Imaging and re-imaging public housing : from modernism to new urbanism

Abstract

When public housing was first introduced as a program on the heels of the Great Depression, its image was a largely positive one, resulting as it did from the confluence of modernism, marketing, and media representation. This led to the eventual acceptance of an otherwise radical, and what some considered deeply un-American, program. Public housing design, therefore, not only marked a transformation in neighborhood form from "slum" to streetless superblock; it also entailed a shift in symbolic and metaphorical associations. Quite precipitously, initial support for public housing eroded, owing to the social, political and economic vagaries of each time period since its inception. Specifically, as the beneficiaries changed from working whites to poor blacks and other minorities, the relevant policymakers' overarching social and political agenda changed as well - and with it, their vision of how the design of public housing could help achieve these objectives. From the building of high-rise "projects" out of the "slums" - and in turn, low-rise HOPE VI neighborhoods out of the "projects" - what has resulted has been one draconian experiment in design after the other, often leaving in its wake the rubble of prior oversights. In this scenario, design has come to be viewed (often only vicariously) as helping to realize the American Dream - or alternately, to exacerbate a perceived urban nightmare. With this assumption about the impact of design in hand, this thesis employs three case studies - one in Washington DC, one in Boston and one in Chicago - that trace the evolution of policymakers' preferred outcomes and their associated images. It so doing, it argues that policymakers used the emerging media to help cast prior visions as failures and future visions as solutions. By extension, the thesis also explores the actual design approaches employed at each critical phase, arguing that the consequences they entailed have helped to solidify the public's negative images of public housing - often with dire consequences for its residents and for the wider communities of which they are a part. After a prognosis about the outcomes of HUD's current HOPE VI initiative, this thesis concludes with an analysis of alternate design approaches.