The Marshall Plan was the cornerstone of U.S. Cold War economic and foreign policy. It was a program of technical assistance to set up free trade through European integration, of mutual security to prevent the spread of communism through the Atlantic Alliance, and of information, education, and cultural exchange to promote the American Way of Life. Devoting specific attention to labor affairs to prevent strikes and communist tendencies among workers, Labor Division of the Marshall Plan advocated a transnational workers' housing program, notably in France, Greece, Italy, and Turkey as well as the Allied-controlled Austria and Allied-occupied Germany, for union-sponsored housebuilding and homeownership.

The program was framed around the discourse of non-communism, free labor, and the free world, disseminated jointly with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Providing financial and technical assistance to trade unions for establishing and managing housing cooperatives, training construction labor in housing development and design, and industrializing building trades were key elements of this program, jointly organized with the ICFTU's European Regional Organisation, trade union federations and governments.

Union-sponsored cooperative housing was promoted for industrial workers as a means to assert authority and autonomy in housing provision, to build a home of one's own and a house with a garden, symbolizing upward mobility. This vision promised labor stability through union affiliation and mortgage loans, while advertising domestic ideals of a preindustrial way of life. Built on U.S. New Deal and wartime legacies on union-sponsored housing and advanced by Scandinavian models of non-profit housing associations, the program functioned as a multilateral U.S. Cold War Project, and grafted real-estate dynamics onto public housing, regardless of local policies and housebuilding traditions of the participating countries.

This thesis offers methodological insights to architectural history and theory. First, I survey non-architectural archives of governmental and multilateral organizations and develop my arguments using correspondence, memoranda, reports and "picture files" as well as photographs, press clippings, and a film script, rather than architectural archives and drawings. Second, I explore trade unions as authors of housing development, design and construction, and integrate social history into architectural historiography for a wider understanding of built environment production and its non-architect agents. The thesis also offers new historical findings and theoretical perspectives. First, I introduce the Marshall Plan's workers' housing program, overlooked except some country-specific studies on its involvement in housing and domesticity. Second, I present the U.S. architect-planner Donald Monson and U.S. labor advisors as key actors, along with previously unexamined U.S. housing consultants. Third, I discuss self-help housing as a tool of postwar imperialism in Western Europe, beyond postcolonial frameworks dividing the "global west/north" from the "global east/south," and I propose multilateral imperialism as an alternative to scholarship that interprets cross-cultural exchange through the lens of global governance. Finally, I demonstrate the agency of union-sponsored cooperatives in shifting workers' housing toward a real-estate market through self-acquisition of land and tenant-ownership model.