This book provides the first comparative assessment of the energy-efficiency retrofit programs in the social housing sector of Canadian cities, focusing on program efficiency and effectiveness. The analytical framework explores key policy instruments - regulatory, fiscal and institutional - in relation to major results achieved. The approach is interdisciplinary, supported by rich empirical data from case studies, observations and interviews. The book explores important strategies for the provision of green and affordable housing, while addressing climate change imperatives and resilience issues. This is of great interest to researchers, policy makers, city leaders, professionals and students. Its value added contribution to scholarship is complemented by practical relevance for social housing organisations in countries with a small residual housing sector. It offers valuable lessons for the design, planning and implementation of energy retrofit programs in North America and beyond.

This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing. Social housing estates - as developed either by governments (public housing) or not-for-profit agencies - became a prominent feature of the 20th century urban landscape in Northern European cities, but also in North America and Australia. Many estates were built as part of earlier urban renewal, 'slum clearance' programs especially in the post-World War 2 heyday of the Keynesian welfare state. During the last three decades, however, Western governments have launched high-profile 'new urban renewal' programs whose aim has been to change the image and status of social housing estates away from being zones of concentrated poverty, crime and other social problems. This latest phase of urban renewal - often called 'regeneration' - has involved widespread demolition of social housing estates and their replacement with mixed-tenure housing developments in which poverty deconcentration, reduced territorial stigmatization, and social mixing of poor tenants and wealthy homeowners are explicit policy goals. Academic critical urbanists, as well as housing activists, have however queried this dominant policy narrative regarding contemporary urban renewal, preferring instead to regard it as a key part of neoliberal urban restructuring and state-led gentrification which generate new socio-spatial inequalities and insecurities through displacement and exclusion processes. This book examines this debate through original, in-depth case study research on the processes and impacts of urban renewal on social housing in European, U.S. and Australian cities. The book also looks beyond the Western urban heartlands of social housing to consider how renewal is occurring, and with what effects, in countries with historically limited social housing sectors such as Japan, Chile, Turkey and South Africa.

By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most people arrived unable rather than unwilling to work, some because of physical problems, others due to a lack of skills or because a changing labor market had left them behind. Birk blends the personal stories of participants with institutional histories to reveal a loose-knit system that provided a measure of care to everyone without an overarching philosophy of reform or rehabilitation. In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution offers an overdue portrait of rural social welfare in the United States.

In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest. * Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city * Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the right to the city and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanisms * Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation * Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake * Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany

Housing matters, no matter when or where. This volume of collected essays on housing in colonial and postcolonial Africa seeks to elaborate the how and the why. Housing is much more than a living everyday practice. It unfolds in its disparate dimensions of time, space and agency. Context dependent, it acquires diverse, often ambivalent, meanings. Housing can be a promise, an unfulfilled dream, a tool of self- and class-assertion, a negotiation process, or a means to achieve other ends. Our focus lies in analyzing housing in its multifacetedness, be it a lens to offer insights into complex processes that shape societies; be it a tool of empire to exercise control over private relations of inhabitants; or be it a means to create good, obedient and productive citizens. Contributions to this volume range from the field of history, to architecture and urban planning, African Studies, linguistics, and literature. The individual case studies home in on specific aspects and dimensions of housing and seek to bring them into dialogue with each other. By doing so, the volume aims to add to the vibrant academic debate on studying urban practices and their significance for current social change.

This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice - a central issue in urban injustices. With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification's unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of 'displacement', as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective. This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.

Due to the financialization of housing in today's market, housing risks are increasingly becoming financial risks. Financialization refers to the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives. It also refers to the resulting structural transformation of economies, firms, states and households. This book asserts the centrality of housing to the contemporary capitalist political economy and places housing at the centre of the financialization debate. A global wall of money is looking for High-Quality Collateral (HQC) investments, and housing is one of the few asset classes considered HQC. This explains why housing is increasingly becoming financialized, but it does not explain its timing, politics and geography. Presenting a diverse range of case studies from the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Spain, the chapters in this book include coverage of the role of the state as the driver of financialization processes, and the part played by local and national histories and institutions. This cutting edge volume will pave the way for future research in the area. Where housing used to be something "local" or "national", the two-way coupling of housing to finance has been one crucial element in the recent crisis. It is time to reconsider the financialization of both homeownership and social housing. This book will be of interest to those who study international economics, economic geography and financialization.

Drawing on a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estate projects in the UK and using hundreds of resident voices, this book reveals the secrets of council housing's failures and successes, and the reasons for them. Bringing to light the complex variety of the lived experiences of residents, it shows how estate pathways were predetermined by factors such as location, design and date, as well as by their local and national social, economic and political contexts. The book highlights what can be learned from some of the successes of less successful housing projects and provides lessons for building sustainable communities in the twenty-first century.

Do you give to someone begging? For centuries, the figure of the beggar has caused public fear, sympathy and confusion. In this book, criminologist Joe Hermer explores how the dilemma of giving to someone begging today has become an unusual site of regulation, public inquiry and law reform. This book investigates why handing pocket change to someone begging is now widely viewed as a gift crime, one that attempts to make the giving public complicit in the policing and control of visibly poor people. Drawing on the historical insight that public feeling is a central problem of policing the vagrant beggar, the author examines how a quirky provincial experiment to stop people giving to beggars morphed into an unlikely movement across England. Hermer ranges widely in his analysis, with discussions of 'diverted giving' schemes, specialised police operations, activist efforts to repeal the Vagrancy Law, and begging-like activities such as busking, Big Issue vending and flag day collections. The author pays particular attention to the Vagrancy Act 1824 and the historic reforms enabled by gift crime regulation to this storied area of criminal law. The consequence, this book argues, is the continuing abandonment of some of the most vulnerable individuals in society through direct appeals to compassion and kindness.

This is a study of the organisation and practical operation of the system of poor relief in Emden from the late 15th century to the end of the 16th. The city went through dramatic economic, confessional and constitutional changes during this period and so offers an ideal setting for the study of the emergence and development of a highly organised, multi-jurisdictional system of social welfare in the early modern period. Utilising account books, church council minutes, wills, contracts, correspondence and guild records it focuses on the day-to-day operation of poor relief - how the many diverse institutions actually functioned. As elsewhere in Europe, the Reformation did not immediately result in swift changes in poor relief; the Roman Catholic components of the administration of social welfare were dissolved and replaced gradually. It was only when the vast changes in religious, social and economic life which occurred at the middle of the 16th century forced matters that the methods of relief for the needy were revolutionised. The city was flooded with refugees from the Dutch revolt, there were widespread and severe economic difficulties caused by bad harvests and skyrocketing prices, and the church underwent a period of intense Calvinisation; only then were Reformed institutions and methods introduced. At times, religious arguments dominated the poor relief debate, while at others the social welfare system was barely affected; the effectiveness of the new systems and institutions is illuminated by an analysis of the recipients of relief during the second half of the 16th century.

This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family homelessness and health care use. For the majority of poor families who become homeless, the experience is temporary; yet little is known about these families after they are no longer homeless. Studies have shown that families living in shelters have difficulty accessing mainstream health care providers. This research documents for the first time the barriers these families continue to face after they are no longer homeless.

Providing an overview of the literature on homelessness and health care, this book presents detailed descriptions of health, housing conditions, and family histories. The study is unique in its longitudinal perspective -- mothers were interviewed at the time they were requesting shelter and again four years later. This data was compared to data collected from mothers on welfare who had never been homeless. The author analyzes the differences in health care utilization patterns between formerly homeless families and those who had never used the resources of a shelter, and presents policy recommendations in the context of recent changes in welfare policies and the expansion of Medicaid managed care programs.

Named a Gift Book for the Discerning New Yorker by The New York Times In a metropolis like New York, homelessness can blend into the urban landscape. For editor Susan Greenfield, however, New York is the place where a community of resilient, remarkable individuals are yearning for a voice. Sacred Shelter follows the lives of thirteen formerly homeless people, all of whom have graduated from the life skills empowerment program, an interfaith life skills program for homeless and formerly homeless individuals in New York. Through frank, honest interviews, these individuals share traumas from their youth, their experience with homelessness, and the healing they have discovered through community and faith. Edna Humphrey talks about losing her grandparents, father, and sister to illness, accident, and abuse. Lisa Sperber discusses her bipolar disorder and her whiteness. Dennis Barton speaks about his unconventional path to becoming a first-generation college student and his journey to reconnect with his family. The memoirists share stories about youth, family, jobs, and love. They describe their experiences with racism, mental illness, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Each of the thirteen storytellers honestly expresses his or her brokenheartedness and how finding community and faith gave them hope to carry on. Interspersed among these life stories are reflections from program directors, clerics, mentors, and volunteers who have worked with and in the life skills empowerment program. In his reflection, George Horton shares his deep gratitude for and solidarity with the 500-plus individuals he has come to know since he co-founded the program in 1989. While religion can be divisive, Horton firmly believes that all faiths urge us to "welcome the stranger" and, as Pope Francis asks, "accompany" them through the struggles of life. Through solidarity and suffering, many formerly homeless individuals have found renewed faith in God and community. Beyond trauma and strife, Dorothy Day's suggestion that "All is grace" is personified in these thirteen stories. Jeremy Kalmanofsky, rabbi at Ansche Chesed Synagogue, says the program points toward a social fabric of encounter and recognition between strangers, who overcome vast differences to face one another, which in Hebrew is called Panim el Panim. While Sacred Shelter does not tackle the socioeconomic conditions and inequities that cause homelessness, it provides a voice for a demographic group that continues to suffer from systemic injustice and marginalization. In powerful, narrative form, it expresses the resilience of individuals who have experienced homelessness and the hope and community they have found. By listening to their stories, we are urged to confront our own woundedness and uncover our desire for human connection, a sacred shelter on the other side of suffering.

To date, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the disperse research on the squatters' movement in Europe. In Squatters in the Capitalist City, Miguel A. Martinez Lopez presents a critical review of the current research on squatting and of the historical development of the movements in European cities according to their major social, political and spatial dimensions. Comparing cities, contexts, and the achievements of the squatters' movements, this book presents the view that squatting is not simply a set of isolated, illegal and marginal practices, but is a long-lasting urban and transnational movement with significant and broad implications. While intersecting with different housing struggles, squatters face various aspects of urban politics and enhance the content of the movements claiming for a 'right to the city.' Squatters in the Capitalist City seeks to understand both the socio-spatial and political conditions favourable to the emergence and development of squatting, and the nature of the interactions between squatters, authorities and property owners by discussing the trajectory, features and limitations of squatting as a potential radicalisation of urban democracy.

This text focuses on the ways that the life chances of homeless people are very much determined by their positions in race, gender and "family values" hierarchies. The author traces the social and spatial consequences of valuing some kinds of people over others, using as a basis her own work on the homelessness in New York. She concludes that homelessness is not simply an economic predicament, but a cultural and moral location.

Young and Homeless in Hollywood examines the social and spacial dynamics that contributed to the construction of a new social imaginary--"homeless youth"--in the United States during a period of accelerated modernization from the mid 1970s to the 1990s. Susan Ruddick draws from a range of theoretical frameworks and empirical treatments that deal with the relationship between placemaking and the politics of social identity.

Takes a fresh approach in that it considers the underlying reasons, and the consequences of urban change for real estate investors and policy makers, not another traditional urban economics textbook Includes chapter objectives, self-assessment questions, chapter summaries, learning outcomes, case studies, global data and statistics Most up to date UK Urban Economics textbook, it is not overly mathematical and strikes the ideal balance between theory and practical policy analysis for the real estate and planning market

This book unpacks the political economy of government subsidised housing programmes in South Africa. Exploring government policy towards subsidised housing in South Africa, this edited collection analyses various programmes, their shortcomings and potential options to address these weaknesses in the context of a country suffering from an exponential demand for housing in the face of insufficient supply. The Political Economy of Government Subsidised Housing in South Africa looks at the complex and contested nature of the issue in post-apartheid South Africa, stimulating debate and knowledge sharing on housing programmes, proffering solutions to the issue. The book explores the issue from both practical and intellectual standpoints, exploring the relationship between historical institutional legacies and contemporary power structures, and their role in provision of housing for the growing population of South Africa. This book will be of great interest to students of urban and regional planning, political economy, development studies, and African studies.

Philosophy is not usually seen as a guidance for modern housing policy, but in this new book, Dr Helen Taylor argues that there is something innovative, unusual, and worth discussing about the application of philosophy to housing. The philosophical framework used within this book is John Rawls' conception of justice as fairness. The UK has gone through several shifts in housing policy over the past decade, most recently by introducing the controversial 'Bedroom Tax', in an effort to make more cuts to benefits and social welfare. Social Justice in Contemporary Housing: Applying Rawls' Difference Principle suggests that by using ideas of agency we can understand the impact that social policy has on individuals and wider society. The work outlines the liberal principle of legitimacy and argues that Rawls' concept of reasonableness can, and should, be used to justify the intervention of policy in individuals' lives. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of housing as well as philosophy and social policy, and also those working around the creation and implementation of social housing in the UK.

If we do stop to think on housing, what do we see? What is housing and what does it do? These seem deceptively simple questions, but they are often left unanswered. The reason for this is that a lot of discourse on housing is really a concern for policy-making and the critical evaluation of existing policies. Discourse, is not, properly speaking, on housing at all. It is concerned with provision, distribution and access, but this thinking on housing stops at the front door. It is only concerned with what is actually external to housing. But for most people, housing already exists and they have access to it. Housing is not then about policy, but about how we can use what is a complex object in a manner that allows us to live well. Housing, for most of us, is about what we do when the front door is firmly shut and we are free from the external world. These essays explore this idea of housing as an object that exists for use. Housing is pictured as an object that contains activity. These pieces look at what we do with housing once we have it and so provides a necessary underpinning for any understanding of why housing is important. A further purpose of these pieces is to present different ways of thinking and writing on housing. It is an attempt to show that housing is a suitable topic for philosophical discourse. It is suggested that we can and should seek to establish a philosophy of housing, rather than just relying on the traditional social sciences.

Through the unique conceptualisation of 'urban resettlement', the book is a first attempt to conceptualise 'resettlement' in urban studies not only as an important dimension of ordinary city lives but also as a tool of government (for populations and places). The book will offer an interesting range of contributions combining destruction and production of urban space in the context of urban development. The unique selection of cases studies brings together empirical evidence on resettlement from three different continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America)

Home and care are central aspects of everyday, personal lives, yet they are also shaped by political and economic change. Within a context of austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resource rationing, the policies and experiences around these key areas are shifting. Taking an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective, this book illustrates how economic and political changes affect everyday lives for many families and households in the UK. Setting out both new empirical material and new conceptual terrain, the authors draw on approaches from human geography, social policy, and feminist and political theory to explore issues of home and care in times of crisis.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Istanbul: Informal Settlements and Generative Urbanism analyzes two informal housing settlements in Istanbul, Turkey - Karanfilkoey and Fatih Sultan Mehmet - to examine how generatively built structures and neighbourhoods can be successfully realized in a modern, burgeoning urban context. Generative development processes adapt to existing conditions and unfold over time, but there have been relatively few examples in the 20th and 21st centuries. This book evaluates the constructs of living structures, pattern languages and generative urban design processes in relation to Istanbul's informal settlements. It provides examples of communities making liveable, dynamic and user-adapted neighbourhoods and establishes them as a modern settlement typology in generative urban design theory.

With rapid population growth, a long-term dearth in new housing construction, the emergence of 'generation rent' and rising homelessness, the issue of housing in the UK is considered complex, open-ended and intractable. Using insights from public choice theory, the new institutionalism and social constructionism Housing Politics in the United Kingdom locates the contemporary 'housing question' in historically entrenched power relationships involving markets, planning, and territorial electoral politics. Written to complement the 3rd edition of the author's bestselling Understanding housing policy (forthcoming, 2017), this book will be essential reading for students of Housing, Social Policy, Social History, Urban Studies, Planning and Political Science.

Can American cities respond effectively to pressing social problems? Or, as many scholars have claimed, are urban politics so mired in stasis, gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis that dramatic policy change is impossible? Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of how America's largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of the Callahan v Carey litigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter. New York City now shelters more than 50,000 otherwise homeless people at an annual cost of more than $1 billion in the largest and most complex shelter system in the world. Establishing the right to shelter was a dramatic break with long established practice. Developing and managing the shelter system required the city to repeatedly overcome daunting challenges, from dealing with mentally ill street dwellers to confronting community opposition to shelter placement. In the course of these efforts many classic dilemmas in social policy and public administration arose. Does adequate provision for the poor create perverse incentives? Can courts manage recalcitrant bureaucracies? Is poverty rooted in economic structures or personal behavior? The tale of how five mayors-Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio-have wrestled with these problems is one of caution and hope: the task is difficult and success is never unqualified, but positive change is possible. Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of what happened-for good and sometimes less good-when New York established the right to shelter.