Workers' housing estates - bike tours

  • 2h
  • 16,2km
  • Suitable for everyone

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, employers, mutual credit unions and municipalities tried to provide the poor part of the population with healthy and moralising housing. It was first of all the employers' initiative, via the Société Mulhousienne des Cités Ouvrières (SOMCO), which in 1853 gave birth to a workers' housing estate unique in Europe for its precocity, innovation in the form of buildings and the possibility of home ownership. At the end of the 19th century, it was the mutual credit unions (workers' and Catholic) that brought about the flowering of similar housing in the city (ground floor, two storeys and attic space: the R+2+C), a model taken up by developer-builders such as Buhler. However, it was the municipality that became the main player from the 1870s onwards. In the inter-war period, the socialists in power developed the public or semi-public response to poor housing, by intervening in various districts (Drouot, Haut Poirier, etc.), then, after the Second World War, by building small collectives (Wagner and Sellier housing estates), which preceded one of the first ZUPs in France, that of Les Coteaux. Departure and arrival rue de Strasbourg/Boulevard du Président Roosevelt.

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