Over the decades, there has been a world-wide transformation of so-called ‘vernacular houses’. Based on ethnographic accounts from different regions, Houses Transformed investigates the changing practices of building houses in a transnational context. It explores the intersection of house biographies and social change, the politics of housing design, the social fabrication of aspirational houses, the domestication of concrete and the intersection of materiality and ontology as well as the rhetoric of the vernacular. The volume provides new anthropological pathways to understanding the dynamics of dwelling in the 21st century.

TRANSFORMING ISSUES IN HOUSING DESIGN A practical and complete resource for students, researchers, and practitioners of housing design Transforming Issues in Housing Design delivers a comprehensive vision for the design, philosophy, psychology, efficiency, and constitution of housing. This collection of articles explores many of the most pressing and relevant issues related to the ongoing transformation of housing design. Twenty-two contributed chapters discuss the past and current state of housing design, how it evolved to become what it is today, and, finally, how it may unfold in the future. A team of global experts presents the most up-to-date research and a diverse and illuminating collection of examples to highlight housing design around the world. Readers will also find: A thorough introduction to modern housing design and how it relieves and contributes to various social and economic problems Insightful explorations of the built environment, interior architecture, urban design, sustainable living, space planning, and more Practical discussions of a theoretical framework to make sense of housing design concepts Complete treatments of concepts, research, and built projects from a diverse range of communities and cultures Perfect for architects and students of urban studies, interior design, and architecture, Transforming Issues in Housing Design will also benefit those who design, research, and teach housing.

The Right to Buy is the most controversial housing policy of the last 30 years, but it is also the most successful. Unlike the many studies that have focused on the costs of the policy and sought to show its negative impact, this book seeks to understand the Right to Buy on its own terms. It explains how the policy links with a coherent ideology based on self-interest and the care of things close to us - instead of a policy that sought to do things for people, the Right to Buy allowed people to do things for themselves.

Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post

This book analyzes the reasons of spontaneous transformation in self-built houses in the context of developing countries. Recognizing Housing Transformation as a natural phenomenon, the book focuses on self-built houses in the city of Dhaka. Firstly, it explains the explicit reasons behind spontaneous housing transformations. Then the book carefully unveils the implicit values that are hidden behind those explicit reasons. The entire book is an ethnographic journey, which expresses unique stories behind houses in transformation.

Time and Transformation in Architecture, edited by Tuuli Lähdesmäki, approaches architecture and the built environment from an interdisciplinary point of view by emphasizing in its theoretical discussions and empirical analysis the dimensions of time, temporality, and transformation—and their relation to human experiences, behavior, and practices. The volume consists of seven chapters that explore the following questions: How do architectural ideas, ideals, and meanings emerge, develop, and transform? How is architecture manifested in relation to time, time-space, and the social dimensions it entails and produces? The volume provides both multifaceted theoretical discussions on time and temporality in architecture and empirical case studies around the globe in which these theories and conceptualizations are tested and explored. Contributors are Eiman Ahmed Elwidaa, André van Graan, June Jordaan, Joongsub Kim, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Assumpta Nnaggenda-Musana, Sanja Rodeš and Smaranda Spânu.

Dura-Europos, on the Syrian Euphrates, is one of the best preserved and most extensively excavated sites of the Roman world. A Hellenistic foundation later held by the Parthians and then the Romans, Dura had a Roman military garrison installed within its city walls before it was taken by the Sasanians in the mid-third century. The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses is the first study to consider the houses of the site as a whole. The houses were excavated by a team from Yale and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters in the 1920s and 30s, and though a wealth of archaeological and textual material was recovered, most of that relating to housing was never published. Through a combination of archival information held at the Yale University Art Gallery and new fieldwork with the Mission Franco-Syrienne d'Europos-Doura, this study re-evaluates the houses of the site, integrating architecture, artefacts, and textual evidence, and examining ancient daily life and cultural interaction, as well as considering houses which were modified for use by the Roman military.