Tenemental

A heartfelt coming-of-age memoir about taking the unbeaten path, owning a home, and holding it all—including yourself—together. Detouring from the traditional timeline of marriage-kids-house, twenty-six-year-old Vikki Warner skips straight to homeownership. She buys a downtrodden three-story house in Providence, Rhode Island, and suddenly finds herself responsible for a rotating cast of colorful tenants. Adulthood comes with unforeseen challenges: backed-up sewage, gentrification, global economic downturn. A candid portrait of how sharing space profoundly reshapes our lives, and forces us to grow into ourselves. “Forget the marriage plot; 26-year-old Warner is after a plot of land…. [An] ebullient memoir.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “Refreshingly original reading.”—Kirkus Reviews “A thoughtful meditation on communal living and urban identity…. Quirky and fun.”—The Providence Monthly “Wry, smart, personal, and pretty damn punk rock.”—Kate Schatz, author of Rad Women Worldwide “Cheers to Vikki Warner, whose tenacious and inspiring coming-of-age story gives voice to a new generation of independent women and grown-ass boss ladies.”—Margot Kahn, coeditor of This is the Place “Full of color, life, and that special type of real, earned wisdom that only comes with taking risks and trusting completely in your own young self.”—Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own “An ode to the messiness of life, Tenemental is the incredibly raw, touching, and laugh-out-loud story of a woman figuring out how to get by in the world.”—Emma Ramadan, co-owner of Riffraff Bookstore

This book examines "new tenements"—dense, medium-rise, multi-storey residences that have been the backbone of European inner-city regeneration since the 1970s and came with a new positive view on urban living. Focusing principally on Berlin, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Rotterdam, and Vienna, it relates architectural design to an evolving intellectual framework that mixed anti-modernist criticism with nostalgic images and strategic goals, and absorbed ideas about the city as a generator of creativity, locale of democratic debate, and object of personal identification.This book analyses new tenements in the context of the post-functionalist city and its mixed-use neighbourhoods, redeveloped industrial sites and regenerated waterfronts. It demonstrates that these buildings are both generators and outcome of an urban environment characterised by information exchange rather than industrial production, individual expression rather than mass culture, visible history rather than comprehensive renewal, and conspicuous difference rather than egalitarianism. It also shows that new tenements evolved under a welfare state that all over Europe has come under pressure, but still to a certain degree balances and controls heterogeneity and economic disparities.

A case study from 1906 of the development of an agricultural estate from early medieval to Tudor times.