Affordable housing is a pressing need across the world, yet its production is far from sufficient to meet the demand. During the interwar and postwar years, social housing was imagined as a political project, the lack of which is one of the main reasons behind the fragmented policy making and the widespread failure in countering the problem of housing shortage today, more so in the so-called “developing countries” and the regions wrought with conflict, war, and displacement. Yet, despite its considerable weight in the history of the built environment, mass housing in general and social housing as its subcategory have been largely underrepresented in mainstream architectural surveys. The emphasis is even less pronounced when the “non-Western” contexts are concerned. This course builds on the premise that learning from such “peripheral” contexts would help address the contemporary global housing crises. To that end, lectures tell the story of social housing in Turkey in interwar and postwar years by pursuing an alternative trajectory of modernism as well as its housing agendas, both in relation to and contrasted with the widely disseminated European examples. The main goal is to ...