For the past decade, the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has designed multiunit housing in a city known for its proliferation of single-family residences. Working with the Skid Row Housing Trust, these projects advance new forms of supportive housing that address the services and infrastructures needed for their particular populations of inhabitants. For Maltzan, housing manifests an incredibly complex set of spatial problems-social, economic, political, typological, aesthetic, and urban-that recast architecture's role in framing the social relationships and individual challenges of everyday urban life. Social Transparency includes a recent lecture by Maltzan at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, as well as reflections from fellow practitioners on this sustained engagement with housing and the city.

At a moment when the world's population increasingly lives in urban settings, the public health of cities-or the intersection of stress and wellness with architecture and urbanism-is a matter of pressing concern for designers. Questions Concerning Health reports on this critical terrain, focusing particularly on Johannesburg, South Africa (a notable test case in which the term "social equivalency," used by epidemiologists, also carries considerable historical and spatial resonance). Among the book's research findings is that health is an intensively local phenomenon that demands intensively local responses in the form of more sensitive architectural typologies as well as urban planning. Questions Concerning Health presents a number of essays by experts on urban health and Johannesburg in particular, including the design proposals of eight students who participated in the research studio.