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This text is about the design of dignified, affordable housing for those not served by the private sector, and how that housing fits comfortably into our communities. It is a non-technical analysis for everyone interested in the creation of affordable housing.

How are efforts at making cities more inclusive and equitable playing out across nations and societies, with different governance structures and varying political circumstances? How is affordable housing bridging economic gaps across different social and cultural geographies? This collection of fifty essays and case studies engages in these important questions and explores a wide array of strategies and approaches, extracting their overlaps and contrasts. It features interviews with influential administrators and planners such as Somsook Boonyabancha (Thailand), and Jaime Lerner (Brazil). It showcases projects by globally known architects and urbanists such as MVRDV (The Netherlands), and Alejandro Aravena (Chile). And it offers discussions on uplifting the base of the economic pyramid through low-income and slum-upgradation projects in Mali, Venezuela, Bogota, Myanmar, and Pune. This volume is not only an invaluable resource for architects and planners interested in the design of affordable housing, but for anyone interested in the global multiplicity and complexity of urban affordability, liveability and social justice.

The book reveals a new understanding of the ways that design shapes our lives and gives professionals and interested citizens the tools to seek out and demand designs that dignify.

"An eye opener. The subject of homelessness has often been discussed, but no one before has cut such a broad swath through the subject. There is no other book that deals with the architecture of homelessness."—Robert Gutman, author of Architectural Practice: A Critical View "Davis lays out a compelling case for us all, especially designers, to get involved in solutions for the problem of homelessness. He discusses the plight of the homeless in terms that make them real, and his chapter on the costs of homelessness lays out the argument for involvement in very practical terms."—Michael Underhill, Professor, School of Architecture at Arizona State University

Designing Architecture is an indispensable tool to assist both students and young architects in formulating an idea, transforming it into a building, and making effective design decisions. This book promotes integrative and critical thinking in the preliminary design of buildings to inspire creativity, innovation, and design excellence. This compendium of individual wisdom and collective experience offers explicit guidance to students and young professionals on how to approach, analyze, and execute specific tasks; develop and refine a process to facilitate the best possible design projects; and create meaningful architectural form. Here the design process – from orchestrating client participation to finalizing schematic design – is explored and illuminated. The following material is presented to make the book a useful didactic tool for professional development: explicit strategies for doing design rather than simply reviewing principles and precedents creative ideas in approaching and framing problems in design terms specific methods to translate ideas to culturally significant, socially responsive, and environmentally sensitive buildings techniques to integrate all levels of cognition from analysis to epiphany counsel on developing a personalized process for engaging design projects case studies augment the text and chronicle fascinating applications of the design process. The essence of this book lies in an integrated and holistic approach to each unique project as well as fostering curiosity and exploration – a departure from algorithms, easy generalities, or a formula for design. Designing Architecture will inspire readers to elevate the quality of preliminary designs and unravel some of the mystery of creating the most beautiful, responsive, and responsible architectural design possible.

Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.