The Public Private House

Throughout the twentieth century, the ancient city of Athens underwent a massive transformation into simple sets of apartment blocks, or polykatoikia. Today, these multifamily residential units define the city's landscape from center to periphery and house a majority of Greece's population. Yet specific circumstances and cultural patterns set Athens's transformation apart from the arrival of architectural modernity in other countries, and what has emerged in Athens is a distinctly Greek variety of modern urban development. The Public-Private House examines Athens's urban character and the apparently unlimited adaptability of polykatoikia. In the first part of the book, a photoessay offers an overall impression of Athens and its signature housing structure. The second part of the book investigates historic developments, the genuinely democratic process of urban planning in the city, and comparisons with Le Corbusier's Dom-ino system, as well as exogenous factors, such as crucial social aspects and the impact of Athens's strict building code. The concluding third part provides an illustrated analysis of Athens's most notable examples of polykatoikia and of current developments in Greece contributing to the building type's decline.

Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: Answering the Call of Nature in the Urban Jungle reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways — momentous and mockable — public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn’s disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don’t want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of transpeople. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women’s bathroom. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it’s clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?

"This book looks at twenty-six houses by an international roster of contemporary architects"--P. [4] of cover.

What, exactly, is private property? Or, to ask the question another way, what rights to intrude does the public have in what is generally accepted as private property? The answer, perhaps surprisingly to some, is that the public has not only a significant interest in regulating the use of private property but also in defining it, and establishing its contour and texture. In The Public Nature of Private Property, therefore, scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom challenge traditional conceptions of private property while presenting a range of views on both the meaning of private property, and on the ability, some might say the requirement, of the state to regulate it.

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.