This book is the first work to describe the architecture of an entire complex society, from the inventive self-built dwellings of the poor to the elegant mansions of the rich. Abundantly illustrated with utilitarian black and white photos and good line-drawings. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collection of essays represents the first in-depth, scholarly treatment of housing policies and conditions throughout the Caribbean. The contributors consider both the performance of the state and the autonomous activities of the poor, making this volume an invaluable contribution to future planning and debate.The essays, each dealing with a specific island or group of islands, collectively address four main themes: the history of housing provision since colonization, current housing conditions, state policies toward housing provision, and the changing relationships between governments, international funding agencies, the private housing sector, and the peoples' responses. These investigations not only highlight the often alarming problems that Caribbean nations face in providing adequate housing for the poor but also implicate governments in past and present failures and poor performances. However, the essays are also filled with useful insights about the ways in which progressive housing policies can be formulated and implemented. For example, the volume suggests that the Caribbean's rich heritage of folk and vernacular architectural styles should be taken into serious account in future planning efforts.In a concluding synthesis chapter, the volume editors argue that a more progressive future is attainable if all parties exhibit the political will that the poor have already demonstrated.

This fourth volume in the Advances in Environment, Behavior, and Design series continues the intent of earlier volumes by exploring new directions in the multidisciplinary environment-behavior (EB or EBS) field. The series is organized around a framework of theory, methods, research, and utilization that some say has defined the field for the past 15 years. This fourth volume is devoted to chapters that explore the integration of theory, quantitative and qualitative research, and utilization in policy, planning, and architec ture. The authors selected for this volume exemplify the multidisciplinary character of the field-they have been selected from architecture, environ mental psychology, environmental studies, housing research, landscape ar chitecture, social anthropology, social ecology, urban design, and urban planning; from academe and practice; and from Australia, Europe, and North America. HISTORY OF THE ADVANCES SERIES The idea for the series emerged in 1983 at meetings of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). Sev eral publishers were contacted about the possibility of an EDRA Annual Review. Eliot Werner at Plenum Press expressed great interest but suggested that an Advances series would be more appropriate since publication could be tied to a less specific timetable. EDRA, Plenum, and the editors signed a contract in June 1984 for three volumes, with an open door for oral agreements between Plenum and the editors after that time. Four volumes have been published (Volume 1, 1987; Volume 2,1989; Volume 3,1991; and the current Volume 4), each containing 10 to 12 chapters.

Classic representations of the city have focused on simplistic urban dichotomies such as renewal or decline, poverty or prosperity, and vice or vigor. We are left with the question of what actually constitutes a city and what makes it and its people succeed or fail. Recent writing on the city, however, has begun to question the images, metaphors, and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented. Discussing recent visual, architectural and spatial transformations in New York and other major world cities in relation to the themes of ethnicity, capital, and culture, Re-Presenting the City moves between interpretive representations of the newly emerging metropolis and the theoretical and methodological questions raised by the task of such representations. Contributors with backgrounds in urban planning, sociology, cultural studies, architecture, art history, geography, and philosophy reflect on the construction of both the real and the unreal city, the images, metaphors and discourses through which the contemporary city is represented, and the texts which both mediate our experience of, as well as contribute to producing, the city of the future.

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

In considering the consequences of these nineteenth-century attitudes on twentieth-century Puerto Rico, Kinsbruner suggests that racial discrimination continues to limit opportunities for people of color.

In Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design—such as spatial layouts or bright colors—to safely “Latinize” cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging. The built environments that resulted ranged from idealized notions of authentic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of New York City’s public housing in the 1950s, which sought to diminish concerns over Puerto Rican settlement, to the Fiesta Marketplace in downtown Santa Ana, California, built to counteract white flight in the 1980s. Ultimately, Londoño demonstrates that abstracted barrio culture and aesthetics sustain the economic and cultural viability of normalized, white, and middle-class urban spaces.