The Form and Function of Poverty: Examining National Identity through Public Housing Architecture

Abstract

Lawrence J. Vale tells us that “grand symbolic state buildings need to be understood in terms of the political and cultural contexts that helped to bring them into being,” ¹ 1. Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. and that these buildings can help us understand our national identity. But all buildings are part of a broader political and cultural context. Even unimpressive state-funded buildings express meaning about the politics, power, and priorities of a nation. Because these buildings are not purposefully symbolic, their symbolism has the potential to provide a less contrived—though perhaps less appealing—portrayal of the nation in which they are built. Public housing provides an example of this idea. Public housing in the United States is latent with negative meanings that are reinforced and perpetuated by its architecture, siting, and design. This article examines three historical and iconic public housing communities and analyzes the meanings of these spaces through Goodman's four frames of reference—denotation, exemplification, metaphorical expression, and mediated reference—to determine what these spaces, as architecture, say about the American national identity and our relationship with public housing.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.     

Public Housing and Intergovernmental Reform in the 1990s

The problem identified in this paper is twofold. One is the plight of public housing at the end of the decade, with State programs undermined by Commonwealth funding cuts; the other is the problem of intergovernmental reform and its consequences for discrete areas of policy such as housing. The paper traces developments in CommonwealthState housing arrangements, beginning with the reforms initiated through the Council of Australian Governments through to the still uncertain future of public housing under the Howard government. It examines a number of inquiries into housing and recommendations for reform which served the plans of reformist governments intent on separating out the functional roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth and the States. In particular, these inquiries advocated an ‘affordability’s benchmark which sought to blur the distinction between public and private rental housing leading, inevitably, to the residualisation of the public housing sector.     

After-school Hours and the Meanings of Home: Re-defining Finnish Childhood Space

School children's use of their home during the after-school hours has become a controversial question in Finnish society. The article discusses cultural conceptions and uses of home as a specific space for children by comparing two different sets of empirical data: children's accounts of their after-school spaces and media debate on the same topic. Activated public concern in media accounts is analysed as a process of re-defining the properties of ‘proper places’ for children, whereas children's accounts are interpreted as expressions of local cultures. For the children, home is an ideal place for spending after-school time, while the public debate portrays the home as empty and children as lonely and unsafe. Definitions of home in after-school time are considered as part of a broader cultural process of re-defining contemporary Finnish childhood in which control turns out to be a crucial dimension of children's ‘proper places’.     

Space Against Time: Competing Rationalities in Planning for Housing

Foucault's understanding of government as the 'conduct of conduct' is adopted in order to investigate how the state 'governs at a distance' across space and through time. Rationalities and techniques of governance are identified as the main means by which the state establishes 'networks' across the domains to be governed. The effort required to keep the networks in place is emphasized and it is indicated that conflict can emerge around the rationalities and techniques that underpin governmental networks. A case study examining how conflict unfolds is outlined drawn from the planning-for-housing sector in England. It is shown that governmental rationalities associated with 'developmentalism' are coming into conflict with those associated with 'sustainable development'. It is argued that a new rationality of government is thus beginning to recast the networks of planning and that this rationality privileges space over time.     

Housing Price Gradients: The Intersection of Space and Built Form

A hedonic housing price model, implemented for the Dallas region, reveals a housing market structured around multiple nodes, some of which give rise to positive and others to negative externalities. The utility/disutility derived from relative location is capitalized into the size and quality of the housing stock and the nature of neighborhood amenities. The result is a convergence of space and built form.     

Colonial Streets and Statues: Postcolonial Belgium in the Public Space

Belgium has a very one-sided way of dealing with its colonial past in its public space. The country has hundreds of street names and memorials for white colonials, but not a single tribute to a Congolese. There are at least fifteen monuments for King Leopold II, some of which are occasionally vandalized, but only one presents a plaque with background information. Only one other monument, for a missionary in Antwerp, has been contextualized with an interpretive panel. The demand of Congolese migrants to name a square in the Brussels borough Ixelles/Elsene after Lumumba, has yet to be satisfied after more than ten years.

This situation contrasts that of other former colonial metropoles and can be explained by several factors. Belgium has far fewer postcolonial migrants, who in other countries often have the loudest and most critical voice in the postcolonial debate. Moreover, the postcolonial fight in Belgium is waged with sensitive symbols: a king (Leopold II) and an assassinated prime minister (Lumumba). This makes the debate much more emotionally charged. Last but not least, Belgium has gone through a great identity crisis over the past ten years. Left-wing pundits, who are traditionally more critical of the colonial past, and mainstream opinion-makers have avoided sparking the postcolonial debate so as to not fuel Flemish nationalism.     

Public versus Private Technological Incubator Programmes: Privatizing the Technological Incubators in Israel

Private technological incubators began operating in Israel in 2000, and developed thanks to the rapidly growing private (venture) capital (VC) sector, which traditionally had not funded such projects. The present study examines the differences and similarities between two types of technological incubators—public and private. It addresses the question whether the need still exists for the Public Technological Incubators Programme (PTIP). Based on our empirical analysis and findings, the main conclusion is that private incubators cannot fully replace public incubators; even after the entry of the private sector into the area of technological incubator activity, there is still justification for the continuation of the PTIP. Private incubators tend to concentrate in selected fields, whereas public incubators sponsor a large variety of activities. The PTIP was found to provide answers to advancing national objectives, such promoting peripheral regions and providing special incentives to selected population groups (e.g. new immigrants) for whom such activities would otherwise be out of reach.     

威尼斯城市共和国的公共空间与贵族政治

文艺复兴时期,威尼斯以其社会的繁荣稳定在欧洲享有盛誉。它独特的地理环境,以及发展成熟、高度集中的城市公共空间是其贵族政府实施社会管理的良好舞台。本文从威尼斯城市公共空间的形成历史和现状入手,以广场、街道以及剧院为具体事例,分析贵族政府管理城市公共空间的方式,指出在文艺复兴时期,威尼斯公共空间的主要作用为:1.培养民众的城市认同感;2.宣传贵族政治思想,树立和维护共和国独立、稳定、和谐的形象;3.抑制私人势力膨胀,缓解社会危机。这些手段成功地使威尼斯的城市社会生活不断公共化,城市的公共空间的发展凌驾于私人空间之上。     

探索契合的展陈空间与公共空间——以中国大运河博物馆为例

公共空间是博物馆为观众提供社会教育活动、休闲服务、艺术观赏的场所,也是展陈空间的衔接与延续.中国大运河博物馆的展陈空间与公共空间两者在设计与功能上相互影响、和谐共生,共同构成了博物馆的整体形象.中国大运河博物馆根据运河文化与地方特色设计打造每一处空间,将艺术氛围与服务设施巧妙结合,处处体现以人为本的服务理念,为观众提供...     

Housing and Public Services in a Medium-Sized Russian City: Case Study of Tomsk

A team of Russian and American urban specialists examines variations in living conditions across 26 microrayons of a medium-sized West Siberian city (Tomsk, 2002 population of 487,700) deemed to be fairly typical of urban settlements in that size class. Detailed information derived from the mapping of intra-urban variations in housing type and age, health facilities, schools and other educational institutions, and access to public transportation is used to construct three public service indices representing the relative level of deprivation of urban residents. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: D32, I32, O18. 9 figures, 2 tables, 17 references.     

Public Opinion,National Integration and National Identity in Spain: The Case of the Barcelona Olympic Games

Abstract. This article analyses the impact of the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games on national integration and national identity in Spain with respect to the conflict of interests that developed around the Games between the centre and Catalonia. We argue that polarisation along nationalist lines was limited in large part because national identity in Spain today is not predominantly a unitary and exclusive entity. Dual identity, loyalty to both Spain, on the one hand, and to one's region, or nation as in the case of Catalonia, on the other, and inclusive nationalism that does not aim at complete national independence, increasingly have tended to predominate in the last decade and a half. The Olympics, then, not only polarised relations between Catalonia and Spain, they also served to accommodate antagonisms between them and thus to maintain a delicate, fragile balance of power in the new España de las autonomías.     

Occupying the Past: Colonial Rule and Archaeological Practice in Israel/Palestine

Scholars working on issues of cultural heritage politics have repeatedly argued that archaeological sites in Israel/Palestine serve as grounds for the creation of a nation-state narrative that erases other histories. Expanding on this view, my paper first explores a set of spatio-political strategies that Israeli settlers use to carve out a national space within a larger colonial landscape. Second, as I trace those strategies into the realm of archaeological work, it is my goal to highlight how practices of heritage management and colonial rule in Israel/Palestine are co-constitutive. In this context, I also consider how the occupation, confiscation, and demolition of archaeological sites take place before the background of a modernist discourse that references a universal or global heritage.