"A Decent Place to Live is a fabulous piece of work. Well-written, candid and engaging, its honesty is refreshing; nothing is swept under the rug. The voices of the tenants carry the story forward, but the transformation of Columbia Point is set in a political context and the impact of government policies is explored. A valuable resource for urban planners, architects, housing policy makers, and developers." -- Hubert E. Jones, Assistant Chancellor for Urban Affairs, University of Massachusetts, Boston
The Politics of Joint University and Community Housing Development: Cambridge, Boston, and Beyond informs and encourages the understanding and creation of community/university housing. It reveals the political and technical dynamics of joint housing development involving both communities and universities. Community/university housing projects have been built in several cities and planned in others. Since Cambridge, Masschusetts, home of Harvard and MIT, contains outstanding examples of community/university housing, the book focuses on the projects there since the 1960s. It also discusses a major project in Mission Hill near Harvard Medical School in Boston, along with brief examinations of a number of other projects. Through the Cambridge and Boston cases, the author explores the historical, political, and economic reasons for developing community housing. There, residents asked the universities to help solve the city housing problems to which the institutions had contributed. Since community housing involved a process, as well as a result in describing how the housing was built, the book focuses on the role of community participation in the development process. The study contributes to the understanding of the issues in several ways. First, two people well acquainted with community/university housing and politics introduce the study with insightful forewords. Second, the study provides details of the development process that will be useful to other community/university groups. Third, it explores university responsibility, rhetoric versus reality, and the educational values of community housing participation. Fifth, the lessons and suggestions provide insights and inspiration for others. Finally, the epilogue explains the development of the study. This study will be particularly helpful for other cities and university/communities encountering housing problems. The features and information here will interest a wide range of community, university, and other urban groups. The issues discussed will become increasingly relevant as more people move into attractive areas near universities. It is also pertinent to institutions like hospitals that also have community and housing problems, and to civic groups that can help solve a range of housing problems. This book explains the politics of community/university housing development in ways that encourage others to address and solve similar problems.
"Herein, we bring you to sites that have been central to the lives of 'the people' of Greater Boston over four centuries. You'll visit sites associated with the area's indigenous inhabitants and with the individuals and movements who sought to abolish slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, and bring about a more peaceful world, to achieve racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of workers. We take you to some well-known sites, but more often to ones far off the well-beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places in Boston's outlying neighborhoods. We also visit sites in numerous other municipalities that make up the Greater Boston region-from places such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. The sites to which we do 'travel' include homes given that people's struggles, activism, and organizing sometimes unfold, or are even birthed in many cases in living rooms and kitchens. Trying to capture a place as diverse and dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. (One could say that about any 'big' place.) We thus want to make clear that our goal is not to be comprehensive, or to 'do justice' to the region. Given the constraints of space and time as well as the limitations of knowledge--both our own and what is available in published form--there are many important sites, cities, and towns that we have not included. Thus, in exploring scores of sites across Boston and numerous municipalities, our modest goal is to paint a suggestive portrait of the greater urban area that highlights its long-contested nature. In many ways, we merely scratch the region's surface--or many surfaces--given the multiple layers that any one place embodies. In writing about Greater Boston as a place, we run the risk of suggesting that the city writ-large has some sort of essence. Indeed, the very notion of a particular place assumes intrinsic characteristics and an associated delimited space. After all, how can one distinguish one place from another if it has no uniqueness and is not geographically differentiated? Nonetheless, geographer Doreen Massey insists that we conceive of places as progressive, as flowing over the boundaries of any particular space, time, or society; in other words, we should see places as processual or ever-changing, as unbounded in that they shape and are shaped by other places and forces from without, and as having multiple identities. In exploring Greater Boston from many venues over 400 years, we embrace this approach. That said, we have to reconcile this with the need to delimit Greater Boston--for among other reasons, simply to be in a position to name it and thus distinguish it from elsewhere"--
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History offers a comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge report on recent developments in architectural production and research. Divided into three parts – Practices, Interrogations, and Innovations – this book charts diversity, criticality, and creativity in architectural interventions to meet challenges and enact changes in different parts of the world through featured exemplars and fresh theoretical orientations. The collection features 29 chapters written by leading architectural scholars and highlights the reciprocity between the historical and the contemporary, research and practice, and disciplinary and professional knowledge. Providing an essential map for navigating the complex currents of contemporary architecture, the Companion will interest students, academics, and practitioners who wish to bolster their understanding of built environments.
