This is a growing sector undergoing a huge period of change - with local authorities able to build their own housing for the first time in decades. Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars explores how social/affordable housing has been delivered and designed with success throughout the UK in the last 10 years. Weaving together exemplar case studies, essays and interviews with social housing pioneers and clients, this book demonstrates real-life best practice responses to the challenges associated with housing provision, with a focus on design ideas.
The provision and management of social housing for those who are unable to access the housing market is essential to the maintenance of the fabric of society. The social housing industry is vast and still growing. There are very few countries in the world where some form of subsidised housing does not exist, and the total number of social homes is likely to grow worldwide, as are the challenges of the sector. Paul Reeves takes a people-centred approach to the subject, describing the themes that have run through provision of social housing from the first philanthropic industrialists in the 19th Century though to the increasingly complex mixture of ownerships and tenures in the present day. The management of housing forms a key part of the book, with an emphasis on the practical aspects of tenant participation and multi-agency working. The book is ideal for students of housing and social policy, and for housing professionals aiming to obtain qualifications and wanting a broad understanding of the social housing sector.
This publication examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists. It investigates the role of cultural practice in the organization of the public domain.
A richly illustrated history of below-market housing in New York, from the 1920s to today A colorful portrait of the people, places, and policies that have helped make New York City livable, Affordable Housing in New York is a comprehensive, authoritative, and richly illustrated history of the city's public and middle-income housing from the 1920s to today. Plans, models, archival photos, and newly commissioned portraits of buildings and tenants by sociologist and photographer David Schalliol put the efforts of the past century into context, and the book also looks ahead to future prospects for below-market subsidized housing. A dynamic account of an evolving city, Affordable Housing in New York is essential reading for understanding and advancing debates about how to enable future generations to call New York home.
The examples included in this volume are a clear demonstration of the optimization of resources used in social housing architecture. These projects offer a great variety of typological solutions that are as flexible in their material fulfillment as in their functionality. Every project in this book is thoroughly documented and profusely illustrated with full-color photographs, offering a wealth of information for architects, students, or anyone else who is interested in new forms of social housing architecture.
As oil-rich countries in the Middle East are increasingly associated with soaring skyscrapers and modern architecture, attention is being diverted away from the pervasive struggles of social housing in those same urban settings. Social Housing in the Middle East traces the history of social housing—both gleaming postmodern projects and bare-bones urban housing structures—in an effort to provide a wider understanding of marginalized spaces and their impact on identities, communities, and class. While architects may have envisioned utopian or futuristic experiments, these buildings were often constructed with the knowledge and skill sets of local workers, and the housing was in turn adapted to suit the modern needs of residents. This tension between local needs and national aspirations are linked to issues of global importance, including security, migration, and refugee resettlement. The essays collected here consider how culture, faith, and politics influenced the solutions offered by social housing; they provide an insightful look at how social housing has evolved since the 19th century and how it will need to adapt to suit the 21st.
All countries aim to improve housing conditions for their citizens but many have been forced by the financial crisis to reduce government expenditure. Social housing is at the crux of this tension. Policy-makers, practitioners and academics want to know how other systems work and are looking for something written in clear English, where there is a depth of understanding of the literature in other languages and direct contributions from country experts across the continent. Social Housing in Europe combines a comparative overview of European social housing written by scholars with in-depth chapters written by international housing experts. The countries covered include Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands and Sweden, with a further chapter devoted to CEE countries other than Hungary. The book provides an up-to-date international comparison of social housing policy and practice. It offers an analysis of how the social housing system currently works in each country, supported by relevant statistics. It identifies European trends in the sector, and opportunities for innovation and improvement. These country-specific chapters are accompanied by topical thematic chapters dealing with subjects such as the role of social housing in urban regeneration, the privatisation of social housing, financing models, and the impact of European Union state aid regulations on the definitions and financing of social housing.
Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.
