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The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City book cover

1st Edition

The Housing Question Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City

By Edward Murphy, Najib B. Hourani Copyright 2013
    322 Pages
    by Routledge

    322 Pages
    by Routledge

    322 Pages
    by Routledge
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    In the wake of the Great Recession, housing and its financing suddenly re-emerged as questions of significant public concern. Yet both public and academic debates about housing have remained constricted, tending not to explore how the evolution of housing simultaneously entails basic forms of socio-spatial reproduction and underlying tensions in the political order. Drawing on cutting edge perspectives from urban studies, this book grants renewed, interdisciplinary energy to the housing question. It explores how housing raises a series of vexing issues surrounding rights, identity, and justice in the modern city. Through finely detailed studies that illuminate national and regional particularities- ranging from analyses of urban planning in the Soviet Union, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, to squatting in contemporary Lima - the volume underscores how housing questions matter in a wide range of contexts. It draws attention to ruptures and continuities between high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, demonstrating how housing and the dilemmas surrounding it are central to governance and the production of space in a rapidly urbanizing world.

    List of Figures, Notes on Contributors, Acknowledgments, Introduction: Housing Questions Past, Present, and Future, PART I. PUTTING HIGH MODERNIST PLANNING IN ITS PLACE, 1. Modernity Unbound: Tol’iatti as the New Soviet City Par Excellence, 2. The Transnationalization of the “Housing Problem”: Social Sciences and Developmentalism in Postwar Argentina, 3. Infrastructural Thinking: Urban Housing in Former Czechoslovakia from the Stalin Era to EU Accession, 4. The Politics of Public and Private Space: Housing and Urbanism in Divided Berlin, PART II. THE STATE OF UNEVEN GEOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENTS, 5. The Housing Question of Disaster Reconstruction: Rebuilding New Orleans on the Tenants of an Ownership Society, 6. Public Transit Planning and Austerity in Neoliberal Chicago, 7. Reinventing Favela Aesthetics: From Shacks to Public Housing Buildings, 8. Privatization, Marketization, and the Homeownership Paradox: The Housing Predicaments of China’s Urban Poor, PART III. SPACES OF HOME IN THE CITY OF RIGHTS, 9. Recognizing (Dis)Order: Topographies of Power and Property in Lima’s Periphery, 10. Between Housing and Home: Property Titling and the Dilemmas of Citizenship in Santiago, Chile, 11. Citizenship and the Urban Polity: Right to the City and the Meanings of Home, PART IV FINAL REFLECTIONS, 12. Assemblage and Structure: Toward New Urban Political Economies, 13. Housing Crises, Right to the City, and Citizenship, Bibliography, Index

    Biography

    Edward Murphy and Najib B. Hourani are both at Michigan State University, USA.

    ’This insightful volume places housing at the center of our understanding (examination, exploration) of the urban. By locating the housing question at the nexus of politics, governance and space, Murphy and Hourani realign core urban studies and decenter what is often a U.S. and European based focus. While not neglecting embodied concepts of home, this volume integrates the global and local by drawing upon a range of disciplines and cities in the Global South and Eastern Europe. Ultimately Murphy and Hourani, advocate an approach that is both scholarly and activist, a critical and unique combination for addressing questions of housing inequality today.’ Setha M. Low, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA
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