The Labour Party, Housing and Urban Transformation explores how the urban transformation of Britain between 1945 and 1970 was understood politically by the Labour Party. Placing the Labour Party at the centre of the discussion, the book covers the most extensive period of state-led urban change in British history, from the end of the Second World War to the decline of high modernism in the late 1960s. Taking a particular focus on housing to explore the implementation of modernist ideas to drive a far-ranging process of urban transformation in Britain, it challenges conventional understandings of Labour's urban legacy and puts political ideas at the heart of twentieth-century change. Utilising a breadth and range of material, including two distinct sets of archival sources, published secondary material, national legislation and Housing Acts, and various case studies, Child moves seamlessly between the national picture and its local impacts. It also draws from sources which had a crucial influence on political thinking throughout the mid-twentieth century to understand how urban transformation represented for Labour a political vision of the future. A timely contribution both to urban history and to the history of post-war Britain, it challenges existing interpretations of modernism, connects urban change to the political ideas that drove it, and allows us to comprehend the state of urban Britain today.

From the early Victorian period to the 1970s, the question of slums occupied an important place in British politics and in housing and town planning policies. The inter-war period has two major points of interest. It sees the restoration of slum clearance following a period of opposition and the onset of the first national slum clearance campaign. It reaches its climax in the plans for large-scale redevelopment made during World War II.

In every major city in the world there is a housing crisis. How did this happen and what can we do about it? Everyone needs and deserves housing. But today our homes are being transformed into commodities, making the inequalities of the city ever more acute. Profit has become more important than social need. The poor are forced to pay more for worse housing. Communities are faced with the violence of displacement and gentrification. And the benefits of decent housing are only available for those who can afford it. In Defense of Housing is the definitive statement on this crisis from leading urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden. They look at the causes and consequences of the housing problem and detail the need for progressive alternatives. The housing crisis cannot be solved by minor policy shifts, they argue. Rather, the housing crisis has deep political and economic roots—and therefore requires a radical response.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.

Many cities in different parts of the world have experienced a fundamental economic, cultural and social transformation in recent decades. This volume addresses the global processes of urban transformation empirically and theoretically in a number of case studies of particular cities. The papers cover a range of research in terms of space, time and aspects of urban reality. Some case studies focus on urban life in the context of economic and social structure, or urban renewal in the context of national and local politics. Others deal more specifically with the interrelations between culture, economy and space. The academic focus is variously sociology, political science, economy, geography and architecture.