https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220931197 Journal of Urban History 1–19 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0096144220931197 journals.sagepub.com/home/juh Original Research Article Into the Cold: Neighborliness, Class, and the Emotional Landscape of Urban Modernism in France and West Germany Christiane Reinecke 1 Abstract In France and West Germany, public opinion on modernist mass housing switched from positive to negative over a short period of time. The following article explores and compares this disenchantment with urban modernism in both countries. Analyzing TV documentaries, press reports, and sociological studies, as well as inhabitants’ reactions to them, it traces the discursive production of modern high-rise estates as arenas of social and emotional malfunction. It investigates how contemporaries came to contrast the apparent desolation of modernist high-rises on the periphery of French and West German cities with the warmth and solidarity of traditional working-class neighborhoods. Tracing the genesis of this socio-emotional framing, the article foregrounds the influence of psychological discourses and a new left-wing activism on contemporary urbanism and highlights the local repercussions of modern housing’s public denigration in France and West Germany. Keywords mass housing, urban community, new left, social history, urban marginality, history of emotions, France and West Germany, 1950s to 1970s In the second half of the twentieth century, modernist mass housing in the form of standardized multistoried blocks became one of the most common architectural forms worldwide. Lumped together as satellite towns, peripheral high-rise estates, or inner-city projects, the blocks were keystones of the reorganization of cities in the name of modernity—a process which was often state-subsidized in Europe. They were the product of a transnational planning movement that gained remarkable influence in the first half of the twentieth century. Soon, however, this mod- ernist project fell into disrepute. In a surprisingly high number of Western capitalist societies (though by no means everywhere), the large-scale modernist housing projects acquired the repu- tation of problem zones. 1 This was true in the cases of West Germany and France, where public 1 University of Osnabrück, Germany Corresponding Author: Christiane Reinecke, Head of the Research Group “The Production of Knowledge on Migration,” Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabrück, Neuer Graben 19/21, 49074 Osnabrück, Germany. Email: christiane.reinecke@uni-osnabrueck.de 931197JUH XX X 10.1177/0096144220931197Journal of Urban HistoryReinecke research-article 2020