Events

Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: Lawrence Vale

The Persistent Design-Politics of Race in American Public Housing

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

Lawrence Vale is Associate Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning, director of MIT’s Resilient Cities Housing Initiative, and co-director of the RWJF-sponsored Policies for Action research hub linking housing, health and racial justice. Larry is the author or editor of thirteen books and more than sixty articles examining urban design, affordable housing and city planning, including four prize-winning volumes on American public housing history, design, policy, and politics. His latest book is The Equitably Resilient City (MIT Press, 2024), co-authored with Zachary Lamb. At MIT, Larry has won the Institute’s highest awards for teaching and for graduate student advising.

"The Persistent Design-Politics of Race in American Public Housing": Subsidized housing for low-income residents is more than a matter of laws and policies; it entails controlling and redistributing space. Decisions about public housing reveal the confluence of ideological assumptions about social structure and environmental determinist beliefs about spatial order in ways that can convey either welcome or exclusion. This talk explores that socio-spatial convergence through the lens of ‘design-politics,’ applying this to the racialized development and redevelopment of public housing in the United States. City leaders across the US constructed a great deal of the nation’s public housing in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a racially-segregated basis, rewarding and reinforcing an ideological ideal of the small white nuclear family – both explicitly through tenant selection criteria and implicitly through the sizing and design of apartments. Such ideological preferences – while largely unstated – continue to infuse 21st Century efforts by urban public housing authorities when they redevelop such projects. Once again, their design decisions combine space and race, linking the presumed panacea of ‘mixed-income’ redevelopment projects to an ongoing racial politics aimed at restoring mainstream ideological norms while resisting expressions of non-white identities. More optimistically, a few redevelopment efforts have challenged this with more progressive forms of poverty governance, emphasizing not-for-profit organizations and valuing resident voices.

"Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited" examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

Suggested reading: Vale, L. (2022). The Persistent Design-Politics of Race: Power and ideology in American public housing redevelopment. In The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I (pp. 267-284).

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.