Homeownership and Symbolic Boundaries: Exclusion of Disadvantaged Non-homeowners in the Homeowner Nation of Norway

In this article, I introduce the notion of symbolic boundaries to the study of homeownership. Data for the article are qualitative interviews with ‘housing strugglers’ in two cities in Norway, a ‘homeowner nation’. The social categories in question are refugees, people with drug and/or mental health problems and the ‘déclassé’. The analysis reveals patterns that are familiar from studies of homeowner countries; homeownership is associated with safety/security, freedom/autonomy, savings and belonging. Each of these values is explored, and from this examination, I show how homeownership constitutes a symbolic boundary between the ‘worthy’ and ‘less worthy’, and ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Disadvantaged non-homeowners, who struggle for security and autonomy in private renting or social housing, often find that their exclusion from homeownership is associated with a perceived lack of moral worth and dignity, and with symbolic exclusion.     

Conference Bibliography

This paper looks at Jacques Tati's 1967 film ‘Playtime’ and its constructed city set on the periphery of Paris as an example of the negotiation of urban space and its prescribed ‘instructions for use‘. It explores this city of façades and choreographed subversions in relation to Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Junkspace’. Linked through their interaction with and comment on the changing Parisian landscape of the 1960s the paper then goes on to look at the development of the Centre Pompidou, and the American artist, Gordon Matta-Clark’s intervention on the site of its construction. Tati's film ‘Playtime’ was originally entitled ‘Re-creation’ and the notion of recreation permeates the case studies used, this paper and further research—finding and creating alternative spaces of play, a world apart from the allocated ‘Leisure spaces’ and ‘recreational facilities’ of an expanding Junkspace.     

Exuberance,I Don't Know; Excess,I Like

Hernan Diaz Alonso redefines ‘excess’ and ‘exuberance’ on his own terms. Fully au fait and comfortable with the excessive, he describes how in relation to his own work he views excess as more of a tendency or a logic, which sums up his approach; whereas he perceives the exuberant as removed from the design process and more like an ‘adjective’, an ‘emerging quality’ observed by others. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Repackaging the poor? Conceptualising neoliberal reforms of social rental housing

This paper considers the need for conceptual renewal in comparative housing research. Since the mid-1990s, Kemeny’s model of ‘unitary’ and ‘dualist’ rental markets and Harloe’s classification of ‘mass’ and ‘residual’ social housing provision have been repeatedly recycled in comparative studies of ‘social’ and ‘public’ housing provision. Amidst international neoliberal policy mobilities, their models based on liberal welfare regimes wield particular power. Conceived during neoliberal cutbacks of public services, Kemeny’s ‘dualist’ rental market and Harloe’s ‘residual’ model of social housing similarly depict state-subsidised rental housing provision as bureaucratic, and targeted to the poor. Despite empirical change, these models are still used to describe liberal welfare regimes, and to theorise international policy convergence. Based on a review of recent market-oriented reforms of state-subsidised rental housing provision in the US, Australia and England; original neoliberal ‘sites of production’, this contribution asks whether these conceptual models still reflect the empirics. Findings diverge from the models, undermining their assumptions about how neoliberal reforms progress.     

Mastering the urbanization process. The urban questions of engineer August Mennes in the Antwerp agglomeration

Processes of urban expansion at the turn of the twentieth century have generally been described in terms of ‘regional planning’. However, in the Belgian context, and in Antwerp more specifically, the concept of the ‘agglomeration’ was put to the fore rather than the ‘region’, and ‘urbanization’ was a more common practice than ‘planning’. This paper shows how a ‘programme of urbanization’ centred on pertinent ‘urban questions’ shaped the contours of the Antwerp Agglomeration. In adopting this perspective of ‘programmatic urbanization’, the paper seeks to place the development of Antwerp extra muros within a different lineage, outside of the quest for comprehensive planning. Recomposing an eclectic catalogue of five pertinent ‘urban questions’, this paper investigates how and to which extent the Study Committee for the development of the Antwerp Agglomeration and its prominent engineer August Mennes, tried to master the urbanization process as it unfolded. Urbanization, then, is framed as a collective practice that generates positive agglomeration effects and surplus values that could not have been produced by individual actors. As such, the paper expands the understanding of urbanization from a random process of capital accumulation to a project that includes the building of social and cultural capital.     

唐宋诗画中的茶花及其园林应用初探

从唐宋期间的129首诗词可见,茶花的概念逐渐从茶(Camellia einensis)花发展至涵盖了山茶(Camellia japonica)、滇山茶(Camellia reticulata)、茶梅(Camella sasanqua)等野生资源及山茶品种的广义概念,并出现了'黄香'粉红'玉环'红百叶'并山茶'...     

Developing a land-cover classification to select indicators of forest ecosystem health in a rapidly urbanizing landscape

As moderate-sized cities become more urbanized, ecosystems are altered by land-use change. Key ecological services, such as clean air and water, drought and flood protection, soil generation and preservation, and detoxification of wastes are disrupted, risking the health and welfare of society. An understanding of ecosystem responses to urbanization is necessary to evaluate and balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability goals. Our main objective was to develop a land management and planning tool using a land-cover classification to select landscape indicators of ecosystem health near Columbus, GA. Spearman's Rho correlations were calculated to compare landscape and field-based indicators. Results suggest there are significant inverse correlations between ‘percent forest land-cover’ and ‘population, housing, and road densities’; ‘tree species richness’ and ‘forest patch density’; ‘percent urban land-cover’ and ‘lichen species richness’; ‘lichen incidence’ and ‘forest perimeter-area fractal dimension’. Overall, there were 152 significant urban/biological correlations obtained from this assessment (Rho ≥ |0.50| and p ≤ 0.10). Such a tool could prove useful to land managers and environmental planners by providing a quick and simple method to assess broad areas of land in a single analysis.     

Entitlement and justice

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with people living and working in ‘disadvantaged’ Australian suburbs, this article focuses on how disadvantaged people must prove ‘entitlement’, most often through a stylised performance of ‘undeserved’ suffering which in turn reinforces a definition of need based upon character. These stylised narratives of suffering, and the stories of heroism which complement them, emerge from a local ‘war of words’. The article argues that these stories are a complex and difficult resource for urban analysts and that other, more submerged, narratives must also be incorporated in any account of poverty and injustice.     

The unintended consequences of government policies and programmes for public open spaces in inner-urban Sydney

Sport is important internationally; but in Australia, it is part of the national identity. The enjoyment of public open space for sport is, therefore, an assumed community right. We interviewed key staff from inner Sydney councils about management issues associated with public open space. The greatest concern was sporting fields – formal and informal – which were considered to have exceeded carrying capacity mainly because of the unintended outcomes of government programmes/policies spanning; (1) ‘healthy lifestyles’ which increased public open space use; (2) ‘urban consolidation’ increased inner-city population density with associated increased usage and loss of open space; (3) ‘temporal water restriction’ during drought (not ‘water budgets’) which intensify management issues; and (4) ‘building the education revolution’, meaning that public open space lost from schools results in increased pressure on public open space. Consequences have increased human pressure on public open space without commensurate consideration for the management and/or expansion of these areas.     

Critical nostalgia: Kuwait urban modernity and Alison and Peter Smithson's Kuwait Urban Study and Mat-Building

In September, 1970, Peter Smithson presented the ‘Kuwait Urban Study and Mat-Building' proposal to the Crown Prince of Kuwait. The meeting took place two decades after Kuwait's 1952 Master Plan that had transformed the historical mixed-use centre into a central business district. The new urban landscape, as some suggested, lacked the character and coherence that the old city had once possessed. At the same time, the Smithsons’ dissatisfaction with post-war British reality inspired a shift in their understanding of the city and the development of ideas of ‘re-identification’ and ‘association’. This paper explores the cultural traces of this encounter and ties these narratives together through the more recent concept of ‘critical nostalgia’. It draws conclusions from the parallel narratives of loss that were expressed about the ‘modern’ environment in mid-1960s Kuwait and those that were recorded in the ‘Englishness’ of the Smithsons’ writings. These debates about the role that ‘tradition’ would play in the contemporary city set the context of this cultural intersection that, in turn, informed the making of the Kuwait Urban Study.     

Putting the public back into public space

The exclusion of ‘the public’ from public space has been a growing source of concern in Australian and international urban research. A variety of models of ‘good’ public space are employed to criticise a range of ‘bad’ spatial arrangements and security technologies in contemporary public space. These models often receive less attention than the spaces themselves, but are a fundamental part of any project attempting to ‘put the public back into public space’. This paper compares four models of public space commonly employed by analysts of contemporary public space. Some of the models of ‘good’ public space are themselves inequitable and exclusionary in important respects. Iris Marion Young's“Justice and the Politics of Difference” (1990) develops a multi‐public model which has the potential to address some of these deficiencies, and the paper suggests ways in which this model might be improved.     

A comparative performance analysis of solar heat exchangers for solar hot water application under controlled laboratory conditions

The paper presents the experimental performance evaluation of a novel retrofit heat exchanger (‘SolaPlug’) developed for solar hot water storage applications. The performance of this system was compared with a traditional dual-coil (‘Coil’) solar cylinder under controlled operating conditions. The tests were conducted under different solar-simulated conditions with a 30 and 20 evacuated tube collector. The results showed that after a 6-h test period, the average water temperatures within the store for the ‘SolaPlug’ system were 58.8°C and 40.5°C at 860 and 459?W?m^?2, respectively, and for the ‘Coil’ system were 60.5°C and 40.6°C when a 30 tube collector was used. The performance of the ‘SolaPlug’ system was marginally better than the ‘Coil’ system under the low solar input condition. Under high insolation condition, the overall ‘SolaPlug’ system efficiency was found to be 4.3% lower than that of the ‘Coil’ system. The ‘SolaPlug’ heat exchanger rating was 222?W?K^?1.     

Becoming Architectural: Affirmative Critique,Creative Incompletion

When Greg Lynn embraced digital animation software in the 1990s, he not only redefined architectural production, but also the designer's relationship to the generative process. In this extract from an unpublished essay written in 2000, the philosopher Brian Massumi describes Lynn's ‘in-folding’ open-ended approach, which renders the design process ‘less an external conduit for the artist's creativity’ than the artist ‘a conduit for creativity of the design process’.     

Construction related factors influencing the choice of concrete floor systems

Designers have a wide choice of concrete floor systems for their buildings. They can choose from three basic types available: in situ, precast or hybrid construction. A survey was conducted within the UK construction industry to investigate, in particular, the construction related factors influencing the choice of concrete floor systems. The data collected were subjected to frequency and severity index analyses, Kendall's concordance test and the chi-squared tests to produce a rank ordering of 12 construction related factors. Five factors were identified as being the most important, namely ‘appropriateness of use’, ‘cost’, ‘constructability’, ‘speed’ and ‘health and safety’. These five factors reflect current industry emphasis, and therefore could be adopted as the principal criteria for evaluating and selecting concrete floor systems during the design stage. They could also be used as assessment criteria for developing future systems.     

Attitude‐behaviour relationship in environmental education: a case study from Turkey

This article reports a study on relationships between students’ environmental attitudes and behaviours in Turkey. The theories of reasoned action and learning have been used in this research. The data were obtained from grade‐eight secondary school students (N = 248) in the capital city, Ankara. Factor analysis result showed that there were three factor groups namely ‘general’, ‘economy’ based and ‘domestic’ attitudes and behaviours. Although students’ attitudes towards the environment were highly positive, their answers for behaviours were lower than those for attitudes. Recommendations are presented to improve students’ environmentally responsible behaviour.     

Finding Time

What has our sense of the acceleration of time got to bear on our experience of cities? How might it be consciously countered by architects ‘finding time’ through ‘thoughtful design and measured observation’. ‘A self-declared ‘cultural polymath’, Tim Makower is the founder of Makower Architects. A partner at Allies and Morrison for many years, he has significant experience in leading large-scale projects, ranging from the King's Cross Masterplan in London to the Old Doha Regeneration Framework, which he draws on here and in his book Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale (Wiley, 2014).     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

The Nomenclature of Style: Brutalism,Minimalism, Art History and Visual Style in Architecture Journals

Naming styles or movements is a basic mechanism of architectural journals. The announcement of phenomena such as ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘deconstructivism’ involves referring architectural developments to a context in socio-politics or philosophy, and thus provides at least an initial resistance to their understanding as formal styles, which they quickly become. A different strategy is the naming of an architectural moment in the traditional form of an art historical style. Peter Reyner Banham and the Architecture Review's promotion of ‘Brutalism’ as an anti-aesthetic, look its conceptual form from explicit movements, with members and agenda, such as Futurism. Architectural Design's promotion of ‘Minimalism’ in the l990s exemplifies a different kind of style. In both cases, apparently divergent uses of ‘style’ are complicated by the process of naming, and by the tendency of the journal's graphic design to become the style—to become self-identifying.     

We Will Be Making Active Form

In response to the relative redundancy of architect-designed buildings and the proliferation of commercial structures that are rolled out to a highly formulaic spatial format across the world's cities, Keller Easterling advocates a new architecture of ‘active form’. These active forms potentially perform as ‘verbs’ rather than ‘nouns’ to the city's activities, providing ‘the means by which the field changes’ and the ‘repertoire for how it plays’.     

From long-term homelessness to stable housing: investigating ‘liminality’

Abstract

This paper uses the term ‘liminality’ to refer to the experience of feeling like an outsider when people are transitioning from one housing status (long-term homelessness) to another (housed). Three dimensions of liminality are identified: ‘material’, ‘relational’ and ‘psychological’. The material dimension covers how people feel about their housing and whether they find it difficult to make the transition from homeless to housed. The relational dimension focuses on whether people are able to rebuild relations with family and friends. The psychological dimension includes how people deal with the stigma of homelessness. The paper demonstrates that most people can overcome the material dimension of liminality if they are given appropriate support, but they find it more difficult to overcome the relational and psychological dimensions of liminality. We conclude that moving on from long-term homelessness is not straightforward and we point to the policy implications of these findings.