Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities
Lawrence J. Vale
Abstract
The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. This book offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. This history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment o ... More
The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. This book offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.” In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. This history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood/Clark Howell Homes. The book offers the concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, it recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.
Keywords:
public housing,
American public policy,
Atlanta,
Chicago,
slums,
housing projects,
Cabrini-Green,
Techwood,
Clark Howell Homes,
architecture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226012315 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226012599.001.0001 |
