Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities [Paperback]

The building and management of public housing is often seen as a signal failure of American public policy, but this is a vastly oversimplified view. In Purging the Poorest, Lawrence J. Vale offers a new narrative of the seventy-five-year struggle to house the “deserving poor.”

In the 1930s, two iconic American cities, Atlanta and Chicago, demolished their slums and established some of this country’s first public housing. Six decades later, these same cities also led the way in clearing public housing itself. Vale’s groundbreaking history of these “twice-cleared” communities provides unprecedented detail about the development, decline, and redevelopment of two of America’s most famous housing projects: Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Atlanta’s Techwood /Clark Howell Homes. Vale offers the novel concept of design politics to show how issues of architecture and urbanism are intimately bound up in thinking about policy. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-depth interviews, Vale recalibrates the larger cultural role of public housing, revalues the contributions of public housing residents, and reconsiders the role of design and designers.

Lawrence J. Valeis the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. His many books include three prize-winning volumes:Architecture, Power, and National Identity;From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors;andReclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Public Housing, Design Politics, and Twice-Cleared Communities
2. Public Housing and Private Initiative: Developing Atlanta’s Techwood and Clark Howell Homes
3. Redeveloping Techwood and Clark Howell: The Purges of Progress
4. Up from Little Hell: Developing Chicago&l³(