mass production, and in the conditions where demand prevails over supply, it can dictate the own production-technical criteria to the architectonical work. Another source of reasons is on their opinion the determination of indicators and limits, which is characteristic for the present economic mechanism of the C.S.S.R. The above view has to be widened by the sociological aspect. The solution of the housing problem is in the conception unchanged in the long run oriented to generally available housing and its ensuring by the method of social welfare. In this connection it is necessary to emphasize the social approach of the state in solving the critical housing shortage. The coming nearer to the saturation of the basic housing demand, however, begins to create

6 a problem situation, in which the question of housing quality comes to the fore. The right to ask the state for help in solving one's housing problem is given every citizen regardless of his social-economic status. The only differentiation in this field concerns the size of the flat, depending on the number of members of the family. The difference between the cooperative and municipal construction consists only in the quota with which the state is shared in order to advantage some preferred social groups in allotting municipal flats. It doesn't concern, however, the qualitative side of housing. The mass housing construction and its planning is fully centralized. The work of housing administrations is not connected with entrepreneurial work or,leasing flats. The present orientation practically did not take account of the various needs of several social layers, groups of social subjects in the construction of qualitatively graduated types of flats. As a result, there is a high uniformity of the urban estate type of housing. The growing criticism of the mass housing construction concerns above all the economical shortcomings, such as: questions of the durability, of high economical costs of panel technology, of construction effectiveness, the lagging of the social infrastructure, the modernization possibilities, the possibilities of improving the basic technical parameters, i.e. heat-isolating properties and so on.(5) At the same time, emphasis is laid also on to the social and esthetical criteria. The high uniformity has however also social consequences, it leads to several forms of social pathology from the syndrome of large estate escaping from social control, social enemy to vandalism.

7 The human being is given the natural desire for harmony in satisfying his needs. But the achievement of harmony by satisfying the elementary and higher needs in a close connection with the value orientation of the individual is neither felt, nor formulated as a certain, virtual, specific aim. The disturbance of that harmony due to not satisfied needs, sometimes also partial needs, however, has an immediate affect on his satisfaction, activity, self-realization. In a certain sense of the word one can speak about harmony or disharmony in connection with the satisfaction of the common needs of a small social group, mainly a family. In part I there has been stated, that needs develop, emerge and expire. Their important motivational function is expressed by the law of growing needs, according to which the needs always hurry ahead of the possibilities of meeting them. Let us try to show by an example, how harmony is reached in the housing sphere, representing the intersection of elementary, socio-economic and sociocultural needs. A young, four-person family was allotted a four-room cooperative flat 9 the housing estate. The usable floor area of the flat is 87 m. The marital partners, research officers, furnish the flat, perform some minor changes, the rent is affordable. Initially they do not find the distance to the cultural and recreational centre of the town a difficulty. After some years the income situation of the family has improved, but not to such an extent, that they could think of the construction of a family house. An ideal solution would be to change the flat to a four-room flat nearer to the centrg, where the usable floor area of old flats measures m. The marital partners would pay the higher hire for better housing, but the irony is, that the hire for those flats is sometimes lower almost by one third. On the pages of the newspapers there are hundreds of announcements for change of residence nearer to the centre. The chance is 1:1000. The only possibility is to find parents who wish to get nearer to their children living in the estate. After many months of seeking an exchange the family gives up. Despite the fact, that their housing situation is solved, their virtual living needs are not

8 satisfied. The feeling of dissatisfaction is gradually changing into an alienation from their environment. The striking shortage of transition types of housing between flat of the estate type and a family house means, that there couldn't develop a space for "housing career" - the orientation on an increasing personal housing quality depending on increasing income according to the working results. The solution of this question presumes the creation of a unit flat market with possibilities of economical regulation. A real scheme of housing development in our conditions could be the privatization and improvement of cooperative housing. In connection with the strategical aim to deepen the wage differentiation an offering sphere should be created. Housing and improving its quality one of the primary possibilities of it. The disharmony resulting from restricted possibilities of satisfying housing needs in their whole complex is a problem, the C.S.S.R. tries to solve by orientation to double housing: in the urban housing estate and recreation type of dwelling. A big part of the urban citizens, mainly of large towns, wish to have a recreation cottage. With the number of cottages the C.S.S.R. occupies the first place in the world, before the GDR, the USA, the FRG, French, Great Britain and so on.(6) The possession of a cottage offers a real number of advantages, mainly for families with children. At the same time it is connected with a real personality self-realization. The main limiting factor of cottage construction is the amount of areas in valuable natural regions and the length of the shore of water surfaces per capita. In Sweden the density of population is 7 times lower, they have an enonpous sea shore and lakes with a total surface of about krn. Contrary to the C.S.S.R. the cottage construction was restricted by law far earlier and is hlly forbidden in a zone of 300 m of the water surface.

9 Rather than building cottages it would be better to create the conditions - found in foreign countries - for accommodation in private flats in valuable, scarce natural regions. For the whole society this seems to be an incomparable cheaper solution than the construction of cottages and new social recreation facilities. In addition to this agricultural acreage the natural environment could be saved. One of the presumptions however would be to meet the housing needs at a higher qualitative level, which would simultaneously solve the problem of long-term family capital investment. The housing development model requires changes in the role, the position and the functions of state housing policy in following some fundamental aims: - activization of people by efficient forms of individual and social motivation; - quality improvement of new housing construction using the social impact of the customer on the building production and mainly by the development of qualitative intermediate housing stages; - acceleration of housing construction owing to the mobilization of individual financial resources, the engagement of more people in the improvement of that sphere of life; - creation of organizational and social conditions for the development of communities in the living place as a result of promoting the self-government of the interest associations of occupants; - overall increase of the effectiveness of the policy of the socialist state from the point of view of economical, technical and social criteria.

10 In the context of the economical and social restructuring of our society there arises qualitative new aims and tasks for the Czechoslovakian building industry. They also concern the areas of mass and individual housing construction. The Institute of Economics and Organization of Building Industry in Bratislava, in view of the important socioeconomic relations of that kind of construction, began last year to orient a part of its exploring research in this direction.