Architecture and the housing question / edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction. Architecture and the housing question: specific histories -- Part I. Whose history? Rethinking the expert -- Housing and history: the case of the specific intellectual -- Humanitarian homemaker, emergency subject: questions of shelter and domesticity -- "Oh, but this isn't architecture!": the paradoxical heritage of French public housing -- Part II. Housing and the state -- Inventing socialist modern: housing research and experimental design in the soviet union -- "Production first, living second": welfare housing and social transition in China -- "Pillar" of the welfare state: postwar mass housing in the Belgium and the Netherlands -- Part III. (De)Segregation and the housing enclave -- Housing the people who "lived free": inhabiting social housing in the tin-can neighborhood -- Public life and public housing: Charles Moore's church street south -- Part IV. Land, property, colonization -- Landing architecture: topical bodies, land, and the invisible backdrop of architectural history -- The rise and fall of California City.

"Architecture and the Housing Question examines how the design and provision of housing around the world have become central both to competing political projects and to the architecture profession. How have architects acting as housing experts helped alleviate or enforce class, race, and gender inequality? What are the disciplinary implications of taking on shelter for the multitude as an architectural assignment and responsibility? The book features essays in the historiography of architecture and the housing question, and a collection of historical case studies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, the Netherlands, Somalia, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the United States. The thematic organization of the collection, interrogating housing expertise, the state apparatus, segregation and colonialism, highlights the methodological questions that underpin its international outlook. The book will appeal to students and scholars in architecture, architectural history, theory, and urban studies"-- Provided by publisher.