New build - GWG München

After the Second World War, the gaps in
the city’s fabric gradually began to be
filled up again. In the middle of it all
was GWG München with its enormous
building programme and massive responsibility
to provide housing for people
in the lower social strata. By 1951,
the proportion of new residential buildings
earmarked for social housing was
85%, although this figure would fall to
45% in the ensuing two years. The
estates that arose in this period featured
extremely sparse amenities. But they did
feature one luxury, located between the
buildings: the generously proportioned
garden areas, that these days are a
rareity. Between 1952 and 1964, a large
estate arose along the Krüner Strasse,
over an area formerly used largely as
farmland, comprising 226 buildings with
1,742 rental and 90 owner-occupied
apartments. However, their “simple
construction” was to result in enormous
problems in the long term in terms of
maintenance and modernisation,”
wrote Uli Walter more than twenty years
ago in his History of the GWG (Sozialer
Wohnungsbau in München, 1993, p.
109).
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But there were few alternatives. By
1957, Munich’s population had crossed
the 1,000,000 mark, and pressure grew
to turn unbuilt areas into industrial
zones, and to create housing on farmland
for all those people who had
moved south. Munich continued to
Aerial photograph of the GWG estate in 1961 (top),
View of the site when it was still farmland, 1912
(bottom)
prosper, and by the the 1972 Olympic
Games, it had developed into the highly
praised "World City with a Heart". The
period which saw ring-road bypasses be
built around the inner city to calm the
city-centre traffic has now largely been
forgotten. This was also the time in