Re-Inventing Public Housing

In Public Housing that Worked Nicholas Bloom championed the success of the New York City Housing Authority, but to do so had to champion bureaucratic workability over architectural value. In fact, his assessment had to disregard the fact that nearly all of the high-rise low-income housing projects are psychologically partitioned island wastelands, anticities within the city. Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and now Steven Johnson have offered their generational testaments to density, diversity, mixed use, and continuity- what they considered made urban life meaningful. Steven Connsummarized- “the problem of the 21st century will be how we re-urbanize, how we fix the mistakes of our anti-urban 20th century.”The Pratt Institute UG urban design studio, Re-inventing Public Housing, is intended as one step toward meeting the challenge starting with the question-must we really accept the super block public housing estate for what it is or is there a way to transform and reinterpret it, and by doing so eliminate its stigma, its isolation, and anti-urban grip on the city?

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2016.14

Volume Editors
Alfredo Andia, Dana Cupkova, Macarena Cortes, Umberto Bonomo & Vera Parlac

ISBN
978-1-944214-10-4