2Glendinning’s Mass Housing provides the first-ever comprehensive overview of what was built in the vast modernist housing movement, and why. The publication is not a survey of vernacular building or folk tradition, but “a historical narrative of epic proportions, a dramatic story involving highly professionalized or political actors in all its key roles, and drawing on the deepest driving-forces and anxieties of society” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 1). Glendinning convincingly studies the evolution of modern mass housing as a “Hundred Years’ War”: a century-long succession of campaigns across the world, “prosecuted with military passion and military standards of strategic planning, yet also shaped on the ground by tactical decision-making formulating policy opportunistically rather than cumulatively” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 3).

4The first part of the book elaborates on the “pre-modernist” architectural and planning models, and their underlying housing policies from the mid-nineteenth century until 1945. This period was defined by constant alterations of wars, revolutions, communism and fascism, which made the old urban fabric and 19^th-century private rental housing tenure obsolete. Glendinning discusses in this part the rising maturity of mass housing programmes, which contained disparities and even stimulating contrasts, but still embodied a remarkable common thread of increased state intervention and rapidly spreading international networks of housing reformers and conferences. Housing became part of a rising national “strong state” identity with pointers that ultimately led to the “Hundred Years’ War,” illustrated with cases of both direct and indirect housing policies of the interwar governments in Great Britain, Red Vienna, wider Europe, but also the USSR, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Japan.

5Part Two, the most comprehensive part of the book, follows Sauvy’s geographical division (First, Second and Third Worlds) and structures the narrative of post-war mass housing drive chronologically, with the First World programmes preceding those of Second and Third Worlds. Glendinning states that the discourse and practice of organized modernity “was concentrated in the First and Second Worlds, which therefore inevitably and overwhelmingly dominate Part Two and, indeed, Mass Housing as a whole” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 6). One can critique this geographic focus, especially given the growing literature on housing in Third World contexts, although the author counters this by differentiating Part Two into geo-political subdivisions, for instance “American anti-socialism,” “European Welfare states,” different branches of socialism (Soviet, Yugoslav, Romanian, Albanian), and micro-regional specificities in sub-regions, such as the Low Countries, Nordic states, Poland, East Germany, etc. In addition, Glendinning defends the differentiation of Latin America, Africa and capitalist Eastern Asia (together part of his “Third World”) from the First and Second Worlds by demonstrating that although these regions directed a significant mass housing output, as much as in the First and Second Worlds, their mass housing patterns cannot, according to him, be linked to the social-entitlement policies we see in the first two worlds. Latin America was for instance influenced by alternations of authoritarian and democratic regimes, while the Japanese government in turn stimulated state-directed development capitalism. In parts of post-colonial Africa an “aided self-help doctrine” was promoted by international development agencies as a more individualistic alternative to public rental housing.

6Part Three reflects on the disintegration of centralized state socialism and the neoliberal turn, when mass housing became a “lightning rod for wider critiques of progress-led modernity” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 7). Opposition against the top-down planned housing and the alienating sameness in the former First and Second Worlds became universal in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, even as the new Eastern Asian front in the Hundred Years’ War heated up further. Glendinning discerns the emergence of a new tripartite system in the field of social housing. Firstly, there are mature mass housing systems (mostly in former First and Second Worlds) that use slimming-down demolitions to manage the organizational and architectural legacy of mass housing. The housing systems of the present-day “Global South” are considered a second housing system, where informal housing and international encouragement of aided self-help dominate the housing scene. Glendinning compares these housing systems to the aided self-help doctrines of their “Third World” predecessors, when international agencies promoted aided self-help in newly-independent former colonies as a more individualistic alternative to public rental housing, influenced by American anti-socialism ideologies. Finally, in Eastern Asia ultra-dense mass housing apartment blocks still rise in “strong states” such as in Singapore, South Korea, large cities in China, and Turkey. These housing blocks are heirs of capitalist development programmes, but without its utopian idealism. Planning and housing policies in these “strong states” are closely intertwined with developmental capitalism and strong nation-building strategies, however, their mass housing drives stemmed from different political and military confrontations of mid-twentieth-century Europe and America.

8All three parts of the book illustrate what Glendinning defines as “multiple modernities:” modern mass housing is not an expression of monochrome homogeneity but “a global landscape of riotously colourful variety and complexity, responding both to the diversity of the twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century state and to the countless permutations of modernist architecture” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 1). Mass Housing is thus not a history of discourses, but emphasizes the local “facts on the ground” and reflects on massive, literally “concrete” built reality. The author uses a wide variety of images in the book to enable a comparable reading of the cases and illustrates the global reach and complexity of modern mass housing. By complementing historical development plans and diagrams of the housing schemes with photographs of the buildings in their present state, the author emphasises the concrete “visual” characteristics of housing, not only in terms of universal architectural ideals but also with regard to regional materials and construction methods.

10Nonetheless, Mass Housing is undeniably the first and only comprehensive history on modern mass housing. The study unquestionably succeeds in its chief aim to “demonstrate the feasibility of a more connected-up alternative to the predominant ‘national silo-mentality’ within housing history” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 550). Although the main part of the book is rooted in case-based research, it convincingly correlates both local and national specificity to continuous global narratives, and takes an exciting step in identifying “key transnational themes” answering the question why, and for whom mass housing was built in the first place. The author discerns how lofty social ideals of housing needs are deferential to political considerations during existential crisis of nation state, and how “greater the political urgency, the more wholehearted the engagement of organized state forces, the more quantitatively forceful might be the resulting housing drive” (Glendinning, Mass Housing, p. 551). Although mass housing is in essence a global phenomenon, international organizations and discourses were far less successful than national and regional initiatives. Mainly the “aided self-help” operations, well-financed by international institutions, had a significant global impact, although these were detrimental to mass housing as they mainly focused on low-rise and privately-built initiatives.