Cultivating the Field in the Global Hinterland: Community Building for Mass Housing in the Amazon Region

The large-scale residential settlements that have sprung up over the last decade to house migrants flocking to join Brazil's burgeoning rural industries are in urgent need of retrofitting with infrastructure and community facilities if they are to become sustainable. To this end, international urban design practice the BAÚ Collaborative has initiated the ‘Eden’ project – a participatory design process that involves state authorities, local NGOs, residents and social workers. Rainer Hehl , a cofounder of BAÚ, outlines the problem, the project, and its test-site: the mining town of Parauapebas.     

基于城市规划视角解读我国城建拆迁中的政府行为——以常熟琴湖片区为例

伴随着中国城市化进程的快速推进,"城市扩张"与"旧城改造"日益成为我国城市建设规模不断增大的有力注脚,而与之相伴的则是城建拆迁过程中出现的一系列矛盾冲突和群体性事件,业已成为影响我国社会和谐与稳定的重大隐患。通过梳理我国城建拆迁中的主要利益群体即政府、开发商、被拆迁人之间的利益关系,本文基于城市规划的视角对我国城建拆迁中的政府行为进行了反思,并以常熟琴湖片区为例,对其城建拆迁中的政府行为进行了实证分析,继而对规范今后我国城建拆迁中的政府行为提出了针对性的对策与建议。     

‘Springtecture’ B

Masaaki Takahashi describes a house, designed by Shuhei Endo, whose coiled corrugated-steel surface seamlessly unifies the inside with the outside, despite its surprisingly rural setting.     

The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its community were ultimately destroyed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Privileging the private home: a case of persuasive storytelling in early twentieth-century professional discourses

The private, detached single-family house has long been a dominant feature in the cities, towns, and suburbs of the United States to a much greater extent than in most other Western nations. To this very day, the private home is considered a constitutive element of the “American Dream.” This paper seeks to uncover some of the mechanisms through which this house acquired commanding presence in the American imagination and, consequently, in American metropolitan space. Specifically, the paper turns to professional discourses from the early 1900s. The paper argues that city-building experts from that time period – architects, housing reformers, and urban planners – collectively envisioned the detached single-family house as having a privileged claim to the American city and converted this vision into a persuasive story. Through their storytelling, the experts helped craft a number of government strategies that defended the dominant position of the single-family dwelling in the American city through the remainder of the twentieth century.     

The housing construction process in Nigeria: Implications for urban growth and development

The major form of urban land use is housing construction. And since the pattern of urban land use largely determines the pattern of urban growth and development, this article argues that the housing construction process in Nigeria is an important contributory factor to the chaotic pattern of urban growth and the planless nature of its urban development. Through an evolutionary analysis of the house building process from precolonial to contemporary times, the article shows that as the building process has become more complex and convoluted, and as more agents, institutions and intermediaries have become involved in the various stages of housing construction, it has become difficult to monitor urban growth and its affects on the shape and pattern of urban development, especially in the absence of any form of plan to guide the development of most towns in the country. The article highlights the need for a master, structure or development plan to guide the growth and development of the urban areas, the review and strengthening of the existing land law, the encouragement of private layouts and the simplification of the building approval process.     

House Lab

The house as a container for our personal possessions is a type of architecture that we encounter on a daily basis. The possessions change over time reflecting our personal changes, yet the house often remains a static icon in its location and in our memory. It is within the house that we first understand the act of dwelling through public and private areas, along with an architectural scale that gives us a gauge by which we encounter all other architecture. An investigation into the nostalgic conception of house is the focus for an Advanced Design studio at The University of Texas at Austin titled House Lab where the typical bungalow is explored.     

Know the Client

Abstract

The house as a container for our personal possessions is a type of architecture that we encounter on a daily basis. The possessions change over time reflecting our personal changes, yet the house often remains a static icon in its location and in our memory. It is within the house that we first understand the act of dwelling through public and private areas, along with an architectural scale that gives us a gauge by which we encounter all other architecture. An investigation into the nostalgic conception of house is the focus for an Advanced Design studio at The University of Texas at Austin titled House Lab where the typical bungalow is explored.     

Urban History Matters: Explaining the German–American Homeownership Gap

The homeownership rate in the United States has continuously been about 20 percentage points higher than that of Germany. This homeownership gap is traced back to before the First World War at the urban level. Existing approaches, relying on socio-economic factors, demographics, culture or housing policy, cannot explain the persistence of these differences in homeownership. This article fills this explanatory gap by making a path-dependence argument: it argues that nineteenth-century urban conditions either began to create the American suburbanized single-family house cities or compact multi-unit-building cities, as in Germany. US cities developed differently from German ones because they lacked feudal shackles, were governed as “private cities” and gave easier access to mortgages and building land. The more historically suburbanized a city, the lower its homeownership rate today. Economic and political reinforcing mechanisms kept the two countries on their paths. The article’s contribution is to give a historical and city-focused answer to a standing question in the housing literature.     

Urban [IM]plants Tactics for Recombining Landscape and Collective Space in Bonheiden,Belgium

Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating public spaces that use the town's ‘original landscape as the base material’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Wash

Sean Lally of WEATHERS urges designers to realise the performative capabilities of the ambient effects of the urban wash – the artificial light given off by cities at night. Taking up this principle of a wash within his designs for the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he demonstrates how a ‘climatic wash’ could create an artificial microclimate that extends the seasonal activities of the museum's programmes.     

Ex Silico Ad Vivo: Computational Simulation and Urban Design at Foster + Partners

What makes a successful city? Can this be replicated simply by following tried-and-tested urban typologies? Francis Aish, Adam Davis and Martha Tsigkari of Foster + Partners' Applied Research + Development (ARD) group argue that technology allows other approaches to urban design. They explain that computational simulation is increasingly valuable in predicting how the dynamic and complex systems of a city might play out in an urban context, forging an exciting new alliance between computation and intuition.     

Low-Tech Transgression: The Interventional Work of EXYZT

Alex Romer and Naïm Aït-Sidhoum define EXYZT's practice as one characterised by ‘transgressive forms’ and ‘construction devices’. They explain how this has come about through the studio's penchant for the loose conditions of leftover spaces – derelict urban sites or marginal spaces by the sides of roads and railway lines – which require the building of temporary structures in tight timetables on limited budgets.     

Deregulated private renting: A decade of change in Scotland

Efforts to stimulate reinvestment in the private rented sector in Britain began in the late 1980s. It suited the Conservative government to label these changes as ‘deregulation’ although they were more complex than this term implies. This article provides evidence of the impacts of the changes in Scotland. It emphasizes the need to examine the impacts on different groups within the private rented sector. In particular, deregulation tended to favour those able to pay market rents, while increased restrictions on housing benefits meant that the ability of low-income households to afford private rented accommodation was reduced. Other groups, such as those in tied accommodation or on regulated tenancies, were largely unaffetted by the changes. In response to deregulation, there has been a significant increase in the flow of lets at the upper end of the market (self-contained flats and houses) while rents for this type of accommodation have barely risen. At the lower end of the market (shared accommodation), the flow of lets has increased only marginally or not at all. Landlords also appear to have become more reluctant to house low-income tenants. The article uses a database compiled from advertisements for private rented accommodation appearing in newspapers and property guides in the period 1987 to 1996. Nick Bailey is a Research Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. His main research interests include: housing and urban policy, particularly housing renewal, neighbourhood regeneration and the private housing market; urban economic and social change; and local economic development policies.     

Globalization and urban governance in Istanbul

Since the 1980s, the topic of governance has been extensively investigated in parallel with the effects of globalization on policy issues. Meanwhile, there has been an increasing fragmentation of responsibilities in the urban arena. Now, the main focus is on new institutional relations and the policy process in which different constituents and agencies participate at both the national and the local level. As a result of the rescaling process of the state, networked forms of governance constitute a new form of politics. The changing governance structure in Istanbul, as in many other cities, is shaped by the interaction of economic and institutional factors, which are mediated through political, cultural and other contextual forces. To demonstrate that global forces influence urban management systems, this article describes the increasing participation of the private sector in urban development in Istanbul. An evaluation of urban governance is made to ascertain whether the concept of governance can explain the urban management model prevailing in Istanbul.     

Fieldoffice Architects In Situ: Reflecting on the Rural-Urban Mix in Yilan,Taiwan

Yilan is generally considered a rural county with a city at its heart. Fieldoffice Architects, whose team live and work entirely in this area and are deeply immersed in its community, take a more holistic view. Their collaborative approach blurs the boundaries between rural and urban, with architecture and environmental design projects interconnecting to form part of a regional framework. Principal Sheng-Yuan Huang and Project Architect Yu-Hsiang Hung reflect on their practice.     

居住和交通协同发展与上海城市空间结构重整

住宅、小汽车将成为我国城市住房制度改革后 ,大城市居民的两大消费热点 ,随之也会带来大城市空间结构布局的改变。以上海为例 ,未来居民购买小汽车与住宅联合消费使居住与交通协同发展成为可能 ,它们可作为推动大城市形成“多核心”城市区域的助推剂 ,对我国大城市周边地区新建住宅区与所依托大城市之间空间结构重整将具有积极而深远的意义。     

Local Climates of the City

A specialist in urban effects on climate, particularly the heat island effect, Iain D Stewart is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Here he describes how the emergence of ‘borderless’, ‘patchwork’ and ‘polynucleated’ cities has led climatologists to develop a new classification system of urban landscapes. The system divides cities into local climate zones (LCZs) according to their surface structure, cover, fabric and metabolism.     

Towards a Typology of Tiny Houses

The emergent tiny house movement is gaining momentum globally, in the United States where it originated, and in countries such as Australia. Little scholarly research exists on the tiny house movement, with most information limited to social and popular media. Moreover, there is limited information on the definition of a tiny house. As an important first step in bringing a more scholarly focus, this article presents a typology of tiny houses; what is a tiny house and what defining characteristics allow a tiny dwelling to be considered a tiny house? This study involved an analysis of social media, face to face interviews with key protagonists and a questionnaire survey, to establish a preliminary classification of tiny houses. We aimed to place the movement in its wider context, and establish a foundation for future research into the movement's potential to trigger positive economic and environmental change towards more sustainable urban environments.