Housing

Definition

Housing names the architectural and social provision of shelter — a category distinct from the phenomenological concept of dwelling. In Benjamin's account, "the core architectural idea" of his work is "the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing" (Elliott): the 19th-century interior (the padded cell of the private individual, saturated with possession and trace) gives way to the modernist Existenzminimum — the functional, open, collective housing of the 20th century. This shift is at once a loss (the decay of intimate dwelling) and a gain (the progressive social potential of universal housing). The tension between housing-as-quantity and dwelling-as-quality — between the right to shelter and the need for place — structures the phenomenological critique of modernism (Heidegger's "dwelling is not housing") and the political-economic critique of housing as financialized commodity.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing.
• Martin Heidegger — the critique of housing in the name of dwelling.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin on housing as the progressive core of architectural modernism.

Related Concepts

• Dwelling — the qualitative, existential mode housing is measured against.
• Modernism — the movement that universalized housing as a program.
• Modernity — the historical condition housing addresses.
• Prefab Interior — the manufactured dwelling: the prefab house as housing's industrial promise ("efficiency and affordability of construction") and its interior's suppressed development — the Lustron experiment's rise and 1950 failure as housing-production history.
• Habit — housing's persistence-condition: "long-standing habits in building and living patterns" that order houses and their internal activities (Lawrence), the reason housing stock changes slower than the households it shelters.
• Metropolitan Hybrids — the vertical-city register (Luna): housing produced by appropriation rather than provision — Torre David's 45-story unfinished skyscraper filled with ad hoc dwellings.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — bourgeois dwelling vs. modernist housing.
• Building Dwelling Thinking — housing vs. dwelling.
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the industrial-housing register: prefab's continuing attention "for reasons of efficiency and affordability of construction"; the Lustron House, "a mass-produced prefab introduced by Carl Strundtland in 1946," whose "goal of true mass production was not achieved" and whose company "folded in 1950" — the prefab dwelling as housing production's experimental edge, documented through its interiors (built-ins, mechanical innovations, the closed system) rather than its facades. See prefab-interior, kit-of-parts.
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — housing's sociological and temporal registers: the dwelling "ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns" yet "responsive to social influences in ways that have the potential to remake and reform them outside of a static framework of living standards" (editors, p. 184) — housing as a social product whose forms persist as habit and whose remaking is driven by social change; the modernist audit — "aesthetic resolution to the kitchen and dining room" without adaptation "to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (p. 184) — the housing standard's failure mode: forms fixed while households changed; and the constructive program: "house and housing designs that are attuned to the dynamic processes that occur within them may be produced" within "ecological reflection" (p. 184). Where Benjamin's housing is the modernist program and Heidegger's the critique, Lawrence's is the research register: housing as the domain where domestic space meets demography (see habit, flexible-interior, kitchen, temporality).
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the appropriation register: "In Venezuela, an example of such an appropriation occurred in La Torre de David. The change in political power stalled major construction, leaving incomplete buildings and a large demand for housing. La Torre de David in Caracas was one of these incomplete buildings: a 45-story skyscraper that was appropriated by local people facing hardship. The unfinished structure was adapted in an ad hoc fashion, filled with markets, gyms, services, shops, and dwellings. The dwellings were constructed from leftover and found construction materials; each family personalized their own unit, creating a real sense of diversity in this vertical city." Housing not as delivered unit (Benjamin's modernist program, the Lustron's prefab promise) but as claimed space — supply failure met by vertical squatting, the dwelling personalized from leftovers; and on the designed side, the micro-industry counter-program's "micro-housing units that would allow startups to have working space while sharing bigger facilities… a merger between work space and living space" — housing as one node in the programmable urban core. See metropolitan-hybrids, adaptive-reuse.
• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the growth-machine register: housing targets and Growth Areas ("carefully targeted nudges to the housing market," p. 573); the complaint that "growth was 'housing-led' not 'infrastructure-led'" — "house-builders create new estates with little thought for the social and other provision that might be taken for granted in some urban contexts" (p. 574); delivery through "sustainable urban extensions" incrementally drawing on existing infrastructure; the crash ("Housing was the first industry into the recession," p. 574); and the viability regime of the NPPF (2012) — "an even stronger market-led vision, in which what ultimately matters is the extent to which house-builders deem development to be viable for them"; "the only place they can be borne is from the value of the land. House builders do not make the market" (p. 575). The outcome: "The new model has ended up looking a lot like the old model in which housing has been built on the edges of other settlements, waiting for other forms of infrastructure to arrive" (pp. 575–576). See home-ownership-democracy, nimbyism.
• Tower Block (Glendinning & Muthesius 1994) — the production-system register, the wiki's fullest account of housing as a public, municipal machine: the 1919 sense of mission ("'maximum output', 'standards' and, later on, 'Modernity' and 'community'," p. 1); the statistical structure (1945–69: "over four million public dwellings… 59% of total housing construction… hardly matched even in Eastern Europe," p. 2); the dwelling-type diversity (64% 'cottages', 20% three-to-five-storey blocks, the multi-storey remainder "which… epitomise the postwar 'Modern Dwelling'", p. 2); the two-agent structure (design-vs-production); the 'land trap' and the municipal 'virtuous circle' ("the more dwellings cities built, the more autonomy they gained," p. 219); and the collapse by success — glut, management problems, Ronan Point (ch. 31–32). Where Jacobs anatomises the American public-housing project from outside, Glendinning & Muthesius anatomise the British machine from inside its committees — the providers' own recollections ("When's ma hoose comin down?", p. 220) set against the designers' polemic. See public-housing, housing-crusade, welfare-state-housing, package-deal.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the welfare-state counter-register, and the system contrast: the American suburb "typically planned, developed and constructed by private agents, William Levitt being a famous example," against the Nordic case where "public authorities have had a much more important role in the making of suburbs" (pp. 538–539); the multi-family fact of Nordic suburban dwelling — "a great deal of the suburban dwellings being built in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were multi-family housing; that is, apartment blocks, row houses and semi-detached dwellings" (p. 539); the cooperative tenure ("organized as a cooperative with the inhabitants as shareholders," p. 540); the quantitative facility standards in "the spirit of functionalism" (playgrounds, ball fields, child-care ratios, p. 541); the industrialized-participation combination ("the first time in Norway," p. 540); and the high-rise halt — the "Le Corbusier-style high-rise prefabricated housing" whose criticism "halted further construction of these high-rise housing estates" (p. 540). See welfare-state-housing, satellite-town, taet-lav, user-participation.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the suburban multi-family and market-stress registers: American suburbs hold "almost 10 million such units" of multi-family housing "in three types: condominiums, elderly housing, and 'mixed-use lifestyle centres' mostly in the elite income bracket," home "to more singles than the classical subdivision" (Larco, quoted pp. 591–592); "Sixty-one percent of all Americans now live in single unit detached housing on about an acre of land" (Chakrabarti, quoted p. 586) — "a real problem in so much as… those living arrangements are supported by the most unsustainable economy in the world," though "the same kind of densities may not be quite as disastrous in an economy that is set up in more modest terms" (p. 586); and the stressed-market extremes — London's "iceberg homes" with "multiple below ground floors and amenities" (Waldie, cited p. 587). Housing here is the density debate's material: detached majority, multi-family periphery, basement hyperdensity. See hyperdensity, towers-in-the-park, home-ownership-democracy.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the cost-machinery register, the wiki's fullest account of housing as a priced production system: the land-cost flow-through (lots held to 20–25% of sales price — "if the price of a lot escalated by $5000, the overall home would need to go up by about $20,000," p. 38; the national lot average now 25% of total cost, p. 252); appraisal by square footage ("real estate appraisers often dictated the valuation of homes… primarily based on square footage, not by material use or design quality," p. 36); the zoning tax ("driven up the cost of new homes by as much as 24%," p. 37) with inclusionary zoning's price inversion ("it drives up the cost of the remaining units," p. 38); density's non-delivery ("increased density benefits only the obtainer of those rights," p. 39); the urban/suburban cost gap ("The cost to build a housing unit in an urban setting is approximately three times that for a suburban location," p. 243); the delivery paradox ("statistically and technically, we are the best-housed nation on earth" yet "the lower economic strata… remain ill housed" and communities "economically and racially segregated," p. 55); and the affordability collapse of the conclusion — approvals, impact fees and regulatory barriers having "driven up the cost of delivering a new home in suburban settings to beyond the reach of entry-level buyers" (p. 252), with the Missing Middle legalization as the supply answer (p. 252; see missing-middle-housing). Where Cochrane et al. give housing's growth-machine politics and Keil its density extremes, Wentling gives its cost mechanics — the machinery that converts land value into house form. See home-ownership-democracy, suburban-governance, separation-of-uses, real-existing-suburbia.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the public-housing critique's founding statement and the subsidy re-thought: the root error traced to a "twist of semantics" — people too poor to pay for shelter redefined as "people who cannot be housed by private enterprise," a statistical group "with peculiar shelter requirements, like prisoners, on the basis of one statistic: their income," becoming "a special collection of guinea pigs for Utopians to mess around with" (p. 323); the consequences catalogued ("Separate but equal makes nothing but trouble… Separate but better is an innate contradiction wherever the separateness is enforced by one form of inferiority," p. 323; the cartel logic of income-sorting, p. 323); the diagnosis of projects as planned perpetual slums whose "time… is an eternal disrupter instead of a builder" (p. 277); and the counter-tactic — the guaranteed-rent system: an Office of Dwelling Subsidies guaranteeing financing and economic rent to private owners of ordinary street buildings, tenants selected locally, incomes examined annually, capital costs kept in the rent equation, design standards left to the city's own codes, and income ceilings abolished so tenants can stay "for as long as this was true — be no concern of the ODS" (pp. 326–330). The programmatic epigraph is Stanley Tankel's: "Fix the buildings but leave the people… We must learn to cherish the communities we have; they are hard to come by" (p. 337). Where Benjamin gives housing's progressive program and Heidegger its critique, Jacobs gives its institutional anatomy and a substitute tactic. See unslumming, dwelling-vs-housing, cataclysmic-money.
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the policy-history retrospective and the vicious-spiral frame: the postwar housing spiral's "tangible roots" in fifteen years of depression and war ("people could not afford to build in the 1930s, and during the war both construction materials and skilled workers drained into urgent war work," p. 139); the three public approaches audited — court-enforced rent controls "on balance, counterproductive" (the "birth-control apartments" loophole, the landlord abandonment spiral, "the conversion of formerly tranquil areas into continuous battlefields of predators versus prey," p. 142); slum clearance "even more counterproductive" (redlining as loan famine — "denial of property loans, not on account of poor creditworthiness… but on account of location in a neighborhood designated for clearance," p. 143; replacement buildings providing fewer affordable dwellings than destroyed; Pruitt-Igoe's "explosive demolition… a spectacular symbol of slum-clearance failures," p. 144; eleven thousand units demolished yearly by the mid-1990s against four thousand built); and government-guaranteed mortgages the only supply-adding approach — but their standards and zoning codes "mandated suburban sprawl" (p. 145). The affordability crisis re-stated from 2004: "at some point in the 1970s, the two figures — median shelter cost and median income — slipped seriously out of whack"; "Ninety percent could no longer afford to buy a 'median' house" (pp. 29–30); the bubble ("money growing on houses… sooner or later the bubble must burst, as inevitably all speculative bubbles do," p. 148); and the 74 subsidized apartments added in Toronto in over a decade against 17,515 rental units lost (p. 108). See vicious-spirals, densification, missing-middle-housing, social-capital.
• The New London Vernacular (Callister 2026) — the design-language register, housing's contemporary British product form: the multi-audience solution ("It gave planning officers something recognisable, developers a lower-risk construction language, housing associations a way to reduce expensive shared circulation, and residents front doors, defensible thresholds and homes that felt more house-like," p. 6); the emergency-pressure frame (London's housing emergency package: "faster delivery cannot mean weaker design thinking," p. 7); the equal-quality housing ethic ("Housing design should not announce who is richer and who is poorer," p. 38); and the diagnosis that London's default product has become "a planning-safe aesthetic" (p. 56). Where Glendinning & Muthesius document housing as a public production machine and Wentling as a private cost machine, Callister documents it as a design language under planning risk — the third machine (see new-london-vernacular, tenure-blind-design, design-led-approach).