Including illustrated case study examples, this original and groundbreaking book explores a wide range of literature, combines social theory with elements from the built environment disciplines and explores how and why we build where we do.

Drawing together a wide range of literature, this original book combines social theory with elements from the built environment disciplines to provide insight into how and why we build places and dwell in spaces that are at once contradictory, confining, liberating and illuminating. This groundbreaking book deals with topical issues, which are helpfully divided into two parts. The first presents a conceptual framework examining how the built environment derives from a variety of influences: structural, institutional, textual, and action-orientated. Using illustrated case study examples, the second part covers new build schemes, including urban villages, gated communities, foyers, retirement homes and televillages, as well as refurbishment projects, such as mental hospitals and tower blocks. Multidisciplinary in its focus, Housing Transformations will appeal to academics, students and professionals in the fields of housing, planning, architecture and urban design, as well as to social scientists with an interest in housing.

The Chicago Housing Authority s Plan for Transformation repudiated the city s large-scale housing projects and the paradigm that produced them. The Plan seeks to normalize public housing and its tenants, eliminating physical, social, and economic barriers among populations that have long been segregated from one another. But is the Plan an ambitious example of urban regeneration or a not-so-veiled effort at gentrification? Is it resulting in integration or displacement? What kinds of communities are emerging from it? Chaskin and Joseph s book is the most thorough examination of the Plan to date. Drawing on five years of field research, in-depth interviews, and data, Chaskin and Joseph examine the actors, strategies, and processes involved in the Plan. Most important, they illuminate the Plan s limitations which has implications for urban regeneration strategies nationwide."

How can homes be upgraded to meet today's demands - from living comfort to energy efficiency and digital requirements? How can the fusion of the historic and the new be used as a design element? The use of existing residential buildings scores not only with the charm of what has been handed down, be it a baroque villa, a 19th-century farmhouse, or a post-war bungalow, but actually also always with an excellent ecological balance. The extensive reworking, whether modernization, renovation or extension, is a widespread and thoroughly rewarding task for many architects. Since the initial situation is documented for each of the presented projects, the reader can clearly understand the redesign process.

Riobamba and Cuenca, two intermediate cities in Ecuador, have become part of global networks through transnational migration, incoming remittances, tourism, and global economic connections. Their landscape is changing in several significant ways, a reflection of the social and urban transformations occurring in contemporary Ecuadorian society. Exploring the discourses and actions of two contrasting population groups, rarely studied in tandem, within these cities—popular-settlement residents and professionals in the planning and construction sector—this study analyzes how each is involved in house designs and neighborhood consolidation. Ideas, ambitions, and power relations come into play at every stage of the production and use of urban space, and as a result individual decisions about both house designs and the urban layout influence the development of the urban fabric. Knowledge about intermediate cities is crucial in order to understand current trends in the predominantly urban societies of Latin America, and this study is an example of needed interdisciplinary scholarship that contributes to the fields of urban studies, urban anthropology, sociology, and architecture.

In this book, Sue Popkin tells the story of how an ambitious—and risky—social experiment affected the lives of the people it was ultimately intended to benefit: the residents who had suffered through the worst days of crime, decay, and rampant mismanagement of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), and now had to face losing the only home many of them had known. The stories Popkin tells in this book offer important lessons not only for Chicago, but for the many other American cities still grappling with the legacy of racial segregation and failed federal housing policies, making this book a vital resource for city planners and managers, urban development professionals, and anti-poverty activists.

Annotation This volume is one in a series initiated by the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies on the inter-relationship between globalisation and urban transformation. It identifies and describes the inter- and intra-urban transformations of Central and Eastern European cities and considers their pre-1945 historic legacies, the socialist period, and their contemporary transition towards market oriented and democratic systems. The dramatic changes since 1989 including the collapse of Communist ideology, the break-up of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the end of the Cold War and the impact of globalisation and European integration, have reconfigured this region and affected their re-integration into European and global networks. This book first examines the similarities and differences between significant Central and Eastern European cities, comparing the differing patterns of historical context and socialist legacies before 1990, and the impacts of internal and external forces on re-shaping these cities and their paths of transformation since 1990. It also examines the role of contemporary planning within the overall development of Central and Eastern European cities. The conclusion demonstrates the similarities and differences between Central and Eastern European cities and their re-integration into global networks.