Europe Rehoused was one of the most influential housing texts of the 1930s, and is still widely cited. Written by the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894-1965) it offered a survey of the nearly two decades of social housing built across Europe since the end of World War One, with the aim of informing British policy makers; as a reviewer declared ‘it has a decidedly propagandist flavour’. Denby was a leading figure in housing debates in the 1930s. Adopting a line in sharp critique of what she saw as the entirely materialist approach of state housing policy, Denby advocated the incorporation of social amenities alongside well-designed and equipped flats and houses, ideally sited within urban areas; by the late 1930s she was a pioneering advocate of the concept of mixed development. Europe Rehoused is divided into two parts. The first considered the origins of the housing problem of the inter-war decades, which Denby dated to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. She then examined the various national factors which influenced the problem: climate, post-war economy and the nature of land ownership. Finally she discussed the financial aspect: the bodies responsible for house building and the nature of the subsidies available for building. This was very much a schematic survey and the second, and largest, part of the book was devoted to individual studies of European practice, and discussed ‘two winners in the War, two losers and two neutrals’: Sweden, Holland, Germany, Vienna, Italy and France. This section was completed with a concluding chapter in which she compared continental work with the British system, and the lessons that could be learnt in this country from abroad. Although Denby’s book was not the only one of its sort, its importance lies in its polemical nature and its advocacy of a rehousing policy which would become widely adopted after WWII. Significant too, is that the book is the voice of a woman who had assumed a significant status as a housing expert in the inter-war decades; Walter Gropius, who wrote the introduction to the US edition of the book observed that the book ‘carried the weight of perfect expertness.’ Such voices have for too long been overlooked, yet Denby was formed part of a very strong tradition of women reformers who worked to re-shape the inter-war and post-war British built environment.

Europe Rehoused was one of the most influential housing texts of the 1930s, and is still widely cited. Written by the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894-1965) it offered a survey of the nearly two decades of social housing built across Europe since the end of World War One, with the aim of informing British policy makers; as a reviewer declared ‘it has a decidedly propagandist flavour’. Denby was a leading figure in housing debates in the 1930s. Adopting a line in sharp critique of what she saw as the entirely materialist approach of state housing policy, Denby advocated the incorporation of social amenities alongside well-designed and equipped flats and houses, ideally sited within urban areas; by the late 1930s she was a pioneering advocate of the concept of mixed development. Europe Rehoused is divided into two parts. The first considered the origins of the housing problem of the inter-war decades, which Denby dated to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. She then examined the various national factors which influenced the problem: climate, post-war economy and the nature of land ownership. Finally she discussed the financial aspect: the bodies responsible for house building and the nature of the subsidies available for building. This was very much a schematic survey and the second, and largest, part of the book was devoted to individual studies of European practice, and discussed ‘two winners in the War, two losers and two neutrals’: Sweden, Holland, Germany, Vienna, Italy and France. This section was completed with a concluding chapter in which she compared continental work with the British system, and the lessons that could be learnt in this country from abroad. Although Denby’s book was not the only one of its sort, its importance lies in its polemical nature and its advocacy of a rehousing policy which would become widely adopted after WWII. Significant too, is that the book is the voice of a woman who had assumed a significant status as a housing expert in the inter-war decades; Walter Gropius, who wrote the introduction to the US edition of the book observed that the book ‘carried the weight of perfect expertness.’ Such voices have for too long been overlooked, yet Denby was formed part of a very strong tradition of women reformers who worked to re-shape the inter-war and post-war British built environment.

Bringing together a wide range of studies from twelve European countries, this book offers a state-of-the-art overview of the driving forces behind spatial diversity and social complexity inherent in second home expansion in all parts of the continent - from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and from the British Isles to Russia - in the context of contemporary mobility patterns largely induced by tourism. As befits the overall conception of the book as a compendium of current second home research, planning and policy issues, the book endorses the following: multidisciplinary approaches to the second home phenomenon as an expression of the ’leisure class’ mobility and recreation-based lifestyles, as well as a constitutive element of post-productivist land-use patterns and landscape change; and socio-economic and territorial development planning and policy-related perspectives on social change and spatial re-organization provoked by the expansion of second home tourism in times of prosperity and crisis. ’This book shows that second home tourism has become such an important sector of the economy that it is no longer possible to let it develop freely: it is the source of new forms of social deprivation; it generates residential economies that are particularly sensitive to the economic cycle; it often impairs beautiful landscapes and increases human pressure on natural environments. As a result, it is one of the major physical planning stakes of touristic areas’ (From the concluding essay by Paul Claval, Université de Paris I - Sorbonne, Paris, France).

This book, which fills a gap on the materiality of lived relations, examines households within the context of their immediate physical surroundings of home and shows how human interactions are reflected in built forms. Houses are dynamic participants in family life in many ways. They often pre-date the origins and outlast the life spans of their inhabitants, but they can exert a powerful influence on the organization of behaviors and the values of family members, as well as on the forms and flows of family life across the generations. Constituting wealth, investment, security and inheritance, they are an objective in and of themselves in many domestic strategies. Drawing on developments within anthropology, archaeology, architecture and social history, the authors demonstrate, through detailed case studies, how household or family relations can usefully be mined to re-situate social theory in both space and time. Space, boundaries, family cycles, historic changes, migration patterns, ethnicity, memory and gender are all interrogated for the light they shed on how people interact with the physical world around them and what this means culturally and symbolically. Europe is an especially rich focus for this kind of analysis because it is distinguished by its long, well-documented history and a recent period of intense change.