MCH-EsMed

The project is a material culture study of class, family, gender, and politics in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. As apartment living takes center stage in today’s global metropolises, the project leverages burgeoning scholarship, untapped archives, new tools, and oral history to document and analyze the similarities among the multi-floor condominiums that fully refurbished four prominent cities in the region after WWII: Athens, Ankara, Tel Aviv and Cairo.

MCH-EsMed will frame these built environments less as forms of vernacular (as the product of quid-pro-quo arrangements and local know how) and more as tangible evidence to unpack the rapid socio-political transformations on these margins of Europe during the second half of the 20th century. A key premise of this research is that apartment housing in the region reflected both the postwar global promise and local aspirations for improved living conditions and achieving middle-class status, shaped, as they were, by postwar policies for modernization and economic development, political crises, conflicts, and migration flows. In this regard, the project traces trajectories that expand far beyond the region’s understanding as a connected cultural sphere—with the Ottoman Empire often identified as the common denominator—by comparing multiple physical and perceived scales of data and localities, from the international flows of American and European expertise down to the scale of the flat and the lived experiences associated with it.

By engaging a large team of experts, the project aims to generate new knowledge in the following areas: foreign and local debates and policies on housing and development in the region; the spread and key producers of these condominiums (leveraging GIS and machine learning tools); the identities, roles, and experiences of domesticity; and the micro-history of selected building types, all aiming to contribute to the critical understanding of housing as an important historical factor in the current explosive reality in the region.

Cover photo credits: Christos Georgios Kritikos