The Value of Housing

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.13.1.3829

Abstract

This issue of Footprint brings together housing-as-design with housing-as-policy and housing-as-market to discuss what is, today, the value of housing. It discusses how the architecture of housing plays a role in changing behavioural norms and models of subjectivation promoted by the neoliberal ideological agenda. The contributions included in this issue examine different ways of addressing the production of housing either as a social right or a commodity, or both combined. Reviewing cases from North America, Europe and Asia, they discuss the extent to which the social and economic agendas of the public sector and the market determine the architecture of housing. The background of the discussion is defined by a deadlock: the architectural discourse calls upon the state to re-provide housing and solve the crisis, while the neoliberal state is not interested in commissioning housing. Against this background, this issue examines how the architecture discipline can engage in new ways of responding to the neoliberal state of affairs, examining the entwined relation between ‘architecture’ as a cultural product and ‘housing’ as a socioeconomic need.

Author Biographies

Nelson Mota, Delft University of Technology

Nelson Mota is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. He has authored the book A Arquitectura do Quotidiano (The Architecture of Everyday, 2010) and co-edited Footprint 17: ‘The “Bread & Butter” of Architecture: Investigating Everyday Practices’ (2015, with Ricardo Agarez) and Joelho 8: ‘Ideas and Practices for the European City’ (2017, with José António Bandeirinha and Luís Miguel Correia). Mota investigates the intersections between vernacular social and spatial practices and the architecture of housing. He is production editor and member of the editorial board of Footprint and of the book series DASH – Delft Architectural Studies on Housing.

Yael Allweil, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Yael Allweil is an architect and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel, where she heads the Housing Architecture, History and Theory research group. She completed her PhD in architecture history at UC Berkeley exploring the history of Israel-Palestine as a history of the gain and loss of citizen housing. Her research was published in the monograph Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime 1860–2011 (Routledge, 2017) and several journal articles in Urban Studies, Footprint, Architecture Beyond Europe, City, TDSR and IJIA. During 2019–20 Yael will chair the research group ‘Re-Theorising Housing as Architecture’ at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) in Jerusalem (with Gaia Caramellino and Susanne Schindler). Yael’s work involves academic research and activism in the context of the Israeli housing social movement.

References

Aalbers, Manuel. The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach. London ; New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.

Aalbers, Manuel B., and Brett Christophers. ‘Centring Housing in Political Economy’. Housing, Theory and Society 31, no. 4 (2 October 2014): 373–94.

Allweil, Yael. Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860-2011. Planning, History and Environment Series. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017.

Aravena, Alejandro, and Andres Iacobelli. Elemental: Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.

Blau, Eve. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-34. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.

Burdett, Richard, and Philipp Rode, eds. Shaping Cities in an Urban Age. London; New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2018.

Caramellino, Gaia, and Federico Zanfi, eds. Post-War Middle-Class Housing: Models, Construction and Change. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015.

Cupers, Kenny. The Social Project: Housing Postwar France. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Engels, Frederick. ‘The Housing Question’. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 23:317–91. International Publishers, 1988.

Fezer, Jesko, Christian Hiller, Nikolaus Hirsch, Wilfried Kuehn, and Hila Peleg. Housing after the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies. 1st ed. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Wohnungsfrage: Exhibition Guide. 1st ed. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015.

Krivy, Maroš, and Tahl Kaminer. ‘Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism.’ Footprint, no. 13 (2013): 1–6.

Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. London ; New York: Verso Books, 2016.

Martin, Reinhold, Jacob Moore, and Susanne Schindler, eds. The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate — A Provisional Report. New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2015.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Penguin Books, 2013.

———. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane, 2018.

McGuirk, Justin. Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. 1 edition. Verso, 2015.

McLeod, Mary. ‘Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism’. Assemblage, no. 8 (1989): 22.

Mota, Nelson, and Ricardo Agarez, eds. The ‘Bread & Butter’ of Architecture. Footprint 17. Heijningen: Jap Sam Books, 2015.

Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and UN-Habitat. ‘The Right to Adequate Housing’. Geneve: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2009.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Reinhold, Martin. ‘Real Estate Agency’. In The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate — A Provisional Report, edited by Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, and Susanne Schindler, 92–131. New York: The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2015.

Self, Jack, ed. Real Estates: Life without Debt. London: Bedford Press, 2014.

Smithson, Alison, ed. Team 10 Meetings 1953-1984. Delft: Publikatieburi Bouwkunde, 1991.

Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Swenarton, Mark. Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. London: Lund Humphries, 2017.

Turner, John. ‘Housing as a Verb’. In Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process, edited by John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter, 148–75. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1972.

Waswo, Ann. Housing in Postwar Japan: A Social History. London: Routledge, 2002.

Additional Files

Published

2019-07-03

Issue

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019): Issue # 24 | Spring / Summer 2019 | The Architecture of Housing after the Neoliberal Turn

Section

Editorial

License

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.