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The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest , Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the "deserving poor."
In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country's first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale's groundbreaking history of these "twice-cleared" communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America's most famous housing projects: Chicago's Cabrini-Green and Atlanta's Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Illustrations(p. vii)
• Preface(p. xi)
• Acknowledgments(p. xv)
• 1 Public Housing, Design Politics, and Twice-Cleared Communities(p. 1)
• 2 Public Housing and Private Initiative: Developing Atlanta's Techwood and Clark Howell Homes(p. 39)
• 3 Redeveloping Techwood and Clark Howell: The Purges of Progress(p. 90)
• 4 Up from Little Hell: Developing Chicago's Frances Cabrini Homes(p. 155)
• 5 Urban Renewal and the Rise of Cabrini-Green(p. 193)
• 6 Staving Off Collapse: Mediated Violence and the Beginning of Cabrini's End(p. 230)
• 7 Bringing the Gold Coast to the Slum: Cabrini-Green's Redevelopment and the Litigation of Inclusion(p. 254)
• 8 Conclusion: Public Housing and the Margins of Empathy(p. 314)
• Notes(p. 345)
• Credits(p. 397)
• Index(p. 399)

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CHOICE Review

Unlike Sweden or Germany, the US never fully committed to social housing, preferring to rely on the private market. And when the government provided housing for the poor, it did so reluctantly. During the 1930s Depression, the federal government built and managed housing for the "temporarily" poor. By the 1960s, public housing had become a welfare program meant to mitigate poverty and compensate for racial discrimination against African Americans. This all changed in the 1980s when the large-scale projects of the previous era were demolished and replaced with low-scale housing for owners and renters, both poor and nonpoor. Using these three periods, Vale (design and planning, MIT) retells the history of public housing, emphasizing the role of design in the politics of site location, tenant mix, and the quality and configuration of housing units. He draws on archival material and interviews in Atlanta and Chicago to demonstrate the precariousness of government empathy for the poor, culminating in the current (re)purging of their communities. Producing a thoroughly researched, well-written volume, Vale has contributed an eloquent history to the literature on US public housing. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic, research, and professional collections. R. A. Beauregard Columbia University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Lawrence J. Vale is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. His many books include three prize-winning volumes: Architecture, Power, and National Identity; From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors: and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods.