When social assistance reproduces social inequality: intimate partner violence survivors’ adverse experiences with subsidized housing

This study examined women’s experiences using priority-subsidized housing programs for intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors. Interviews with 10 women highlighted that subsidized housing programs, although very important, can impede women’s efforts to safely escape abuse. Our analysis explored three negative accounts: subsidized housing programs as stigmatizing, difficult to access and qualify for, and controlling. Results have important implications for improving practices and policies of subsidized housing programs and suggest that: (a) subsidized and nonsubsidized housing should be integrated; (b) eligibility should not be based on extent and timeframe of abuse; and (c) women should be permitted to choose their own housing.     

‘Orthodox’ and ‘alternative’ explanations for the reduction of urban violence in Medellín,Colombia

In 2016, 43 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world were located in Latin America. In reducing levels of urban violence and preventing future outbreaks, approaches developed in Western Europe and North America are the most influential and have been subjected to considerable testing in high-income urban environments.

This article focuses on Medellín, Colombia. By drawing from qualitative data collected in Medellín, the article scrutinises claims that the social urbanism policies caused the significant reduction in homicides. An alternative explanation for the reduction in homicides is then presented, focusing on the methods of the perpetrators of violence.     

Intergenerational family support for ‘Generation Rent’: the family home for socially disengaged young people

This paper critically discusses the concept of intergenerational family support in housing for young people. Recognizing increased difficulties faced by the younger generation in the housing market, this paper highlights that support from older family members is increasingly important. Nonetheless, it is critiqued that the role of the family home has been largely ignored in the current ‘generation rent’ discourse. By drawing on recent youth studies debates, this paper argues living in the family home could be an important form of support in housing, especially for marginalized youth. This paper presents insights from qualitative studies in Hong Kong and Scotland and analyses interview accounts of socially disengaged young people. It reflects how remaining at the family home could be interpreted as intergenerational support, and further elicits complexities in expectations, negotiations and emotions involved. This analysis offers new evidence and a more nuanced perspective of intergenerational family support in housing research.     

The Rise of the ‘Invisible Detail’: Ubiquitous Computing and the ‘Minimum Meaningful’

The architectural detail has provided the essential material building block for conveying an idea. Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ask how this, though, is all set to change in a digital context. As technologies shrink and vanish from sight, what might become the new minimum meaningful unit for architecture? How might a new relational scale establish itself, at the level of the ‘invisible detail’ or the microchip? How might this, in turn, change the very nature of buildings as they become highly responsive, human-occupied transmitters?     

At home in home care? Contents and boundaries of the ‘domestic’ among immigrant live-in workers in Italy

How ‘at home’, if at all, migrants feel in their everyday lives abroad is a neglected research issue, with meaningful implications for immigrant, social and housing policies. Their employment as live-in care workers with elderly clients is a unique site to address it, as this article aims to do, based on an archive of life histories of immigrant women in Italy. Co-residential domestic work foregrounds migrants’ need for a domestic space of their own, within the place of someone else. Building on immigrant women’s narratives, I explore what senses and dimensions of domesticity, or even of home, are negotiated in their routine interactions with older clients and the latter’s family members. Within a dwelling place which conflates work and domesticity, the cognitive, emotional and practical dimensions of migrants’ gendered home experience are nothing obvious. How is home-making – as a set of practices oriented to pursue security, familiarity and control – enacted under these circumstances? Is the cultivation of a sense of home beneficial to the clients only, or do immigrant women themselves feel at home somehow? Different ‘modes of domesticity’ are discussed, at the intersection between continuous expectations of home-making and discontinuous ways of feeling at home.     

Social outcomes in the construction industry: the case of the Western Australian ‘Percent for Art’ policy

Social outcomes, in particular intangible social outcomes, are generally difficult to achieve in the construction industry due to the predominantly episodic, fragmented and heavily regulated nature of construction that presupposes a tendency towards mainstream construction processes and design. The Western Australian ‘Percent for Art’ policy is recognized for stimulating social outcomes, by creating richer and more aesthetically pleasing social environments through the incorporation of artwork into public buildings. A case study of four Percent for Art projects highlights the role of the Artwork Selection Committee in incorporating artwork into construction. A total of 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with committee members and policy officers. Data analysis involved a combination of pattern coding and matrix categorization, and resulted in the identification of the committee’s three key elements of collaborative communication, democratic decision-making and project champions. The findings suggest these key elements foster the interaction, communication and relationships needed to facilitate feedback, enhance relationships, create cross-functional teams and lower project resistance, which are all necessary to overcome constraints to social outcomes in construction. The findings provide greater insight into the mechanisms for achieving social outcomes and a basis for future discussion about the processes for achieving social outcomes in the construction industry.     

‘This place feels authentic’: exploring experiences of authenticity of place in relation to the urban built environment in the Jewellery Quarter,Birmingham

Discourses about authenticity of place have gained relevance in recent years and are of increasing importance for urban designers. The paper discusses notions and experiences of authenticity of place in relation to the urban built environment and analyzes concepts of ‘experiential’ authenticity in the form of three key dimensions: the experience of origins, the experience of continuity, and the experience of potentiality and actuality. Drawing on qualitative informant interviews in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham (UK), the paper examines how business representatives experienced authenticity of place in relation to architecture and urban design, with a particular focus on individual identity constructions.     

Planning for decline: the ‘D’‐village policy of County Durham,UK

From the 1930s to the 1970s the contraction of the coal mining industry in County Durham in northern England was followed closely by plans to abolish many of the settlements that had supported the mining population. This article examines the development of the policies that were used to classify villages for demolition, the local resistance that developed in defence of the villages and the justifications provided in support of this policy. The bulk of the research is based on archived contemporary newspaper reporting of the events as they happened. Through this approach it is possible to document the course of popular opposition to planning policies. The policy was wide ranging, with 121 villages designated as category ‘D’, meaning that they were to be demolished. This paper examines the local response in specific case study localities, showing that the main tensions were between the economic concerns and aesthetic appraisal of policy makers and community‐based perceptions of social relations and the environment. The paper suggests that the legacy of the ‘D'‐village policy continued until relatively recently in the minds of planners and residents in Durham's ex‐mining localities.     

Quasi-urban citizenship: the global village as ‘Nomos of the Modern’

The term global village, first coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1962, has come to signify a world peacefully united by electronic media. However, the term must be read in the context of McLuhan’s profound intellectual debt to the ethno-psychiatrist John Colin Carothers who was summoned to Kenya in the 1950s to advise on Britain’s war against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). Carothers recommended that villagisation—a system for detaining civilians in militarised camps—be reconceptualised as a psychiatric buffer, protecting Kenyan agriculturalists from the effects of modernisation and urbanisation. This article examines how villagisation worked as a device of quasi-urbanisation, and how its mechanisms of control were reflected in McLuhan’s concept of the global village.     

Planning outside ‘planning’: the changing role of the Queensland Co-ordinator-General

The unique office of Co-ordinator-General of Public Works was created by the government of the State of Queensland, Australia, in 1938 in line with a contemporary trend towards the coordination principle in public administration throughout much of the western world. Its function was to coordinate the development and planning of public works across the State. Through this role, supplemented by the various changes in function which have occurred over the years, it has been a very influential agency in the planning and development of the State. However, it has never been fully connected to the standard land use planning system. The paper explores the changing roles of the agency between 1938 and 1999 and discusses the influence of a planning agency which is not part of traditional ‘planning.’     

‘A University is a society’: an environmental history of the METU ‘campus’

The formation of a ‘society’ was the major goal of the founders of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey, which was established in 1956 and became a significant source of intellectual, ideological and architectural capital for its region. The university was designed as a total entity, a three-dimensional modern grid spread over the barren Anatolian prairie, and, in half a century, succeeded in transforming its immediate environment into an ‘ideal landscape’. There has been no publication to date documenting the formation processes of the institution, nor its impact as an environmental revolution. In opposition to the consensus that the development of this university was rooted in the United Nation's programmes for higher education in the developing world and the United States' post-war policy in the region, this paper suggests that the METU Project was rather indicative of the Turkish Republic's desire for modernisation in all of its social and ideological programmes. This paper examines the METU Project in a bid to understand how the Anatolian prairie was transformed into an urban environment, and the unique ways it is perceived in the surrounding political contexts of institutional and everyday life. By compiling an environmental historiography, the intention is to find answers to the questions of how, and to what extent, the ideal landscape was influential, and how it was presented with architecture through social and political practices.     

Lighting the Cavern: ‘Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban’

Michael Spens has an intimate working knowledge of the buildings of Alvar Aalto having supported a restoration programme for Aalto's Viipuri Library in Russia between 1993 and 1997, which involved professionals from Russia and Finland. Here he offers his thoughts on the recent Aalto exhibition at the Barbican. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Virtual enclosure,ecosystem services,landscape’s character and the ‘rewilding’ of the commons: the ‘Lake District’ case

Abstract

It is paradoxical that, while there is a generally increasing recognition of the scientific and cultural importance of conserving ‘semi-natural’ pastoral environments, and the negative effects of their widespread abandonment and overgrowth, British ‘rewilding’ activists and environmental managers are effectively advocating policies that will have a similar negative effect on the character of the semi-natural pastoral commons of places like England’s iconic Lake District. This situation, it will be argued, owes to the mindset of ‘virtual enclosure’ whereby the character of landscape is pre-defined by an assumed, behind-the-scenes, Euclidean/Ptolemaic spatial logic that leads to the comprehension of nature as a bounded scenic property; an (e)state of nature with its own economic system and services. This mindset is antithetical to both the practice of pastoral commoning and much contemporary natural science and conservation policy. It fits well, however, with older teleological ideas of nature, as well as modern ideas of privatisation, private property and management control.     

THE ‘WHOLLY OTHER’: On the Spatiality of the Holy in Islam

Most architects and planners are familiar with the failings of Modernist high rise housing constructed in die 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the most symbolic was die Pruitt Igoe housing development in St Louis which was demolished in 1973. It would come as a surprise to many, however, that in 1997 the NSW Department of Housing is planning complete demolition of a housing development known as die Villawood estate. More surprising would be die fact that Villawood is not a high rise development, but a medium density housing scheme completed as recently as 1981. Post-occupancy evaluations at Villawood have indicated that most residents have few complaints regarding the individual dwellings. One such study found that the internal dwelling design was actually ‘a redeeming feature’.¹ Instead, many of their problems stem from die spatial organisation of the dwellings, associated open space, pedestrian and vehicular circulation and community facilities. This article will examine the ideology which influenced the design of Villawood and explain why the spatial organisation has contributed to producing an unsatisfactory residential environment. Most importantly, it will demonstrate the importance of spatial organisation in Australian urban housing.     

The difference of ‘being diverse’: City branding and multiculturalism in the ‘Leicester Model’

This city profile on Leicester focuses on the representation of ethnical diversity in city branding. Through a historical approach, the paper discusses how the local authorities have taken advantage of the arrival of different migration flows into the city, in order to redefine its post-industrial identity in terms of multiculturalism, tolerance and inclusivity. In so doing, the paper emphasises the combination of deliberate marketing communicative activities, the provision of services for attracting and retaining foreign businesses and the creation of an open urban milieu where various ethnic groups are free to express and celebrate their own cultures through festivals and events. The paper identifies the alignment between place communication and place ‘offerings’ development as the crucial element underpinning Leicester's model for multicultural cooperation and critically assesses the recent challenges that are being posed to the sustainment of a multicultural city image.     

‘Filling the mattress’: Trust development in the governance of infrastructure megaprojects

The development of trust is a major challenge for the governance of public private infrastructure megaprojects. Contractual pre-arrangements should provide a blueprint for collaborative behavior and trust development but the characters of megaprojects challenge such arrangements. This longitudinal study explores practices of trust development in the collaboration of commissioner and contractor consortia in the Dutch road infrastructure megaproject ‘Schiphol, Amsterdam and Almere’ (SAA). The findings show that six different types of workshops have been used to intervene in the collaboration of project partners in order to develop trust. The study contributes to the debate on governance in megaprojects showing how governance arrangement are enacted in the daily practice in megaprojects. To buffer the potential loss of trust through conflicts, project partners negotiated for a balanced reciprocal relationship, which is the simultaneous exchange of equivalent resources without delay.     

Spectacular Heritage: ‘Total Restoration’ at the Site of Carcassonne

This article discusses the rise of the heritage site as spectacular theme park through a case study of Carcassonne in southern France, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site and includes all the trappings of mass European tourism. This medieval town is a meta-site of changing practices in architectural conservation, as it was first subjected to extensive restorations under the direction of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-1800s. It is this history of conservation which assists in making the argument that the phenomenon of the heritage site as spectacle is not only a contemporary transformation, but also has roots in nineteenth century practices.     

Beyond the Scarcities of Affluence: An ‘Alternative Hedonist’ Approach

Kate Soper describes how at a time when the gap between the rich and poor has grown wider, scarcity has become a product of affluence in a double sense. Not only is consumption using up material and energy resources for everyone, for the wealthiest section of the world's population the pleasures of consumption are also being paid for by the dearth of life's other qualities, such as sufficient leisure time, good health and an environment free of pollution and congestion.     

‘Mart of the World’: an architectural and geographical history of the London Stock Exchange

A stock exchange is a spatial contradiction. Conceived as a marketplace for the trade in securities and other financial instruments, it is intended to provide a regulated forum as a fair and free market for its members: an open economic environment made possible by institutional confinement. Once the largest and most influential in the world, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) embodied this contradiction. Established in the heart of the imperial metropolis, the LSE emerged at the core of a global financial network that sustained Britain's territorial and ‘informal’ Empire. Concurrently, its self-regulated standing within the City of London and reliance on an esoteric world of gentlemanly connections positioned it as an establishment shaped and assisted by its locality.

Established to finance overseas trade in the seventeenth century, the London stock market materialised as the informal appendage of commodity markets in the alleyways surrounding the Royal Exchange. The next three hundred years saw the consolidation and growth of the LSE from classicising institutional grandeur, to concrete monolith in the 1970s and most recently, to the corporate serenity of Paternoster Square.

In mapping the movement of global markets alongside the shifting terrain of the LSE buildings, this paper addresses the manner in which the latter reflects the geographical scope of Britain's capital accumulation throughout the last three centuries. The LSE is looked at in the context of the rise and fall of the British Empire and in its more recent role as channel for international (and offshore) capital, in order to assess whether its architectural choices might reflect shifting attitudes towards economic expansion. At present there are no dedicated architectural accounts of the LSE at any point of its existence. This paper intends to traverse the gap between economic geography and architectural history by means of a methodology of spatial scales, moving from the cartographic to the bodily. In producing a dialogue between macroscopic and microscopic analysis, this enquiry intends to expose more tangible interpretations of an immaterial system that increasingly distorts our material reality.