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Abstract

In the Global South, housing and modernization projects share a similar context of rapid urbanization in the 20th century when masses of people relocated to the urban cores, often in informal settlements. Governments reacted by developing top-down housing policies based on modern planning and architectural ideas. In Venezuela and Morocco, the implementation of social housing projects shared similar driving forces, reflecting political and design agendas focused on the erasure and substitution of informal settlements with new housing solutions promising a renewed standard of living. This paper examines the housing projects developed by the French colonial government in Morocco and the military dictatorship in Venezuela in the 1950s. It looks at the political ideologies involved and at the role of public entities that gathered modern architects and planners that developed housing prototypes based on the models promoted by the CIAM congress: the Group GAMMA in Morocco led by Michel Ecohard and the Banco Obrero in Venezuela led by Carlos Raúl Villanueva. By examining the most emblematic case studies, Casablanca’s Carrières Centrales and Caracas’ Superbloques, this paper compares how the governments approached housing policies for low-income residents as a means of urban and social regeneration and as an instrument to systematize and modernize urban living. It also examines the evolution of these projects by looking at the resident’s agency in adapting and appropriating modern housing, including implementing informal construction to redefine their living environment.