Affordability and the supply of Housing : Session 2005-06, Vol. 2: Oral and written Evidence

After World War II, the most urgent reconstruction problem in these islands was in the field of public housing, and the opportunity presented itself to create innovative buildings and to finally abolish slums. Everyone, including the slum-dwellers, united behind the plan to build new dwellings as quickly as possible. In this book Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius tell the story of a great adventure of building and explain the architectural and political ideas that lay behind it.

Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy in the Urban North brings together leading scholars on northern urban housing across the Canadian North, Alaska, and Greenland. Through various case studies, the contributors examine the ways in which housing insecurity and homelessness provide a critical lens on the social dimensions of northern urbanization. They also present key considerations in the development of effective and sustainable social policy for these areas. The book kickstarts a conversation between multiple stakeholders from different cultural and national regions across the North American north. It asks key questions including these: What are the common problems of, and responses to, housing insecurity and homelessness across these northern regions? Is a single definition of “homelessness” even possible, or desirable? And if not, can a shared language around how to end the housing crisis and homelessness in our northern regions still occur? The contributors explore how experiences of northern towns and cities inform an overall understanding of urban forms and processes in the contemporary world, and speak directly to the emerging body of literature on cities. Highlighting key limitations to federal, state, and provincial policy, Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy in the Urban North raises important implications for developing policy that is responsive to northern realities.

Following on from a previous Committee report on sustainable housing issues (HCP 135-I, session 2004-05; ISBN 0215021517) published in January 2005, this report considers recent developments, including the Government's decision to increase the proposed rate of new build housing from 150,000 to 200,000 per year by 2016. Issues discussed include: the likely effectiveness of the proposed voluntary Code for Sustainable Homes in terms of achieving well-designed, energy efficient sustainable buildings; whether the Government is doing enough to promote the Code within the building industry and the general public; fiscal measures needed to reward higher building quality and greater environmental performance; funding for the timely provision of infrastructure such as transport links, schools and hospitals in main growth areas; security of water supplies and whether the Government, the Environment Agency and the water companies are doing enough to educate people about water efficiency. Overall, the Committee's report recognises the need for additional housing capacity but criticises the Government's failure to acknowledge the valid concerns about the environmental impacts of its house building plans, and its lack of planning to ensure the necessary supporting infrastructure is put in place to establish sustainable communities.

Incorporating HC 47-i-vii session 2006-07

The UK contains more than 26 million homes which, collectively, emitted 41.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2004. This book includes chapters, which examine: regulation and encouragement; financial incentives; energy performance certificates; breaching the barriers to change; newer technologies; and, older buildings.

Sweet Land of Liberty is Thomas J. Sugrue’s epic account of the abiding quest for racial equality in states from Illinois to New York, and of how the intense northern struggle differed from and was inspired by the fight down South. Sugrue’s panoramic view sweeps from the 1920s to the present–more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history. He uncovers the forgotten stories of battles to open up lunch counters, beaches, and movie theaters in the North; the untold history of struggles against Jim Crow schools in northern towns; the dramatic story of racial conflict in northern cities and suburbs; and the long and tangled histories of integration and black power. Filled with unforgettable characters and riveting incidents, and making use of information and accounts both public and private, such as the writings of obscure African American journalists and the records of civil rights and black power groups, Sweet Land of Liberty creates an indelible history.

The Dene, a traditionally nomadic people, have no word for homelessness, a rare condition in the Canadian North prior to the 1990s. In No Home in a Homeland, Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and argues that this alarming trend will continue so long as policy makers continue to ignore northern perspectives and root causes, which lie deep in the region’s colonial past. Christensen interweaves analysis of the region’s unique history with the personal stories of people living homeless in two cities – Yellowknife and Inuvik. These individual and collective narratives tell a larger story of displacement and exclusion, residential schools and family breakdown, addiction and poor mental health, poverty and unemployment, and urbanization and institutionalization. But they also tell a story of hope and renewal. Understanding what it means to be homeless in the North and how Indigenous people think about home and homemaking is the first step, Christensen argues, on the path to decolonizing existing approaches and practices.

Being homeless in one’s homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous practices, languages, and cultures—including patterns of housing and land use—can be seen today in the disproportionate number of Indigenous people affected by homelessness in both rural and urban settings. Essays in this collection explore the meaning and scope of Indigenous homelessness in the Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They argue that effective policy and support programs aimed at relieving Indigenous homelessness must be rooted in Indigenous conceptions of home, land, and kinship, and cannot ignore the context of systemic inequality, institutionalization, landlessness, among other things, that stem from a history of colonialism. Indigenous Homelessness: Perspectives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia provides a comprehensive exploration of the Indigenous experience of homelessness. It testifies to ongoing cultural resilience and lays the groundwork for practices and policies designed to better address the conditions that lead to homelessness among Indigenous peoples.

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic is a concise introductory guide to the design and planning of the built environments in the Arctic region. As the global forces of change are becoming more pronounced in the Arctic, the future trajectories for living environments, city-making processes, and their adaptive capacities need to be addressed directly. This book presents 11 new and original contributions from both leading and emerging scholars and practitioners, positioning the Arctic as a dynamic, diverse, and lived place at the nexus of unprecedented socioenvironmental transformations. The volume offers key concepts for understanding and spatializing Arctic cities and landscapes; similarities and differences in the development of design and planning approaches responsive to specific climatic and cultural conditions; and historical and geographic case studies that provide unique perspectives for the management of the built environment, from the scales of a building and infrastructure to cities and territories. Altogether, the contributions expand regional Arctic design scholarship to understand how the variability of the Arctic context influences the designed urban, architecture, and landscape systems, and offer numerous lessons for design and other forms of spatial practice both within and beyond the Arctic. This is a unique resource for researchers, creative practitioners, policymakers, and community decision-makers, as well as for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.