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This chapter focuses on social housing as a particular domain where exclusions of migrants and ethnic minorities are prevalent. Everyone has a right to feel safe 1 in their own home and neighbourhood yet, between 2013 and 2014, there was a noticeable increase in the number of reports of individuals and families in Ireland experiencing racism in housing, either in the home or in its vicinity. While offering insights into immigrants’ experience of racism and racially motivated anti-social behaviour in social housing in the Republic of
Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.
This book focuses on the ways in which German urban élites tried to mould German cities between the 'birth' of modern planning in the 1890s and the complete cessation of building caused by the economic collapse around 1930. It investigates the attributes which 'metropolis', was given by early twentieth-century Germans. The book takes Munich as its 'still point in the turning world' of German urban development in particular, but makes arguments relevant well beyond the southern capital's city limits. It presents a case study of the urban landscape of modernity and modernisation which was increasingly. The book commences with exploration of the balanced construction of 'the city' in planners' world views. It addresses contemporaries' 'action plans' as responses to the problems of modernity, and characterises these actions as themselves distinctly modern. The book also tries to restore an emphasis on contemporaries' nuanced views of modernity and modernisation, and explores the balanced construction of 'the city' in planners' world views. Discussing hospitals, old people's homes and social housing, the book discusses that space could be a highly coercive tool for the social reformer, and scholars need to address material effects. It also demonstrates how intellectual impasses in manipulating the technologies of space could have profound political consequences. The ways that the built environment is currently used as evidence in historical writing are problematic. The book treats modernity with little eye for Modernism.
Resisting urban renewal in Barcelona’s periphery 99 5 Commoning neighborhoods: resisting urban renewal in Barcelona’s periphery In search for the potentialities of emancipatory commoning, a lot is to be learned by studying practices of cohabitation in housing complexes. We know that in most cases people are forced to live together under conditions that they never chose merely because they don’t have other options. Neighborhoods of so-called affordable housing programs or social housing complexes more often than not become stigmatized areas for the urban poor
. Shedding light on the lived experience and agency of the inhabitants of mid-twentieth-century social housing, this final chapter continues where chapter 3 left off to demonstrate how the project of urban modernism and the ambitions of planners were challenged at street level by the very ordinary, quotidian habits of the very people for whom the estates were designed. As I showed in chapter 3, expectations about how certain spaces should function, what it was appropriate to do in them and the beneficial outcomes they were supposed to produce meant mapping certain
struggle for land and access to public funding; it continues with the collective definition of projects and is finally consolidated in stonemasonry” (USINA 2006:17). Homeless workers associations, organized in the context of very active movements struggling for the right to housing, not only participate in the design of their future social housing complexes but are educated by USINA to be able to work in the construction process efficiently and through organized forms of collaboration. These are directly connected to the rich tradition of community cooperation developed
this would contribute to creating a dozen garden cities intended for workers. Up until today, this type of activity has remained closely associated with the concept of social housing. There is therefore something rather paradoxical in examining the spaces created at the same time in the French colonies, intended for Europeans, the most privileged sector of
-maintenance, disempowering, unnecessary, mostly ugly, and they can never be truly safe.’1 The Daily Mail’s notorious right-wing commentator Richard Littlejohn claimed that Grenfell Tower represented ‘all that is wrong with our social housing stock in microcosm … a dumping ground for problem families and recent immigrants’.2 Even Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London who hailed from a south London council estate, stated that the ‘defining outcome of this tragedy [may well be] that the worst mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s are systematically torn down’.3 In reality, public housing has not
John Lawson was one someone. He was left feeling particularly disappointed by Sheffield City Council's response to the Poll Tax. During the Help Oppose Mass Estate Sales Campaign to stop private landlords buying up council houses, John Lawson had built up a large network of activists on Parsons Cross, the largest social housing estate in Sheffield. At the behest of Blunkett he had ‘educated’ them – ‘what he meant was agitate’. 119 When the Poll Tax was announced Blunkett phoned Lawson again asking him to mobilise the
private and public housing has shifted considerably in a majority of European cities. Easy access to mortgage financing has greatly encouraged ownership. A further impact has resulted from less social housing or publicly protected housing following reductions in public investment in housing programmes (CECODHAS 2012 in García and Vicari-Haddock 2016: 398) leading to sharp divisions in housing accessibility. Large numbers of citizens affected by the housing crisis have had to rely on family and community solidarity. Housing accessibility problems have burdened local