Public Housing in Spain. From the Early Days of Public Intervention through the Spanish Civil War

Introduction: Housing the Urban Working Class

Since the advent of industrialization, across Spain the population began leaving the countryside and concentrating in cities. Population growth in Spain had been slow until 1775, but after 1850, it skyrocketed. Furthermore, the population began concentrating in cities, where the birth rate was also higher than in rural areas. Faced with this situation, in the late 19th century, most large cities undertook growth plans in the form of more or less planned expansions. However, these expansions filled up much faster than expected, giving rise to densification processes that increased plot ratios and densities beyond what was expected. As new migratory waves arrived in cities, in the 1920s and 1930s, urban areas proved incapable of providing affordable housing for all the new inhabitants. The solution of subletting rooms, which had contained the situation to some extent up to that point, reached its limits.

The Early 20th Century and the Law on Affordable Housing (Ley de Casas Baratas)

Given the evidence that urban growth policies governed by the free market could not meet the demand for affordable housing for workers, government intervention became essential. With the “Law on Affordable Housing for the lower classes,” those aims were captured in a legislative figure that represented the beginning of direct intervention from the government in the problem of working-class housing. The law made it easier for developers to qualify for official aid or low-interest loans. In order to qualify for those benefits, the units had to meet certain requirements in terms of habitability and size. Although the successive Affordable Housing Laws recognized that the housing problem was “very serious,” the results were limited in scope, concentrated during the years of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and, in most cases, the architectural quality could hardly be compared to similar experiments that were being carried out in other European countries.

The Limited Influence of Europe

Given the evidence of the limited impact of the affordable housing programme, the central government saw the need to give a boost to private stimulus for housing development. At that time, the authorities understood that their role should be to provide new spaces for urban growth, beyond the consolidated expansions. To that effect, they commissioned a series of studies and plans that culminated in the call for an international competition in 1929. The competition was declared void despite solid proposals, such as the one presented by Secundino Suazo together with the German urban planner Hermann Jansen, which espoused the criteria established for the residential extension of Berlin. As a result of the knowledge on the experiments coming from Europe, Secundino Zuazo and Miguel Fleischer built the Casa de las Flores, one of the most notable examples of public housing in Madrid’s Ensanche and reminiscent of the projects in Red Vienna, especially the famous Karl-Marx-Hof. In Barcelona, the Plan Macià of 1932 by the GATPAC and Le Corbusier offered a direct translation of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse but was never implemented.

The Salmón Law (Ley Salmón)

In 1935, the so-called Salmón Law was approved, named after the Labour Minister Federico Salmón. On paper, the law incorporated several earlier proposals: direct public investment in ultra-affordable housing and fiscal benefits for the private development of rental housing for the middle classes. In reality, the spirit and ultimate interest of the Salmón Law was to promote the latter option, with the ultimate aim of tackling the growing problem of unemployment by promoting construction. The law demanded maximum dimensions for the units, which varied depending on their location. However, the buildings covered by the Salmón Law seldom took into account the experiments that were being carried out in Europe on the minimum necessary residential programme. The result was that, while gestures of modernity were allowed on the façades, the floor plans were largely derived from urban bourgeois housing. Some 3,000 buildings were built in Spain under the Salmón Law, most notably in Madrid, the buildings by Luís Gutiérrez Soto and, in Barcelona, those of Pere Benavent de Barberà.

Experiments on the Periphery: The Case of Catalonia

In the context of the Second Republic, in Barcelona – along with the aforementioned Macià Plan – a series of ideas were tested that had been developed in Central Europe during the early post-World War II era, especially in the Weimar Republic, associated with the Modern Movement. The Casa Bloc was the emblem of what the new workers’ housing should be and was held forth as a manifesto of the GATCPAC. The building was fully aligned with the principles of the modern city as promoted by Le Corbusier: with a flat roof and a ground floor raised on pilotis, freeing up a maximum of public space. Both the massing and the building typology are consistent with the principles of Existenzminimum and the standards of the Modern Movement. The experience of the Casa Bloc prefigured an optimistic future for the public development of social housing in Catalonia.

However, that future was thwarted by the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship.

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