Working-class Housing Research Articles

Structural Disadvantage in Housing Opportunities

This paper discusses the ways that race and migration have shaped the housing opportunities people experience in England. It explores the historical development of policy and practice that has shaped racial inequalities in housing. It argues that the violence created by national and local state-supported housing policies has disproportionately affected racialised minorities, as has the slow violence generated by the neglect and stigmatisation of working-class housing. In turn, this has provided the justification for clearances and the remaking of space for those with the money to invest in the financialisation of land and housing through dispossession and denial of the right to safe, secure, and affordable housing. This analysis will be used as a basis to propose ways in which housing research can develop a coherent, critical perspective to race and migration and develop an alternative discourse to challenge the dominant market-driven, individualistic narratives. Adopting a critical approach allows researchers to move beyond the logic of housing policies at national and local levels to analyse and propose action to address persistent racial inequalities in housing.

Rhetorics of love in the field of working-class housing in nineteenth century Europe

Rhetorics of love in the field of working-class housing in nineteenth century Europe

"Slum Clearance" in 1890s Wellington

In 1892, a remarkable map of Wellington was completed. Stretching from Thorndon in the north to Berhampore to the south, and taking in the teeming inner-city areas of Te Aro and Newtown, the remnants of Māori kāinga, the town belt, the Basin Reserve, the prison, "lunatic asylum" and hospital, reclamations and every street in between. The map, drawn by engineer and surveyor Thomas Ward, is actually 103 maps, drawn on A1 sheets. On the map, the exact footprint of every single building in Wellington is recorded every commercial building and house, every garden shed and outdoor toilets. Bay windows and verandahs are carefully drawn. Data is recorded for every building, including how many rooms it contains, what the roof and walls are made of and how many storeys it has. Legal titles are exactly mapped, as are the city's streams and even the street lights. Once complete, one full pristine set of the maps was set aside and preserved intact. Another set of the maps was updated regularly, for approximately the next ten years. For that decade, we can follow every change in the city, down to the smallest detail such as the replacement of slate rooves with corrugated iron, but also bigger-scale work such as the reconfiguration of whole streets.
 The Thomas Ward map is a touchstone for the history of our city. It is used every day by Wellington's archaeologists and historians. Wellington City Council provides the map online as an digital overlay over modern satellite images of the city, allowing us to compare the city of 1892 to the city of today. A well-known feature of the history of Wellington in the 1890s was the outbreak of typhoid and other diseases in the inner-city, a result of overcrowding and lack of clean water. To combat this, a number of "slum clearances" were ordered by the city council, resulting in whole streets of working-class houses being demolished. This paper, a part of a much larger project, will examine some of the stories shown in the two sets of maps, with a particular focus of the changed landscape of the inner-city brought about by this "slum clearance" work of the 1890s.

Industrial housing clusters in nineteenth-century Lisbon: finding spatial patterns

Abstract This article aims to analyse housing solutions used in nineteenth-century Lisbon to deal with explosive demographic and urban development. It particularly focuses on two specific types of industrial housing ensembles created in Lisbon called pátios and vilas operárias. The goal of this article is to analyse the spatial distribution of pátios and vilas operárias in Lisbon. Through the potential of geographic information systems, we aim to understand in a spatial-quantitative way the spatial patterns of these kinds of industrial housing ensembles for the most deprived population. To do so, we used spatial modelling and spatial analysis procedures, including simple spatial distribution, mean centre, standard distance, directional distance and density estimation (hotspots). The new contribution of this article lies in the increase of scientific knowledge about these forms of working-class housing – the pátios and vilas operárias – and their spatial implementation in Lisbon in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Multiculturalism between ideology and practice: Immigrant self-narrations of community activism in Toyota, Japan

ABSTRACT From 1990, a revised immigration law offered foreigners of Japanese descent (nikkei) the right to work for unlimited duration in Japan. Many nikkei came from Latin America to take on blue-collar jobs in the country’s factories. Homi Danchi, a working-class housing complex in Toyota, Japan, has since become known for its Brazilian immigrant community. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study analyzes the self-narrated biographies of three Brazilian immigrants who actively participate in community activism in Homi. Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his critique of the “biographical illusion,” this article examines how the abstract ideology of Japanese-style multiculturalism (tabunka kyōsei) is understood and practiced at a local level. It argues that our narrators’ practical desires to recreate multicultural community in Homi reapply abstract multicultural values to a local context, thereby implicitly acknowledging multiculturalism’s symbolic capital and limiting the extent of activism to Homi. Applying the symbolic capital of multiculturalism to everyday practice, in turn, makes activism meaningful and imagines a community of fellow actors, albeit to the exclusion of outsiders. Multiculturalism thereby becomes a question not primarily of coexistence, but of community-building. We also underline the role that narration of one’s own history plays in mediating between individual experience and community belonging, contributing to methodological debates about Bourdieu’s biographical method.

Arquitectura y territorio. El desmantelamiento del barrio de El Cabo (1957- 2022)

Currently the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife continues immersed in its regenerative metamorphosis. One of its neighbourhoods, El Cabo, underwent enormous changes agreed upon in the first general urban planning plan that restructured its disorderly plot of post-conquest origins (1496). It disappeared to be reborn, eliminating all the working-class houses, as well as some streets, leaving three buildings standing: The Hospital of Our Lady of the Forsaken (1749), the San Carlos barracks (1875) and the hermitage of San Telmo (early century xvi). The demolition, construction and rehabilitation work began in 1963 and did not stop until the recent 2022

PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE: THE ACTION OF THE STATE

In Chile and Latin America, the State has built the city. Thus, from buildings and public spaces, institutional, school, housing, hospital, industrial, and transportation architectures, to the most diverse spheres, the State’s action in the production of public architecture is undeniable. At different times, this fact has been more or less valued or recognized. For example, during the presidency of José Manuel Balmaceda (1886-1891), his administration undertook numerous public works that sought to spread modernization throughout the country through buildings and infrastructure. Likewise, during the 1940s, with the boost of the Popular Front governments, there was a sustained institutionalization action that resulted in the construction of numerous buildings, that spread the benefits of modern architecture for public architecture and working-class housing. With the application of a capitalist economic-social model, which privileges market fluctuations, from the 1970s to the present, the private sector has been favored, so that the State’s action in the production of the city has been curtailed and, on many occasions, muted or vilified.

The Research on Differences and Policies of Housing Provision in UK Cities before and after the WWII

WWII dealt a heavy blow to British cities, especially to urban housing provision. The purpose of this research paper is to compare the differences in urban housing supply data and policies in the UK before and after the WWII and draw out some successful experiences and housing policies. With reference to the changes in housing provision in London and Manchester before and after WWII, this essay firstly focuses on an overall development process of housing provision before and after WWII in British industrial cities represented by the two cities through a comparative and analytical data research method. Then, through comparative analysis, the article compares what effective government policies were put in place to stabilise housing supply before and after the WWII. Before WWII, the government met the large demand for working-class housing by clearing slums and increasing housing construction, while after WWII, the government encouraged the development of counter-urbanisation and dealt some conflicts in the urban-rural fringe to ensure effective urban housing provision.

"Biohaus": The Bauhaus and the Biopolitics of Global Space

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians and urban studies scholars have been pleading for a more nuanced analysis of the Bauhaus in order to divorce from the one-sided affirmative reading of the iconic German art school. Yet, within the prevailing heroic narrative that still dominates contemporary public discourse after the 100-year anniversary of the school, the Bauhaus is praised for its affordable as well as working class-oriented design and it is thus depicted as intrinsically antithetical to today’s neoliberal housing market and bourgeois planning practices. To complicate this somewhat lopsided account, this paper draws on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of functionalist architecture and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to examine the late Bauhaus through a biopolitical lens. It first presents the Törten working-class housing estate in Dessau, Germany to scrutinize how biopolitical socio-spatial practices crystalize in Bauhaus urban planning and architecture. The second part of the paper turns to the film screen to discuss how the Weimar-era narrative of bio-functional modernism materializes in Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s late 20s, early 30s filmic works on urban life, the so-called “city symphonies.” Considering the postwar afterlives of the Bauhäusler, the Conclusion places these findings in a broader historical perspective and reflects on the contemporary implications of a Foucauldo-Lefebvrian rereading of the Bauhaus. It is within this final contextualization that the paper inquires into the possibilities of people-centered urban dwelling in the age of biopower.

Representación de la vivienda obrera a principios del siglo XX. De las soluciones cotidianas al Concurso de Barrios Obreros para Cartagena de 1902

El problema de la vivienda obrera en España se estuvo generando durante décadas debido a diferentes causas socioeconómicas. La promulgación de la 1ª Ley de Casas Baratas en 1911 fue la primera respuesta del Estado como toma de conciencia de este grave problema social, pero en tanto se gestaba, las distintas soluciones para el alojamiento obrero fueron propuestas por múltiples agentes (privados, cooperativas, administración, etc.). Este artículo ofrece un recorrido por algunos proyectos significativos de vivienda obrera en la comarca de Cartagena analizando sus propuestas gráficas, desde las obras más sencillas y cotidianas, hasta la solución excepcional del proyecto para el primer concurso de vivienda social en la España del siglo XX, que propone la construcción de dos barrios obreros en Cartagena. Finalmente se exponen los aspectos y pautas identificadas en este tipo de representaciones para la producción de vivienda.

Lines in the Mud: Tank Eco-restoration and Boundary Contestations in Chennai

This article analyses the politics of environmentalism revealed in struggles over the land–water boundary of an urbanising tank in Chennai. In contesting this boundary, property-less settlers on its banks called into question the tank’s ‘nature’ and functions in its urban milieu, and demanded a redrawing of boundaries to reflect the socio-natural transformations that had turned parts of it into land. Simultaneously, propertied residents, in concert with state eco-restoration schemes and court rulings, fought to restore the tank to its ‘original’ dimensions. In foregrounding the liminalities of the urbanising tank, this article suggests the limits of the contemporary property-determined eco-restoration discourse, premised on a return to pristine pasts and original boundaries. It proposes that the stand-off between water body restoration and the defence of working-class housing rights necessitates recognising the tank as an artefact assembled over time by socio-technical and natural processes.

Brothels and Sex Workers: Variety, Complexity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Little Lon, Melbourne

The neighbourhood of Little Lon, in Melbourne, first attracted historians’ attention as a ‘slum’ area whose occupants in the nineteenth century were characterised as ‘outcasts’. Later archaeological work characterised Little Lon as a poor working-class area housing factories and low rent accommodation for labourers and immigrants. In both cases the presence of sex workers and brothels was acknowledged but their role was played down or considered in relation to criminal activities in the area. In this article a closer look at the sex workers’ lives and the variety of brothels in Little Lon allows for a more nuanced appreciation of the sex work industry within the social and legal context of the era.

Public parks and urban development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Nottingham

ABSTRACTIt is well known that Nottingham was one of the most densely built and overcrowded towns in Victorian England. Following the enclosure, 1845-65, green spaces, including public parks, had to be provided in the new suburbs. This article looks at the creation of parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to show how a combination of government policies, local authority commitment to providing open spaces and recreation grounds, and philanthropic involvement, led to the post-1845 town and its newly created suburbs having numerous accessible green spaces. This provision has, in turn, impacted on how the modern city has evolved, and the article suggests that this is important for our understanding of urban development more generally. The paper notes the impact of more recent development where large swathes of working class housing, with few or no green spaces, has been swept away and replaced by a significantly greener environment.

Mass Factory Housing: Design and Social Reform

In the past, housing and homeownership have been used as media for social reform. This article looks at the socio-political agenda behind the birth of company towns and the role of architecture and urban design in shaping the social life of the inhabitants. The study examines Cité Ouvrière, a nineteenth-century mass factory settlement in Mulhouse (France), which provided workers with access to property. Through literature, archival, and design research, this article traces the incremental transformation of a uniform working-class housing scheme into an ethnically diverse and formally heterogeneous city quarter.

Voces que construyen memoria colectiva. La dimensión inmaterial del patrimonio industrial en la Población Obrera Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego, Punta Arenas, Chile

The construction of the Working Class Housing “Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego” in the 1950s in the city of Punta Arenas, meant, in addition to a manifestation industrial paternalism logics, the consolidation of a community of neighbors that strengthened a bond with each other. Once the livestock industry decided to get detached from the houses, in the prelude to its disappearance, this community began to disintegrate. The following article explores around the collective memory that has survived the dissociation process, in a way that seeks to avoid its disappearance and to claim a legacy in which both architecture and sociocultural dimensions merge.

Theodor Goecke. La vivienda pequeña en el debate urbano alemán de final del S.XIX

<p>The last decade of the 19th century is especially relevant in Germany with relation to the matter of the working-class housing and its influence in the city shape. During previous years, this dwelling was developed inserted into the large and deep urban block with the few exceptions of occasional works of reform character produced by non-profit building societies. In Berlin, the small dwelling becomes, for the first time, in 1891, an object of attention of the professional collective of architects. With Theodor Goecke as one of its main figures, the debate on the urban form and the working-class housing model will lead towards new proposals for a green and extended city, where in addition to the tenement rental building, the single-family house will become increasingly present. The differentiation of traffics, with the consideration of a new type of street for a more domestic living, not foreseen in the significant nineteenth-century designs of the Berliner city, favour this protagonism and establishes a starting point for the new modern approaches that will consolidate in the German urban planning of the first European post-war.</p>

Variation in the Characteristics of Everyday Life and Meaning of Urban Housing Due to the Transition of Social Structure: Focusing on Articles Published in Lifestyle Magazines

The patterns and characteristics of everyday life have been changing according to changes in social structure. However, South Korean apartment complexes as a representative urban housing type are still based on the Western tradition of modern working-class housing, and have been commodified in the context of consumer capitalism. Therefore, this research explores the contemporary lifestyles that should be supported in urban housing by analyzing the articles of lifestyle magazines. Based on this analysis, we derived the changed patterns of contemporary lifestyles in terms of residents’ characteristics, the relationship between individuals and family, the relationship between house and workplace, and the pursuing direction of residential space planning. These results can contribute to discover the contemporary characteristics of everyday life and its lifestyle; define the changed meaning of urban housing; and reduce the gap between living space and their lives for urban and social sustainability.

Martin Wagner in America: planning and the political economy of capitalist urbanization

ABSTRACTMartin Wagner’s contribution to planning thought and management during the Weimar Republic is widely known, but he recedes into obscurity afterwards. However, he maintained a tenacious intellectual activity in his American exile, conducting teaching-oriented research as Associate Professor of Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design and prolonging these explorations until his passing in 1957. Working with students and other colleagues – most prominently Walter Gropius – Wagner devised comprehensive proposals for an alternative regional urbanization pattern that combined radical city-core renewal for conspicuous services and high-end residence with a massive suburbanization of middle- and working-class housing and industrial activities. This scheme exacerbated his earlier conceptions and simultaneously incorporated new inflections stemming from a critical engagement with contemporary debates in the US, which allow a better understanding of his German period and the transatlantic transfer of planning ideologies. At Harvard, Wagner reinforced the political-economic perspective of his work, following a contradictory imperative to secure the implementation of proposals by assimilating capital’s spatiality in design strategies. Taking the dynamics of profit-oriented urbanization to their logical conclusion, the American Wagner envisioned a dark albeit consistent ‘diagram’ of the potential reach of a stark capitalist approach to territorial restructuring, prefiguring major urban shifts in subsequent decades.

The Tenth Delhi: economy, politics and space in the post-liberalisation metropolis

Recent studies of the post-liberalisation Indian metropolis have largely followed a theoretical framework from contemporary urban sociology in the West, drawn from David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, among others. These studies show the contemporary city being shaped by global transnational capital—which accumulates wealth through dispossession—resulting in a clearing of the poor and marginal from central urban areas to the periphery, and replacing them with middle- and upper-class newcomers. Concomitantly, new jobs in these cities have shifted from industrial manufacturing to post-industrial services for large transnational firms connected through international networks of global capital. These theories suggest that in the neoliberal city the welfare state has receded, surrendering its role of protecting working-class housing and employment to the interests of transnational capital. We argue that by identifying processes that unfold in New York or Paris in New Delhi, these studies only capture a small part of the picture of urban transformation in contemporary India. In the case of New Delhi, we show how Economic Liberalisation has fundamentally restructured India’s capital city, producing a new iteration of the ancient metropolis, which we call the “Tenth Delhi”. However, the new order does not, for the most part, resemble the above-described Western-derived theories. Instead of jettisoning its poor, Delhi has become a magnet for the working classes from across India. There are now more migrants each year to Delhi than to any other Indian city. Instead of the periphery, or squatter settlements on the urban edge, the influx of migrants is found in the oldest settlements of the city, the so-called Lal Dora areas or “Urban Villages”, where new forms of rental housing have emerged. The cases of displacement and dispossession in Delhi are well documented, but little has been written about the more large-scale phenomena of “regularisation” where hundreds of the “Unauthorised” housing colonies that exist across the city have been formally regularised. Through a case study of one neighbourhood called Taimoor Nagar, which contains a patchwork of multiple types of spaces, populations and economic activities, this paper seeks to understand how things work at a small scale to explain a larger system, and to identify patterns that repeat across urban space in terms of spatial ordering, informal norms, economic relations and political change. We argue that capital-intensive dispossession has not been the primary form of urban transformation in post-Liberalisation New Delhi. The liberalisation of state control over spaces and types of economic activity and the expansion of democratically elected representation in this period has also been dramatically important. When most of the economy is unregulated, and most of urban space is unplanned, democratic politics mediates the relationship between urban citizens and the rule of law.

Digging up memories: Collaborations between archaeology and oral history to investigate the industrial housing experience

This paper forms part of a wider PhD project exploring whether there can be an informative research relationship between archaeology and oral history. Its focus is on the working class housing experience in the North of England during the Industrial Revolution period. Oral history as a discipline applied within archaeological investigation is growing in popularity and in application in the UK as a form of ‘community archaeology’. Evidence suggests that there is potential for combining the memories of oral history testimonies and the physical archaeological evidence from excavation to enhance our understanding of an event, person, time and place. However, establishing what evidence of the housing experience survives in an archaeological context and what survives in memory is crucial to the success of a combined investigative approach. This paper will use the example of The Public Archaeology Programme of the site Dixon’s Blazes as a relevant example in which to explore this, with evidence of sanitation, overcrowding and architecture surviving in both.