Selected Publications
Against Climate Haussmannization: Transformation Through and in Urban Design
Zachary Lamb, Luna Khirfan
Journal of Planning Literature, 2022
Why do Planners Overlook Manufactured Housing and Resident-Owned Communities as Sources of Affordable Housing and Climate Transformation?
Zachary Lamb, Linda Shi, Jason Spicer
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2022
Resident-Owned Resilience: Can Cooperative Land Ownership Enable Transformative Climate Adaptation for Manufactured Housing Communities?
Zachary Lamb, Linda Shi, Stephanie Silva, Jason Spicer
Housing Policy Debate, 2022
From Progressive Cities to Resilient Cities: Lessons from History for New Debates in Equitable Adaptation to Climate Change
Linda Shi
Urban Affairs Review, 2020
Planners and activists are identifying ways to promote equitable adaptation that counter climate injustice. This article explores how this progressive turn in adaptation compares with past progressive movements. I argue urban progressive politics have cyclical tendencies toward liberalism and radicalism, and that the evolution of planning for climate adaptation mirrors these waves. I review 10 recent guidance documents that recommend strategies for enhancing racially just adaptation. I then assess how these recommendations advance the three pillars of progressive reforms: redistribution, expansion of democracy, and structural reform. I find that proposed strategies for racially just resilience are a welcome advance from mainstream, unjust resilience planning. However, history suggests that the focus on procedural justice for oppressed communities seen in recent discourse may limit their scope and durability. I conclude with suggestions for areas where climate activists and scholars can expand given emerging political space for ambitious thinking under a Green New Deal.
Surging seas, rising fiscal stress: Exploring municipal fiscal vulnerability to climate
Linda Shi, Andrew M. Varuzzo
Cities, 2020
Planning the Green New Deal: Climate Justice and the Politics of Sites and Scales
Kian Goh
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2020
Politics by design: Who gets what reflected in competing design ideals in South Africa’s low income housing production
Laura Sara Wainer
City Journal, 2019
From the Cold War to the Warmed Globe: Planning, Design-Policy Entrepreneurism and the Crises of Nuclear Weapons and Climate Change
Zachary Lamb, Lawrence J. Vale
Planning Perspectives, 2019
Pursuing Resilient Urban Design: Equitably Merging Green and Gray Strategies
Zachary Lamb, Lawrence J. Vale
The New Companion to Urban Design, 2019
The Politics of Designing with Nature: Reflections from New Orleans and Dhaka
Zachary Lamb,
Socio-Ecological Practice Research, 2019
Promise and paradox of metropolitan regional climate adaptation
Linda Shi
Environmental Science & Policy, 2019
Connecting the Dots: The Origins, Evolutions, and Implications of the Map That Changed Post-Katrina Recovery Planning in New Orleans
Zachary Lamb
Springer, 2019
Promises and Perils of Collective Land Tenure in Promoting Urban Villages
Linda Shi, Zachary Lamb, XI (Colleen) Qiu, Hongru Cai, Lawrence Vale
Habitat International 77, 2018
All Mixed Up: Making Sense of Mixed-Income Housing Developments
Lawrence J Vale, Shomon Shamsuddin
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2017
Hoping for More: Redeveloping U.S Public Housing without Marginalizing Low-Income Residents?
Lawrence J Vale, Shomon Shamsuddin
Housing Studies, March 2017
A New Climate for Regionalism: Metropolitan Experiments in Climate Change Adaptation
Linda Shi
Dissertation, Ph.D in Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017
What Happens When Resettlements Focus on the Physical Environment: The Aftermath of the Resettlement Process in a Displaced Community in Cartagena, Columbia
Andrés Achury
Thesis, Master in City Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017
Lease It or Lose It? The Implications of New York’s Land Lease Initiative for Public Housing Preservation
Shomon Shamsuddin, Lawrence J. Vale
Urban Studies, January 2017
Assessing Urban Resilience for Low-Income Housing Enterprises in Colombia
Lawrence J. Vale, Laura S. Wainer, Andres Achury, Francis Goyes
Resilient Cities Housing Initiative, Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, 2017
Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Critical Perspectives from Global North and South
Isabelle Anguelovski, Linda Shi, Eric Chu, Daniel Gallagher, Kian Goh, Zachary Lamb, Kara Reeve, Hannah Teicher
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2016
Affordable Housing and the Resilient Chinese City: The Role of Shenzhen’s Urban Villages in Enhancing Livelihood, Environment, Governance, and Security of the poor
Lawrence J. Vale, Hongru Cai, Zachary Lamb, Colleen Xi Qui, Linda Shi
Report for the Samuel Tak Lee Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab , 2016
What Affordable Housing Should Afford: Housing for Resilient Cities
Lawrence J. Vale, Shomon Shamsuddin, Annemarie Gray, Kassie Bertumen
Cityscape, 2014
The politics of resilient cities: whose resilience and whose city?
Lawrence J. Vale,
Building Research & Information, 2014
Public Housing in the United States: Neighborhood Renewal and the Poor
Lawrence J. Vale, edited by Naomi Carmon and Susan S. Fainstein
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013
From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing: 75 Years of American Social Experimentation
lllogical Housing Aid
Lawrence J. Vale, Yonah Freemark
The New York Times, October 30, 2012
The Displacement Decathlon: Olympian Struggles for Affordable Housing from Atlanta to Rio de Janeiro
Lawrence J. Vale, Annemarie Gray
Places Journal, April 15, 2013
The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster
Lawrence J. Vale, Thomas J. Campanella
Oxford University Press, May 2005
Lawrence J. Vale, Yonah Freemark
Journal of American Planning, December 2012
Urban design is an essential component of planning for climate transformation. However, the concept of transformation in urban design is complicated by the problematic legacy of design-led mega-projects. Such projects, often called Haussmannization, are criticized as inattentive to existing landscape, built, and social environments. While corrective movements have partially addressed criticisms of Haussmannization, they can also hinder justice-centered climate transformation, by empowering already powerful interests to defend status quo conditions or justifying inequity-deepening interventions in the name of climate action, a phenomenon we label climate Haussmannization. We present a schema connecting transformative urban design with procedural, distributive, and recognitional justice.
More Americans live in manufactured housing than in public and federally subsidized rental housing combined. Of the nearly 40,000 U.S. manufactured housing communities (MHCs), more than 1,000 are resident-owned communities (ROCs), a form of cooperative ownership. Yet planning research continues to neglect MHCs and ROCs, raising questions of classism and cultural bias. We address five common biases against MHCs and argue ROCs in particular deserve greater attention because they enable low-income people to improve their housing security in the face of financial and environmental vulnerabilities. Lessons from these efforts can help other alternative and collective housing providers do the same
Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct a spatial analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and interview ROC USA staff, technical assistance providers, and resident co-op leaders. Although ROC USA communities, like other MHCs, face elevated exposure and sensitivity to hazards, we find that ROC USA’s model supports communities’ adaptive capacity by increasing access to financial resources, bridging formal and informal knowledge and skills, and improving social and institutional capacity. This networked cooperative model represents a scalable form of transformative adaptation by enabling low-income communities to address the underlying causes of uneven hazard vulnerabilities that are intensifying under climate change. We close with public policy and programmatic recommendations to enhance and expand this model.
Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct a spatial analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and interview ROC USA staff, technical assistance providers, and resident co-op leaders. Although ROC USA communities, like other MHCs, face elevated exposure and sensitivity to hazards, we find that ROC USA’s model supports communities’ adaptive capacity by increasing access to financial resources, bridging formal and informal knowledge and skills, and improving social and institutional capacity. This networked cooperative model represents a scalable form of transformative adaptation by enabling low-income communities to address the underlying causes of uneven hazard vulnerabilities that are intensifying under climate change. We close with public policy and programmatic recommendations to enhance and expand this model.
Recent disasters and growing concerns about climate change have spurred calls for cities to retreat from and avoid developing in coastal areas. Instead, cities have doubled down on waterfront development. We ask why and with what implications, using the U.S. state of Massachusetts as a case study. By overlaying data on sea level rise, land use, and property taxes, we find a few coastal cities may lose significant levels of municipal revenues to long-term sea level rise, while others face negligible impacts. Coastal municipalities are cognizant of their risks yet continue to site redevelopment projects in flood-vulnerable areas to meet present-day budgetary needs. Moreover, they resist efforts to align property values and insurance premiums with climate risks, as reforms only hasten lost taxes. Left unchanged, existing land use and fiscal policies incentivize municipalities to make short-term decisions with accelerating climate risks over time. This creates new dynamics of fiscal stress that can increase regional inequality and vulnerability to climate change. The study highlights the need for dialogue among researchers and policymakers in the U.S. and internationally on the nexus between land use planning, government administration, and climate change as these tensions likely exist wherever local governments rely on land-based finance.
Climate change and the rise of a grassroots–legislative political–environmental movement in the United States should change how urban planners think and act on spatial change and social justice. After the 2018 U.S. elections, organizing movements and progressive legislators endorsed the Green New Deal. In this Viewpoint I look at the Green New Deal’s potential implications for urban planning. I analyze it in reference to the 1930s’ New Deal inspirations and current climate and urban challenges, and illustrate the contradictions between large-scale spatial change and community-scale social justice. I explain how the imperatives of the Green New Deal, in conjunction with the shifting sites, scales, and politics of planning for climate change, should encourage planners to reframe their spaces and politics of practice toward a reconceptualized urban regional scale and a new politics of more public participation.
Unprecedented rapid urbanization, accompanied by growing urban informality, have positioned housing delivery at the frontline of national political agendas in the Global South. This paper analyzes the housing redevelopment of the Joe Slovo informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa (2004 to present) to shed light on the role of architecture and urban design in democracy building and city production. As an alternative framework to the ideas of ‘normalization’ and ‘resistance’, this case offers insights into the importance of situating spatialized political tensions and conflict at the heart of the analysis of city production. The Joe Slovo redevelopment initially deployed an inclusionary welfare-state policy that resulted in exclusionary housing design practices, causing political contestation among the residents of the informal settlement. The community materialized their struggle for housing and urban rights in creative examples of ‘design from below’. These practices not only re-defined the spatial control over Joe Slovo’s territory, but also, by the production of alternative urban space, they challenged institutional spaces, re-defining who plays what role in housing delivery. The findings reveal multidirectional design politics between governments and communities that occur when the state loses control over design decision-making processes. The community’s right to not be displaced to distant locations was guaranteed by reducing the state’s implementation and delivery capacity, exposing the challenges of city co-production and inviting us to rethink who has the right to design, code and imagine our cities. This case opens a window into understanding design as a political device of urban governance.
Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package earlier ideas about ‘the good city’. This paper analyses how mid-twentieth-century planning discourses regarding Cold War urban dispersal in the USA might help us understand contemporary conversations about urban climate change adaptation. We apply Kingdon's Multiple Streams Analysis and his concept of policy entrepreneurs to show how planners frame problems and shape policy agendas. We propose a subtype of ‘design-policy entrepreneurs’ who use the spatial and visual tools of planning and design to advocate for preferred policies. By analysing the rhetoric and visual representations made by planners and designers from 1945 to 1965, we examine how they repurposed long-standing ideas about urban deconcentration into ‘dispersal for defence’ proposals. Such proposals for dispersing urban settlements into separated and ‘self-contained’ units received a dysfunctional partial acceptance: housing and transportation legislation embraced the dispersal part but resisted the complementary elements aimed at limiting damages from nuclear attack by concentrating development into distinct nodes. We conclude by asking how the perils of such partial policy-making success might play out on the terrain of climate change adaptation.
This chapter addresses two related questions: Can urban design provide a domain for concrete projects, processes, and practices that ground the abstract concept of resilience, creating urban places that are more just and environmentally sound? Similarly, can a refined focus on resilience allow scholars and practitioners of urban design to synthesize social, ecological, and aesthetic analysis through disciplinary practices that are more flexible and more attuned to the concerns of the most vulnerable members of urban societies? In addressing these questions, the chapter outlines parallel “green” and “gray” traditions of “resilience” and “urban design,” and draws examples from emblematic projects in cities of the Global North and Global South, focusing on three river delta cities: New Orleans, Rotterdam, and Dhaka. We outline a series of principles intended to simultaneously ground resilience and refocus urban design on the creation of just and environmentally sound places. Resilient urban design, we conclude, entails (1) pursuing geophysical and social resilience simultaneously; (2) integrating protective infrastructure with the public space and built fabric of cities; (3) recognizing the varied and shifting positions of state and non-state actors in different settings; and (4) balancing the need for control and flexibility in the form and function of urban development.
Over the 50 years since its publication, Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature has been enormously influential in shaping design and planning in cities and regions around the world, including in the flood-prone cities of New Orleans and Dhaka, Bangladesh. This commentary reviews the influence of Design with Nature in key plans and proposals in Dhaka and New Orleans to highlight the potentials and limitations of applying McHarg’s methods. In both cities, McHarg-influenced urban expansion plans of the 1970s and 1980s were largely not implemented because their focus on geophysical landscape processes did not address considerations of power, politics, and property. More recent green infrastructure proposals have threatened to entrench urban inequalities by labeling low-lying low-income settlements as against natural laws of landscape suitability. Drawing on these cases and on critical environmental scholarship produced in the years since Design with Nature, the commentary argues that McHarg’s work is essential for addressing contemporary urbanization challenges, but that it must be amended with a greater recognition of the politics of urbanization and environmental risk. To do so would require (1) expanding and problematizing the idea of nature, challenging the stable nature–society binary, and embracing pluralistic forms of environmental knowledge; (2) shifting from a conceptualization of design as “revelation” by technical experts to methods centered on synthesizing diverse perspectives and enabling democratic deliberation; and (3) recognizing that the shift to designing with nature is a politically fraught process in which adaptation opportunities and constraints are defined by place-specific historical patterns of urbanization.
Over the past decade, regions worldwide have developed initiatives to tackle climate change adaptation at the metropolitan scale. Faced with barriers to adaptation planning and implementation at the local level, growing numbers of practitioners have turned to the metropolitan region as a new scalar platform for climate adaptation planning. This study examines regional adaptation planning in Los Angeles, Miami, and Boston, three metropolitan areas that have significant exposure to the impacts of climate change and typify the high levels of administrative fragmentation found in the United States. I ask, what regional adaptation strategies have they deployed? What local adaptation challenges do they try to overcome? Given their progress, what are the implications for this scale of adaptation planning? Drawing on case studies of these efforts, I find that regional collaborations promisingly get more cities to start planning for the impacts of climate change, even in states where governments oppose climate action, by increasing access to information, providing opportunities for networking and technical assistance, helping secure additional funding, and strengthening coordination among vertical levels of government. However, local-centric regional adaptation efforts have had less success in addressing horizontal coordination challenges across municipalities, particularly as they relate to land use planning, fiscal constraints, spillovers effects, and social equity. These findings suggest that scaling up adaptation to the metropolitan region is no panacea for overcoming structural limits to local adaptation in places with weak regional governance institutions. More critical and reflexive regional adaptation planning can help pave the way to difficult conversations around regional institution building so that governance at this scale can achieve its promise of producing more effective and equitable adaptation.
The map that would become known as the “green dot map” was published by the New Orleans Times-Picayune on January 11, 2006, and quickly came to hold a central place in the canonical account of post-Hurricane Katrina planning in New Orleans. The map and its swift public rejection became emblematic of the overreach of top-down planning in the immediate aftermath of Katrina’s devastation, taking on a sort of mythical power as a singular artifact whose catalytic power was taken for granted. To better understand how this episode shaped post-Katrina planning, this chapter traces the development of the map through early drafts produced by three different sets of actors. Through critical cartography-informed visual analysis of the maps themselves and their “para-map” materials, the chapter assesses how visual representations and spatial classifications shifted with each subsequent interpretation. The textual and visual framing of the proposal as put forward in the Times-Picayune’s final map reinforced preexisting suspicions that post-Katrina planning would be insufficiently equitable and politically illegitimate. Through interviews with planners, designers, and decision-makers, the chapter considers how the green dot map and its reception have shaped water planning in New Orleans in the years since. The chapter highlights the critical importance of representational politics in an era when visual representations are increasingly central to climate change adaptation and other arenas of urban planning.
New frameworks for “urban resilience” frequently overlook the role of property rights and tenure security in shaping vulnerability, as well as how different property rights regimes shape societal capacity to adapt to environmental and developmental disruptions. We contribute to these discussions by examining how collective urban land tenure affects community-scale resilience, defined as environmental wellbeing, productive livelihoods, and empowered governance. We use urban villages in Shenzhen to study how this widespread phenomenon of collective land ownership in Chinese cities allowed rural villagers to adapt as cities spread around them over time. Drawing on a literature review, interviews, and a field visit to Shenzhen, we find that collective tenure in Shenzhen’s urban villages has helped them avoid some of the limitations seen in household-level tenure formalization efforts elsewhere. Collective tenure enabled rural villages to create self-governance mechanisms that allowed them to transform individual and collective assets into vibrant, well-serviced, and mixed-use neighborhoods. Urban villages house most of Shenzhen’s residents and have helped underwrite the region’s industrialization process. However, collective tenure also has hindered integration with Shenzhen’s urban infrastructure, governance, and taxation systems, resulted in astronomical profits for village elites, and repeated historic patterns of unequal land ownership in China. The promises and perils of collective urban property rights seen in Shenzhen call for research on other such models around the world to further inform whether and how such property rights regimes can support equitable and holistic notions of urban resilience.
Mixed-income housing is a popular strategy used by planners, developers, and government agencies to simultaneously revitalize blighted urban neighborhoods and preserve affordable housing for low-income residents. Yet the term “mixed income” is not consistently defined, so there is no clear understanding of what mixed-income housing is, what characterizes it, and how mixed-income projects differ from one another. Planners and policymakers are making important decisions about whether and how to pursue this urban redevelopment strategy without knowing the kinds of housing mixes available. We construct a data set of all 260 HOPE VI mixed-income redevelopment projects to conduct a descriptive analysis of income mixes across projects and develop a framework for categorizing key aspects of mixed-income housing. We show that HOPE VI developments vary dramatically across four key dimensions and highlight additional characteristics that may affect the broader community. xx
Urban restructuring policies have uprooted residents and dismantled communities. Previous studies focus on housing redevelopment that minimizes the fraction of housing units left for poor residents and on interviewing residents only once the redevelopment has been announced. By contrast, this paper examines how residents over time experienced the HOPE VI redevelopment of the Orchard Park public housing project in Boston, which sought to preserve a low-income community. Using official records and a unique set of interviews with residents before and after redevelopment, we find marked declines in crime and increased residential satisfaction, which are attributed to changes in tenant composition. The redevelopment process reduced the total number of public housing units yet maintained the vast majority of housing for poor families while creating a new social mix. The findings suggest that to more fully capture the impacts of restructuring, existing theory must be expanded to consider who is displaced and how poverty is deconcentrated.
Climate change threatens the function and even existence of coastal cities, requiring them to adapt by preparing for near-term risks and reorienting long-term development. Most policy and academic interest in the governance of climate adaptation has focused on global, national, and local scales. Their efforts increasingly revealed the need to plan for adaptation at the scale of metropolitan regions. This dissertation is the first academic comparative analysis of U.S. regional adaptation initiatives. Drawing on multi-method qualitative research of five coastal regions, I argue that adaptation collaboratives are an ecological variant of new regionalism that recenters the role of public agencies in advancing adaptation efforts. Adaptation champions have helped overcome limited local adaptation, even where states are antagonistic to climate action, by sharing knowledge, providing technical assistance, and fostering political support. However, most have yet to tackle the limitations of local adaptation. Only places with regional agencies or county governments that have land use authority, fiscal leverage, or state mandated targets have advanced region-wide zoning and long-term developmental changes. These findings highlight the need to strengthen regional government in order to overcome difficulties in coordinating, implementing, and enforcing multi-sector and multi-jurisdictional responses to climate change — a path to a renewed ecological regionalism where regions function as an ecological whole, rather than as the sum of individual parts
Over three million Colombians were affected by the rainy season associated with "La Niña" phenomenon between April 2010 and June 2011. Colombia also has the second largest number of internally displaced persons in the world at 6.3 million individuals. This research studies the dilemmas that accompany resettlement processes, the involuntary physical and social isolation of residents from access to services and public facilities, the consequences for economic well-being and quality of life, and the improvement of personal security from crime and violence.
This thesis finds that while resettlement processes provided new built environments to address the physical needs of the displaced population, they did not address the needs that perpetuate poverty, vulnerability, and marginalization. It further explores the challenges and dilemmas that resettled communities face in order to inform discussions related to the physical, economic, and social reconstruction of communities in the aftermath of displacement.
Urban scholars frequently call for equitable and inclusive growth to create more just cities but this vision has proven elusive in urban development—especially involving low-income communities and affordable housing. In 2013, the New York City Housing Authority proposed to leverage private development to benefit low-income residents by supporting market-rate residential construction on open space in public housing sites to pay for needed improvements to subsidised units. The Land Lease Initiative was a seemingly win-win plan but quickly faced backlash from multiple quarters. Using interviews with key housing authority officials and analysis of plan documents and media coverage, we show how the content and framing of the plan stoked fears of displacement, despite stated intentions. Our analysis reveals that criticism overlooked four unconventional ideas for preserving public housing, which are embedded in the plan: (1) retaining all public housing units and high-rise public housing towers on site, as opposed to demolishing them; (2) deconcentrating poverty by increasing residential density, instead of displacing poor residents; (3) adding affordable housing units to the site of low-income public housing; and (4) creating mixed-income communities around buildings, in addition to within them. The findings suggest that the future of affordable housing in the neoliberal era involves blurring the line between preservation and privatisation.
The general objectives of this research are four. First, to contribute to improving the capacities of Fundación Mario Santo Domingo (FMSD) in the design, implementation and evaluation of their principal Integrated Development for Sustainable Communities (DINCS) projects in Colombia: Ciudad del Bicentenario in Cartagena and Villas de San Pablo in Barranquilla. Second, to establish an evaluation system to measure DINCS project impacting the mid and long term. Third, to document and share FMSD’s DINCS approach for learning and knowledge transfer purposes. Finally, RCHI aspires to provide sufficient evidence to influence policy makers towards a more sustainable, equitable and efficient allocation of housing investment in Colombia. Furthermore, the proposed research project has the potential to articulate the current successes and future opportunities around the DINCS outcomes of strengthening community capital from the environmental, social, and economic standpoints. Using a resilience framework for this analysis ensures that all these perspectives will be considered. The analysis will provide insights into how to further improve the model’s replicability and broaden its reach to build capital in more communities. The process of engaging local universities can help develop local academic capital as well.
A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission, when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities, and acts of omission, when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor.
A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission, when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities, and acts of omission, when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor.
Well-designed affordable housing involves more than the provision of safe, decent, and inexpensive shelter; it needs to be central to the resilience of cities. Framing the issue as a matter of “what affordable housing should afford” expands the agenda for housing designers to consider factors that extend beyond the physical boundaries of buildings and engage the social, economic, environmental, and political relationships that connect housing to cities.
We illustrate four principles for affordable housing to engage to support the resilience of cities with four examples from recent practice. Taken together, these examples demonstrate what is at stake if we ask affordable housing design to serve the greater goal of city resilience.
It is vital to acknowledge the socio-political complexity of the deployment of the term ‘resilience’ and to develop a more unified set of expectations for the professions and disciplines that use it. Applied to cities, resilience is particularly problematic, yet also retains promise. Like resilience, the term ‘city’ is also subject to multiple contending definitions,depending on the scale and on whether the focus is on physical spaces or social communities. Due to cities and city regions being organized in ways that both produce and reflect underlying socio-economic disparities, some parts are much more resilient than others and therefore vulnerability is often linked to both topography and income. Uneven resilience threatens the ability of cities as a whole to function economically, socially and politically.
Resilience can only remain useful as a concept and as progressive practice if it is explicitly associated with the need to improve the life prospects of disadvantaged groups. To improve the prospects of cities proactively (and reactively), there is a need to unify the insights from the multiple professions and disciplines that use ‘resilience.
This book chapter considers the tortuous and tortured saga of public housing in the United States, viewing it as a kind of double social experiment: first when it was built–under the high modernist hopes of the mid-20th century–and again, as the 20th century closed, when it was redeveloped to mimic a pre-modernist urbanism. In both phases, planners and designers promised new and improved housing for low-income households, clearing slums the first time and, in the second iteration, clearing public housing itself.
The chapter traces both the evolution of public housing and the corresponding way that scholars and practicing planners have responded to it. “Planners hear housing as a verb; architects hear it as a noun; but residents hear it as 'my home.' Achieving progress on the relationship among housing, planning, and people means remembering that housing is always simultaneously a process, a piece of the built environment, and an emotional attachment to a place.”
American public housing since 1937 is often viewed as a single failed experiment of architecture, management, and policy. This view masks a much more highly differentiated experience for residents and housing authorities, rooted in a long-term moral and ideological struggle over the place of the poorest residents in American cities.
This article reframes public housing history as a succession of informal social experiments: initial public efforts to clear out slum-dwellers and instead accommodate barely poor working-class tenants or the worthy elderly; a 30-year interlude, where public housing authorities consolidated the poorest into welfare housing while gradually shifting responsibility for low-income housing to private landlords, private developers, and private investors; and a series of partnerships since 1990 that reserve more of this public-private housing for a less-poor constituency. Empirically, this article provides an unprecedented graphic glimpse into the ways that the overall mode-share of public housing has shifted and diversified. Ultimately, this article reveals that the reduced role of the public sector has curtailed the growth of deeply subsidized housing provision to the lowest-income Americans.
The tax deduction for mortgage interest may not quite be the “third rail” of politics that Social Security is, but politicians on both sides have long been afraid to touch it. So when Mitt Romney recently floated the idea of capping this deduction, Democrats pounced. Here, after all, was Mr. Romney arguing to cut a long-favored tax benefit for middle-class homeowners—in the midst of a soft housing market, no less—so as to make up lost revenue from his proposed tax cuts that, critics say, disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
The world is urbanizing, but neither easily nor evenly. Modern cities are being shaped by top-down, forward-looking, skyline-transforming, neighborhood-renewing, tourism-enhancing, creatively-destroying, global-investment-enticing forces of change. Yet these same forces exert conflicting pressures on the poorest urban neighborhoods, and so cities are being shaped as well by bottom-up, self-organizing, citizen-activist movements that are struggling to oppose the displacement that so often accompanies real estate development. It is this interplay between the dominant narrative of progress and prosperity and the counter-narratives of protest and resistance that gives early 21st-century cities their distinct dynamism. These struggles are especially magnified when cities become the setting for mega-events that attract both frenzied local development and global scrutiny—none more so than the Summer Olympic Games
Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.
COVID-19, Climate Change, and Cooperative Adaptation.
Zachary Lamb
Berkeley Planning Journal, 2021
Ending Gated Communities: The Rationales for Resistance in China
Colleen Chiu-Shee, Brent Ryan
Housing Studies, 2023
Although gated communities (GCs) have spread globally, their prevalence in China is often attributed to China’s unique tradition of gated living. In 2016, China announced policy recommendations intending to end GCs, which faced societal resistance. To elucidate the nature of this resistance, we interviewed experienced Chinese officials, practitioners, and scholars—who, inevitably, were themselves GC residents. They challenge the policy in two ways: policy-rejectors justify gating as common sense and stress risks of ungating, whereas policy-sympathizers understand the policy shift but doubt its feasibility. Their rationales reveal ingrained cognitive dissonance and entrenched state-society tension. Such sentiments that resist ungating collectively create practical and ideological barriers to mitigating housing segregation. China’s GCs showcase how private production of civic goods prioritizes market rules and promotes individual values. China’s failure in ungating suggests that the prevalence of privately produced communities can justify exclusion, normalize “gated mindsets,” and reinforce socioeconomic and spatial inequalities.
A Neighbourhood Unit for Equitable Resilience
Zachary Lamb, Lawrence J. Vale
Built Environment, 2024
The early twentieth-century concept of the neighbourhood unit aimed to use spatial planning to redress problems associated with that era of urbanization in the US and Europe, including car traffic, pollution, and social alienation. We ask how this influential and controversial concept might be adapted to address today's most vexing urban challenges: climate change hazards and widening inequality. Drawing on a diverse array of global case studies, we argue that the neighbourhood can be a unit for 'equitable resilience', but only if we reconceptualize neighbourhoods in significant ways. First, 'neighbourhood' must be defined more capaciously to include not just the middle-class enclaves envisioned by Clarence Perry and other early neighbourhood planning advocates, but also places that are home to disadvantaged residents, from mixed-income communities to public housing, informal settlements, and manufactured home parks. Second, for neighbourhood interventions to bring lasting equitable resilience, they must be linked to analysis and action on wider spatial and political scales. Finally, to ensure resilience will be equitable, neighbourhood scale interventions must link built environment changes to institutional changes that improve conditions in the domains of livelihoods, environmental safety, governance, and security from displacement. In short, to be units for equitable resilience, neighbourhoods must help residents build the power to act in the face of climate change and other threats.
The Persistent Challenges of U.S. Housing Policy
Lawrence J. Vale
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024