"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
In January of 1972, The Museum of Modern Art hosted "The Universitas Project," a two-day conference sponsored by the Museum's International Council and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. The distinguished participants, from a wide range of scholarly and artistic disciplines, including Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Gyorgy Kepes, Octavio Paz, Anatol Rapoport, Meyer Schapiro, Carl Schorske and Jivan Tabibian, among many others, engaged in a multidisciplinary debate on the future of design and design institutions in the postindustrial era. The project, conceived and directed by the noted architect and designer Emilio Ambasz, then Curator of Design at the Museum, was originally described as "a critical and prospective inquiry into the relation of man to the natural and the sociocultural environment...specifically planned to explore the possibility of establishing in the United States a new type of institution centered around the task of evaluating and designing the man-made milieu." This important volume publishes in their entirety the various components of the conference: the working papers that set the terms of the debate; the essays submitted by the invitees; the proceedings of the symposia responding to the papers; and the postscripts provided by the participants after the event. It makes this chapter in the intellectual history of the Museum, addressing issues and ideas still relevant today, available for the first time to scholars, the architecture and design community and the general public.
High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy.
Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.
"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"--
First published in 1994, this book brings together the papers presented at the International Forum on ‘Future Visions of Urban Public Housing’ held on November 17-20, 1994 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Participants included public housing officials, academics, practitioners and public housing residents who came together to debate, compare and analyse practices and issues in urban and public housing in industrialised nations. The 55 collected papers address the following key topics: public housing policy; comprehensive neighbourhood planning for public housing; public housing in the urban design context; quality of design standards and guidelines for public housing; resident participation and enhanced self-sufficiency in public housing; public housing alternatives; revitalising and rehabilitating public housing; the Elderly, Children, and special populations in public housing. The findings suggest new directions for policy and agendas for action.
Why and how Boston was transformed by landmaking. Fully one-sixth of Boston is built on made land. Although other waterfront cities also have substantial areas that are built on fill, Boston probably has more than any city in North America. In Gaining Ground historian Nancy Seasholes has given us the first complete account of when, why, and how this land was created.The story of landmaking in Boston is presented geographically; each chapter traces landmaking in a different part of the city from its first permanent settlement to the present. Seasholes introduces findings from recent archaeological investigations in Boston, and relates landmaking to the major historical developments that shaped it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, landmaking in Boston was spurred by the rapid growth that resulted from the burgeoning China trade. The influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century prompted several large projects to create residential land—not for the Irish, but to keep the taxpaying Yankees from fleeing to the suburbs. Many landmaking projects were undertaken to cover tidal flats that had been polluted by raw sewage discharged directly onto them, removing the "pestilential exhalations" thought to cause illness. Land was also added for port developments, public parks, and transportation facilities, including the largest landmaking project of all, the airport. A separate chapter discusses the technology of landmaking in Boston, explaining the basic method used to make land and the changes in its various components over time. The book is copiously illustrated with maps that show the original shoreline in relation to today's streets, details from historical maps that trace the progress of landmaking, and historical drawings and photographs.
