What Affordable Housing Should Afford: Housing for Resilient Cities (original) (raw)
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Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 2018
This paper examines the realism of the resilience ambition and process of the U.S. housing system, shedding light on its heterogeneity as well as the financialization currently acting as the driving force in real estate production. The resilience ambition leading to enhanced justice and egalitarianism is understood as the provision and maintenance of postdisaster housing for all within an institutionally diverse landscape of housing policy makers and implementers. Particular emphasis is given to the post-Katrina institutional transformations resulting from multifarious interactions between multilevel institutional structures and a diverse landscape of low-income housing policy implementers – referred as social resilience cells (SRCs) in this paper. The nature and level of these transformations determine the degree to which resilience in its heterogeneous form has been incubated in New Orleans. The paper concludes with a discussion on the macro conditions and bottom-linked governance structures under which all SRCs could be better bolstered in a post-financialization, radicalised neowelfare U.S., and which in turn create possibilities for materialising the resilience ambition.
Town and Terraced Housing for Affordability and Sustainability by Avi Friedman
Journal of Urban Affairs, 2013
My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina is a memoir of Edward J. Blakely's two years as New Orleans's "recovery czar" after the 2005 hurricanes. Blakely, a prominent urban scholar, might have appeared an unexpected choice for this position. As Blakely explains, however, he came to New Orleans as a disaster recovery practitioner who brought experience from the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, the 1991 Oakland fires, and the 2001 attacks on New York, as well as development projects in numerous countries. For readers who have a particular interest in New Orleans, Blakely's insider's account of City Hall will compliment Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2010), Rob Olshanky and Laurie Johnson's detailed account of the planning processes in the period after the hurricanes. Readers anticipating a reflective account that draws from the richness of Blakely's experience will nevertheless be disappointed. Although Blakely tells what he did, said, and thought at different moments and across a series of issues, this book offers no clear explanation for what shaped actions and outcomes in the struggling city. After a brief introduction, the book is divided into four parts and 16 chapters. The four chapters in Part I ("Seeing the Problem") explain Blakely's experiences that led to his reputation as a disaster recovery expert, Blakely's initial involvement in New Orleans and Louisiana, and his arrival to accept the position as Executive Director of Recovery Management for New Orleans. The five chapters of Part II ("Where To From Here") discuss the recovery framework and mechanisms that Blakely established. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explain the institutional mechanisms Blakely developed to manage the recovery. Blakely considered the Target Area Plan, adopted to guide recovery resources and attention, and the Office of Recovery and Development, established to manage recovery decisions and projects, two key successes. Chapter 8 recounts the internal struggles for control of the recovery, and Chapter 9 turns to economic development strategies and in particular a medical district near downtown. This work occurred in a city facing ongoing challenges outlined in the chapters of Part III ("Elements of the City"). In these chapters, Blakely highlights the city's lack of civic leadership-despite the numerous community-based organizations-as well as the need to rebuild neighborhoods, schools, and housing, and the deep racial divisions. Blakely also found the media unhelpful and questioned the city's long-term safety from environmental hazards. Blakely's account relays familiar stories of a divided, disadvantaged, and incompetent city. The issues that Blakely covers-racial disparities and economic disadvantage, urban politics, neoliberal reforms in federal and local policies, environmental vulnerability, long-term population loss and a declining built environment, and political and social displacement resulting from the disaster-have been developed in both popular and scholarly writing about post-Katrina New Orleans. Blakely gives numerous details about overt racism conveyed by white residents, African
ARCC-EAAE, 2022
Comparable with the word 'sustainable' in the late 1980s, over the last decade, the word resilience has been used extravagantly. Resilience is deployed most popularly when enquiring about the ability of a city to assume this trait but is also invoked while exploring same in communities, institutions, systems, and infrastructure. Within the latter is housing, where recurring estimations signal the need to address the enhancement of people's lives via holistic housing solutionsspecifically as it pertains to social rental housing (SRH). The challenge we tackle in this paper attempts to minimize the continued loss of SRH; first by advocating the need for its relocation from city fringes to nonpoor neighborhoods, and secondly, by identifying the chief causative factors of opposition within such neighborhoods and determining the viability of operational guiding principles to aid their successful integration. The research builds upon select pillars of resilience such as collaboration, flexibility/adaptability, transformability, and consolidation. Incorporating a case study methodology, with a mixed methods approach including literature review, phenomenology, and survey, our study discovered (amongst other things) that (I) utilizing the knowledge of the residents/public as a key source of information to create the guidelines is necessary to ensuring its applicability following completion, and (II) understanding existing governance structures, policymaking processes (on localization), and possible entry and impacts points to allow the smooth translation of the guidelines into policy, and integration of the guidelines to current strategies. Moving beyond critical analysis, the work culminated in the design of the guidelines which the authors anticipate will see conversion to policy, thereby improving institutional structure, capacity and performance. Further, the authors aim to enhance resource management, and build public participation, to more potently address urgent SRH issues. This study highlights the need for a more involved local government, which proves an indispensable network in building resilience in cities across Africa and beyond.
Cities and Affordable Housing, 2021
This book provides a comparative perspective on housing and planning policies affecting the future of cities, focusing on people-and place-based outcomes using the nexus of planning, design and policy. A rich mosaic of case studies features good practices of city-le d strategies for affordable housing provision, as well as individual projects capitalising on partnerships to build mixedincome housing and revitalise neighbourhoods. Twenty chapters provide unique perspectives on diversity of approaches in eight countries and 12 cities in Europe, Canada and the USA. Combining academic rigour with knowledge from critical practice, the book uses robust empirical analysis and evidence-based case study research to illustrate the potential of affordable housing partnerships for mixed-i ncome, socially inclusive neighbourhoods as a model to rebuild cities. Cities and Affordable Housing is an essential interdisciplinary collection on planning and design that will be of great interest to scholars, urban professionals, architects, planners and p olicymakers interested in housing, urban planning and city building.
International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, 2017
Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of "resilience" by disentangling the contentious interactions of various parameters that define and guide resilience trajectories, such as the physical infrastructure, socio-spatial inequalities, path dependencies, power relationships, competing discourses and human agency. This socio-political reconstruction of "resilience" is needed for two reasons: the concept of resilience becomes more responsive to the complex realities on the ground, and the discussion moves toward the promotion of more dynamic recovery governance models that can promote socially just allocated redundancy in housing actions, which could be seen as a key to incubating resilience. Design/methodology/approach-This is a conceptual paper that mobilizes theories of urban political ecology, social innovation and housing with the aim to examine the tensions between various discourses that steer housing production during post-disaster recovery processes, and put a spotlight on the heterogeneity in the transformative capacity of the various actors, institutions and visions of housing systems that preexist or emerge in the post-disaster city. This heterogeneity of actors (i.e. growth coalitions, neighborhood associations and housing cooperatives) consequently leads the discussion toward the investigation of "new" roles of the state in formulating relevant disaster governance models and housing (re)construction systems. Findings-The initial stress produced by a natural event is often extended because of long-term unmet housing needs. The repercussion of this prolonged stress is a loss of social progress partly due to the reiterated oppression of alternative housing production propositions. In this paper, the authors conclude that an asset-based community development approach to recovery can provide an antidote to the vicious cycles of social stress by opening up diverse housing options. This means that the recovery destiny is not predetermined according to pre-set ideas but is molded by the various bottom-up dynamics that democratically sketch the final socially desirable reconstruction outcome(s). Originality/value-The contribution of this paper is twofold. By using theoretical insights from urban political ecology, housing studies and social innovation, the paper first builds up onto the current reconstruction of the notion of disaster resilience. Second, by identifying a heterogeneity of "social resilience cells", the paper leads the discussion toward the investigation of the "new" role of the state in formulating relevant recovery governance models. In this respect, the paper builds a narrative of social justice in terms of the redistribution of resources and the cultivation of empowerment across the various housing providers who struggle for their right to the reconstruction experiment.
1970
This paper's focus is on identifying a system for devising and implementing a culture and context specific planning and design approach to creating the right low cost housing solutions for mitigating the effects of floods and flood related disasters. Two sites will be explored, one in Kundasale, Sri Lanka and the other in Nanjing, China. The paper first identifies key issues leading to unsuitable developments that exacerbate the natural phenomenon of flooding. It then presents the culture and context specific approach for each location. While one takes a more direct design practice focused approach, the other takes a more theoretical and academic approach. Each approach is defined by the designer's own cultural background, knowledge, and understanding of the local context, culture and people. The intention of this comparison is to highlight the uniqueness of each contextual situation and the significance of having a specific solution, appropriate to site, and driven with awareness of the designer's own limitations and strengths. A robust planning and design guideline will act as a checklist for designers, while for community stakeholders it is a means of ensuring development projects are culturally and contextually suited and sustainable, and aligned with international policy recommendations for disaster risk reduction, building resilient communities and reducing vulnerability to poverty.
Neighbourhood resilience in mass housing: co-production via research-by-design
Building Research and Information, 2016
In the debate on neighbourhood resilience, there is a demand for co-production involving inhabitants in adaptation processes. Neighbourhood resilience is discussed in terms of economic, ecological and socio-political capacities, making place-people relations a key factor. Academia-led research-by-design projects are engaging in resiliencebuilding, but professional roles are still unclear. Architects, planners and urban designers often have limited knowledge about the specific community and the socioeconomic impacts of their projects. This especially occurs in modernist mass-housing settlements within current conditions of neo-liberalization. Here, inhabitants and designers have only limited access to decision-making power and resources. More significantly, the spatial improvements might endanger major resources: the social cohesion and affordability of the neighbourhood. Using the concepts of collaboration (versus cooperation) and resourcefulness (versus resilience), this paper discusses the advantages and limits of academic design projects using two cases from the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt (AnG) in Berlin, Germany. Based on a process of community-based research-by-design, these projects activate spatial facilities and employ full-scale interventions to improve local resilience. Resourceful collaboration at the neighbourhood level demands new intermediary actors and designers as advocates with multi-scalar and transdisciplinary knowledge and abilities to assess and engage with the impacts of their co-produced design work.
Town and Terraced Housing: For Affordability and Sustainability
2012
My Storm: Managing the Recovery of New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina is a memoir of Edward J. Blakely's two years as New Orleans's "recovery czar" after the 2005 hurricanes. Blakely, a prominent urban scholar, might have appeared an unexpected choice for this position. As Blakely explains, however, he came to New Orleans as a disaster recovery practitioner who brought experience from the 1989 Bay Area earthquake, the 1991 Oakland fires, and the 2001 attacks on New York, as well as development projects in numerous countries. For readers who have a particular interest in New Orleans, Blakely's insider's account of City Hall will compliment Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2010), Rob Olshanky and Laurie Johnson's detailed account of the planning processes in the period after the hurricanes. Readers anticipating a reflective account that draws from the richness of Blakely's experience will nevertheless be disappointed. Although Blakely tells what he did, said, and thought at different moments and across a series of issues, this book offers no clear explanation for what shaped actions and outcomes in the struggling city. After a brief introduction, the book is divided into four parts and 16 chapters. The four chapters in Part I ("Seeing the Problem") explain Blakely's experiences that led to his reputation as a disaster recovery expert, Blakely's initial involvement in New Orleans and Louisiana, and his arrival to accept the position as Executive Director of Recovery Management for New Orleans. The five chapters of Part II ("Where To From Here") discuss the recovery framework and mechanisms that Blakely established. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explain the institutional mechanisms Blakely developed to manage the recovery. Blakely considered the Target Area Plan, adopted to guide recovery resources and attention, and the Office of Recovery and Development, established to manage recovery decisions and projects, two key successes. Chapter 8 recounts the internal struggles for control of the recovery, and Chapter 9 turns to economic development strategies and in particular a medical district near downtown. This work occurred in a city facing ongoing challenges outlined in the chapters of Part III ("Elements of the City"). In these chapters, Blakely highlights the city's lack of civic leadership-despite the numerous community-based organizations-as well as the need to rebuild neighborhoods, schools, and housing, and the deep racial divisions. Blakely also found the media unhelpful and questioned the city's long-term safety from environmental hazards. Blakely's account relays familiar stories of a divided, disadvantaged, and incompetent city. The issues that Blakely covers-racial disparities and economic disadvantage, urban politics, neoliberal reforms in federal and local policies, environmental vulnerability, long-term population loss and a declining built environment, and political and social displacement resulting from the disaster-have been developed in both popular and scholarly writing about post-Katrina New Orleans. Blakely gives numerous details about overt racism conveyed by white residents, African