Modernity,Heritage and Landscape: The Housing Estate as Heritage

Abstract

Housing estates are rarely considered as specific landscapes with particular histories, social and physical fabrics, let alone considered of relevance to heritage debates. Both popularly and among experts, housing estates are often taken to be the symbols and materialisation of modernity’s failed planning and architecture, and consequently socially alienating and homogenising environments. In this article, we present findings from a qualitative study among residents in a housing estate in Trondheim, Norway. It is argued that the residents’ processual perspective on landscape, heritage and home produces an understanding of the housing estate, which rests on what the housing estate offers, rather than what it lacks. A processual perspective hence allows for a more critical understanding, socially and morphologically, not only of estate living “on the ground”, but of hegemonic discourses of contested relations between heritage, landscape and modernity.