Factory housing Mulhouse style

In the workingman's city (Cité Ouvrières) in Mulhouse three types of housing can be found as the main types of social housing for factory workers. These three also form a continuation in the thinking about social housing. It would go to far as to state that social housing started with the back-to-back, as it was a type often built in inner-city areas from the late medieval period onward. But utilization for housing workers is strongly linked to the industrial revolution and the sudden need to house the workers for the factories and collieries. Before crafts were either practiced at the home or in an artisans workshop. Mechanization of production not only scaled up the production process and the place of production -from a workshop to a factory- but also the amount of materials used and the number of workers involved to produce the end product (the output of which had also been dramatically increased). Mechanization also meant a shift from skilled laborers with a trade towards low skilled workers that only had to master certain parts of the production process. These workers were often recruited from a rural population. This combined with the overcrowding in the densely built up areas (slums) lead to miserable living conditions, which resulted in low life expectancy and the necessity of a steady influx of new workers that had to be trained and managed. Some factory owners quickly realized that a reliable workforce capable of their tasks was important for the longevity of their business. From a philanthropic viewpoint not all men were equals but brethren of one kind. So it came to be that these lovers of humanity set out to improve the living standers of their workmen, thereby ensuring their future business success!     

At first factory workers were housed in existing dwellings, sometimes as lodgers, but more often in rented rooms or houses. Savvy property owners quickly began subdividing existing houses into rentable rooms, added extra rentable rooms in ramshackle lean-to's and built over any existing outdoor space on the back which provided at times accommodation without any windows or direct escape route. The first purpose-built workers houses often were little more than low barracks subdivided into single room accommodation. Some were more akin to the meager dwellings provided for working peasants consisting of little more than a few rooms around a hearth. These were called workers cottages and in continental Europe these were often combined into a short row under a single roof.

None of these barracks are present in Mulhouse. The oldest representative of factory housing are the back-to-back houses built in both the first and second Cité Ouvrières. These houses were cheap to build as they didn't demand a large plot and could be constructed as apartments (one up one down). In actual fact they could be built between roads (although in Mulhouse they have a narrow garden at the front).

Back-to-back houses typically share three walls with the neigbouring houses. They only had windows on one side (the front).

A great improvement on the back-to-back was the pioneering Mulhouse Quadrangle (Carré Mulhousien) with a garden on two sides. These blocks of four dwellings under one roof were situated between narrow lanes thus giving access to the gardens and the houses. The gardens were mainly meant for food production and made the built-up area much more fire safe. 

In the Mulhouse Quadrangle the houses share only two walls with the neigbouring dwellings. These houses have windows on two sides and also garden space around the building.

After 1875 the Mulhouse Quadrangle quickly falls out of favor and rows of terraced houses become the norm. At first these rows of single family dwellings under one roof are as long as the terrain or the road pattern would allow. This is the cheaper way of building such accommodation. It wouldn't be until the ideas of Camillo Sitte and Raymond Unwin combined in the Garden City aesthetic that this practice would change.

 

In terraced rows of houses the dwellings share two walls with the neighbouring dwellings. They have windows on both the front and back and at least a back garden.