This article brings together various spatial and political theorizations on the commons as a broader project to understand multiple dimensions of the inclusive nature of public housing. By picking up theorizations on the commons, the article feeds the debate on the loss of “publicness” of public housing and removes attention from what is seen as a state related business. Four core-dimensions are identified: ownership, participation, community ...
The housing of low-income groups in Greater Cairo has always been difficult. The general shortage in housing supply is contrasting with the low occupancy rate of newly constructed public housing units. In contrast, despite their bad living conditions, informal settlements have a high occupancy rate. In order to analyze the reasons behind this contradiction, the study compares four neighbourhoods ranging from the formal Mubarak Youth Housing ...
Despite our taste for geniuses and landmark buildings, the bulk of the built environment of the postwar world has been designed by unidentified architecture firms that produce buildings rather than discourse. Belgium forms no exception to this rule. Its landscapes are littered with constructions that testify to a mentality that values pragmatism and common sense more than inspired commitment or long-term vision. This is especially true in the ...
Notwithstanding persistent levels of ethnic discrimination on the rental housing market, we have witnessed in many West-European countries a shift from targeted multicultural to colour-blind policies. At the same time, anti-immigration attitudes remained relatively stable. Whether and how these attitudes are translated in support or aversion toward anti-discrimination policies is, however, still unclear. As the first study in Europe we analyse ...
Despite our taste for architectural geniuses, landmark structures and avant-garde manifestoes, the built environment of the post war period (post 1945) is principally shaped by unidentified architectural offices that produce buildings rather than discourse. Notwithstanding their instrumental role in the outlook of the contemporary environment, such architectural offices rarely receive critical attention. Founded in Brussels in 1949, Groupe ...
In Brazil's post-neoliberal government of upward mobility and public policies, infrastructures are the symbiosis of experimental forms of government, political action, and practices of consumption. This article draws from a four-year-long multiscalar ethnography of Minha Casa Minha Vida, the country's largest public housing program. It uncovers the temporalities of infrastructural hope unleashed as people wait for—and engage with—their first ...
In Latin America’s pink tide democracies, peripheries were pivotal openings into the ambiguities of political and economic urban governance. Once portrayed as territories of decay, state disregard, and societal oblivion, peripheries turned into key moral and spatial assemblages in Brazil’s post-neoliberal project of a “de-poored,” middle-class country. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in two peripheral Minha Casa Minha Vida ...