From Siedlungen to S.A.A.L. The Social City as a continuum

Abstract

The question of the contemporary urban periphery occupies a place in the disciplinary debate on the urban form. Not only because the so-called perfical city is dominant facing the historial city, but also because it concentrates results and confluences of various historical models. Collective housing was chosen as an instrument by various European movements such as the Garden City movement or the Siedlung settlements, which would later converge in the proposals of the Modern Movement. This combination, which allowed an association between architecture and social reformism, will be present in projects, distant in time, such as the siedlung or the Local Ambulatory Support Service, the S.A.A.L., where some stratagies and formal aspects are recovered to support an intervention in a large spectrum concept of city. In this article, we have tried to confront habitat, social housing, in the form of a neighborhood, based on a set of constructed examples, with a verifiable reality in the contemporary world, which is poor in meaning and fragile in terms of responsiveness.