Architecture And The Housing Question

Architecture and the Housing Question examines how the design and provision of housing around the world have become central both to competing political projects and to the architecture profession. How have architects acting as housing experts helped alleviate or enforce class, race, and gender inequality? What are the disciplinary implications of taking on shelter for the multitude as an architectural assignment and responsibility? The book features essays in the historiography of architecture and the housing question, and a collection of historical case studies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, the Netherlands, Kenya, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the United States. The thematic organization of the collection, interrogating housing expertise, the state apparatus, segregation and colonialism, highlights the methodological questions that underpin its international outlook. The book will appeal to students and scholars in architecture, architectural history, theory, and urban studies.

In the wake of the Great Recession, housing and its financing suddenly re-emerged as questions of significant public concern. Yet both public and academic debates about housing have remained constricted, tending not to explore how the evolution of housing simultaneously entails basic forms of socio-spatial reproduction and underlying tensions in the political order. Drawing on cutting edge perspectives from urban studies, this book grants renewed, interdisciplinary energy to the housing question. It explores how housing raises a series of vexing issues surrounding rights, identity, and justice in the modern city. Through finely detailed studies that illuminate national and regional particularities- ranging from analyses of urban planning in the Soviet Union, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, to squatting in contemporary Lima - the volume underscores how housing questions matter in a wide range of contexts. It draws attention to ruptures and continuities between high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, demonstrating how housing and the dilemmas surrounding it are central to governance and the production of space in a rapidly urbanizing world.

This book presents the history of modern architecture in Swedish housing. It is essential reading, especially at a time when a lack of accommodation is having such a brutal impact on Swedish society. However, this has not always been the case. Decisive public policies implemented during the 20th century led to an exemplary democratisation process of housing, unparalleled in terms of equality and inclusiveness. The first part of the book presents an overview of housing responses in Sweden. It dissects the housing question, describing it as a multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be addressed without considering social, political and economic circumstances.The second part compiles texts and materials from the exhibition Bo. Nu. D�: Bostadsfr�gor och svar under 99 �r (Housing. Now.Then: 99 Years of Housing Issues and Responses) held at ArkDes in 2016 and curated by Dan Hallemar. Based on the rich ArkDes collections, the book features examples of architectural solutions to the housing question from 1917 to the present. 99 Years of the Housing Question in Sweden brings together different perspectives, contributions, accounts and critiques from specialists and citizens alike, each illustrating in its own way how modern Swedish housing and society have developed and evolved hand in hand. The result is an important but relatively unknown discourse on the role of housing in the construction of the welfare state which offers vital lessons for todays world.

During the 1870s, a major polemical debate unfolded in Germany's worker/democratic press on the shortage of housing available to workers in major industrial centres. The influx and increase of the proletariat created a housing crisis. On June 26 1872, Engels contributed the first of a series of articles to the Volksstaat, entitled "The Housing Question." The last appeared on February 22 1873. Engels' central point was that the revolutionary class policy of the proletariat cannot be replaced by a policy of reforms, because "it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible." The series criticizes Proudhonism (and petty-bourgeois socialism in general, including Lassalleanism). It also discusses things like the nature of the State, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the eradication of the antithesis between town and country, the solution of the agrarian problem, forms of the socialist reconstruction of society and the tasks of the proletarian party.

This book presents an architectural overview of Dublin’s mass-housing building boom from the 1930s to the 1970s. During this period, Dublin Corporation built tens of thousands of two-storey houses, developing whole communities from virgin sites and green fields at the city’s edge, while tentatively building four-storey flat blocks in the city centre. Author Ellen Rowley examines how and why this endeavour occurred. Asking questions around architectural and urban obsolescence, she draws on national political and social histories, as well as looking at international architectural histories and the influence of post-war reconstruction programmes in Britain or the symbolisation of the modern dwelling within the formation of the modern nation. Critically, the book tackles this housing history as an architectural and design narrative. It explores the role of the architectural community in this frenzied provision of housing for the populace. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings and photographs from contemporary journals and the private archives of Dublin-based architectural practices, this book will appeal to academics and researchers interested in the conditions surrounding Dublin’s housing history.

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

Looks at portrayals of Havana in literature, music, and the visual arts in the post-Soviet era, as the city is reinvented as a destination for international tourists and business ventures.