How the middle class housed itself in the Eastern Mediterranean

MCH-EsMed critically explores housing as a blind-spot in the post-war history of the Eastern Mediterranean, one of the world’s most volatile regions, marked by war, ethnic tensions, migration flows, and climate change.

The research focuses on the vast spread of mid-sized condominium apartment buildings during the second half of the 20th century in four prominent cities: Athens, Ankara, Cairo, and Tel Aviv.

Known as ‘polykatoikía’ in Greece, ‘müteahhit yapımı apartman’ in Turkey, ‘al-'Imara’ in Egypt, and ‘bait-Meshutaf’ in Israel, these structures were the prevalent form of middle-class housing during the period under study.

The central hypothesis of this project is that comparative architectural and spatial analysis of this built heritage can yield valuable insights into the historical processes shaping the middle income strata, their distinct identity, and more broadly, the mechanisms of post-war modernization beyond the context of Western welfare states.

Two cutting-edge topics in recent architectural historiography, namely, the proliferation of middle-class housing and development policies for the Third World, now offer the necessary evidence and conceptual framework for embarking on this research.

Moreover, tools for visualizing big data (GIS) and state-of-the-art technology such as remote sensing and machine learning, provide unprecedented opportunities for this research’s ambitious scope to deal with extensive, mostly uncontrolled, private-led house-building and urbanization phenomena.

Lastly, the increasing engagement of architectural historians in preserving local knowledge through micro- and oral history methodologies serves as a critical guide to the challenging yet imperative endeavor of documenting the lived experiences of residents, particularly before the first post-war generation diminishes.

As crises in the region continue to erupt, MCH-EsMed is expected to provide an unconventional yet nuanced perspective of their ‘pre-history.’