Public Housing in the United States: Neighborhood Renewal and the Poor
| Date/Time: | Wednesday, 03 Apr 2013 from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm |
|---|---|
| Location: | 130 College of Design |
| Cost: | Free |
| Contact: | Jane Rongerude |
| Phone: | 515-294-5289 |
| Channel: | College of Design |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
The tortuous and tortured saga of public housing in the United States can be seen as a kind of triple social experiment: first, when it was built to house the upwardly mobile working class under the high modernist hopes of the mid-20th century; second, when public housing shifted to house chiefly the poorest; and third, as the 20th century closed, when conspicuous parts of it have been redeveloped into mixed-income communities.
In the first and third phases, planners and designers promised new and improved housing for low-income households, clearing slums the first time and then, a half-century later, clearing public housing itself. In both cases, planners and designers used physical design and development processes to substitute a new kind of community for one judged to be less desirable, leading to a kind of public gentrification.
Vale's presentation will trace both the evolution of public housing as conceived, designed and managed, and the corresponding way that scholars and practicing planners have responded to this housing. This means (1) coming to terms with the initial enthusiasm for public housing by dissecting the rationales of its proponents; (2) contending with the "rise and fall" critiques that soon followed; and (3) assessing more contemporary efforts to defend, reinvent, replace or simply eliminate this form of deeply subsidized housing.
The presentation will focus on the saga of two public housing developments that cover the full spectrum of United States public housing history: Atlanta's Techwood/Clark Howell and Chicago's Cabrini-Green. Each of these is a "twice-cleared community," created as a result of slum clearance and then redeveloped in tandem with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI program. Each case reveals the complex social, cultural, political and design challenges that have made it so difficult to house the poorest Americans.
About the Speaker
Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the former head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning; he has taught in the School of Architecture and Planning since 1988 and currently serves as president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History.
Vale holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Amherst College, a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT and a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
Vale is the author or editor of six books examining urban design and housing. Architecture, Power and National Identity (1992), a book about capital city design on six continents, received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians. A revised, second edition of the book was published by Routledge in 2008. Much of Vale's most recent published work has examined the history, politics and design of American public housing, with a focus on Boston. His research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and received a Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and EDRA/Places Award for "Place Research" and the John M. Corcoran Award for Community Investment.