Mobilising Housing Histories

Mobilising Housing Histories

Author: Peter Guillery

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1000702340

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The problem of creating affordable, adequate housing for a growing population is not a new one. This book, for anyone with a professional or personal interest in improving housing provision everywhere, aims to inspire by offering in-depth studies of London's housing past and seeks to provide sustainable solutions for the future by linking to wider contemporary historical and social contexts. This book will influence today’s housing debates through showcasing lessons from the past and highlights examples that inform the present. The buildings assessed in these case studies will be measured in terms of their longevity, sustained popularity, livability, average densities and productivity. The research and case studies from the book provide an invaluable resource for academics of architecture, urban design, sociology, history and geography as well as professionals, policy makers and journalists.


Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

Concerning Stephen Willats and the Social Function of Art

Author: Sharon Irish

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1350197602

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This book on Stephen Willats pulls together key strands of his practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics, experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of concepts about control and feedback within living and machine systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current conditions and future possibilities. Sharon Irish's study demonstrates the power of Willats's multi-media art to catalyze communication among participants and to upend ideas about “audience” and “art.” Here, Irish argues that it is artists like Willats who are now the instigators of social transformation.


Shaping the City to Come

Shaping the City to Come

Author: Deborah Lewittes

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 180207077X

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This study reassesses modern architecture and town planning in mid-twentieth-century England, highlighting ideas and debates that were in circulation as modernist ideals gradually took root. The book reveals an architectural culture that was serious, active, and visionary, with impact that extended into the postwar years. Through close studies of specific works and writings, the author acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture as it intersected with the variety of narratives that defined English modernism, such as national identity, the New Empiricism, and the picturesque, taking into account the large community of émigré architects who settled in England with the approach of World War II, as well as a more general dissemination of international style forms and theories from continental Europe. The book places familiar figures such as Berthold Lubetkin and Ernö Goldfinger, as well as projects such as Tecton’s Penguin Pool and the Festival of Britain’s “Live Architecture” Exhibition, in new light, presenting a rich picture of the modern architectural climate in England. The study draws attention to the debates, proposals, and processes that fed into the development of modernist, urban-minded, and forward-looking architectural ideals.


Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

Author: Urs Bette

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-03-30

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1787357228

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Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground sets out to validate the role of the unreasonable in the design process. Using case study projects, architect Urs Bette gives an insight into the epistemological processes of his creative practice, and unveils the strategies he deploys in order to facilitate the poetic aspects of architecture within a discourse whose evaluation parameters predominantly involve reason. Themes discussed include the emergence of space from the staged opposition between the architectural object and the site, and the relationship between emotive cognition and analytic synthesis in the design act. In both cases, there is a necessary engagement with forms of ‘unreasonable’ thought, action or behaviours. By arguing for the usefulness and validity of the unreasonable in architecture, and by investigating the performative relationship between object and ground, Bette contributes to the discourse on extensions, growth and urban densification that tap into local histories and voices, including those of the seemingly inanimate – the architecture itself and the ground it sits upon – to inform the site-related production of architectural character and space. In doing so, he raises debates about the values pursued in design approval processes, and the ways in which site-relatedness is both produced and judged.


Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London

Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London

Author: Robertson Lisa C. Robertson

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1474457916

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Explores radical designs for the home in the nineteenth-century metropolis and the texts that shaped themUncovers a series of innovative housing designs that emerged in response to London's rapid growth and expansion throughout the nineteenth century Brings together the writing of prominent authors such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing with understudied novels and essays to examine the lively literary engagement with new models of urban housing Focuses on the ways that these new homes provided material and creative space for thinking through the relationship between home and identity Identifies ways in which we might learn from the creative responses to the nineteenth-century housing crisis This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city's built environment.


The Tenants' Movement

The Tenants' Movement

Author: Quintin Bradley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317962648

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The Tenants' Movement is both a history of tenant organization and mobilization, and a guide to understanding how the struggles of tenant organizers have come to shape housing policy today. Charting the history of tenant mobilization, and the rise of consumer movements in housing, it is one of the first cross-cultural, historical analyses of tenants’ organizations’ roles in housing policy. The Tenants' Movement shows both the past and future of tenant mobilization. The book’s approach applies social movement theory to housing studies, and bridges gaps between research in urban sociology, urban studies, and the built environment, and provides a challenging study of the ability of contemporary social movements, community campaigns and urban struggles to shape the debate around public services and engage with the unfinished project of welfare reform.


Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City

Author: Tom Allbeson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000184978

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Examining imagery of urban space in Britain, France and West Germany up to the early 1960s, this book reveals how photography shaped individual architectural projects and national rebuilding efforts alike. Exploring the impact of urban photography at a pivotal moment in contemporary European architecture and culture, this book addresses case studies spanning the destruction of the war to the modernizing reconfiguration of city spaces, including ruin photobooks about bombed cities, architectural photography of housing projects and imagery of urban life from popular photomagazines, as well as internationally renowned projects like UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters, Coventry Cathedral and Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche. This book reveals that the ways of seeing shaped in the postwar years by urban photography were a vital aspect of not only discourses on the postwar city but also debates central to popular culture, from commemoration and modernization to democratization and Europeanization. This book will be a fascinating read for researchers in the fields of photography and visual studies, architectural and urban history, and cultural memory and contemporary European history.


The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 5, The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance

The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 5, The Islamic World in the Age of Western Dominance

Author: Francis Robinson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-11-04

Total Pages: 945

ISBN-13: 1316175782

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Volume 5 of The New Cambridge History of Islam examines the history of Muslim societies from 1800 to the present. Francis Robinson, a leading historian of Islam, has brought together a team of scholars with a broad range of expertise to explore how Muslims responded to the challenges of Western conquest and domination across the last two-hundred years. As their articles reveal, the social, economic, political and historical circumstances which influenced these responses have, in many different parts of the world, empowered Muslim societies and encouraged transformation and religious revival. The volume offers a fascinating glimpse into the local dimensions of that revival and how regional connections have been forged. Synthesising the academic research of the past thirty years, as well as offering substantial guidance for further study, this book is the starting-point for all those who wish to have a serious understanding of modern Muslim societies.


Irish Housing Design 1950 – 1980

Irish Housing Design 1950 – 1980

Author: Brian Ward

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1315442388

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This book examines the architectural design of housing projects in Ireland from the mid-twentieth century. This period represented a high point in the construction of the Welfare State project where the idea that architecture could and should shape and define community and social life was not yet considered problematic. Exploring a period when Ireland embraced the free market and the end of economic protectionism, the book is a series of case studies supported by critical narratives. Little known but of high quality, the schemes presented in this volume are by architects whose designs helped determine future architectural thinking in Ireland and elsewhere. Aimed at academics, students and researchers, the book is accompanied by new drawings and over 100 full colour images, with the example studies demonstrating rich architectural responses to a shifting landscape.


Housing Displacement

Housing Displacement

Author: Guy Baeten

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-14

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0429762798

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This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice – a central issue in urban injustices. With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification’s unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of ‘displacement’, as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective. This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.