ABSTRACT
Subsidized housing for low-income residents is more than a matter of laws and policies; it entails controlling and redistributing space. Decisions about public housing reveal the confluence of ideological assumptions about social structure and environmental determinist beliefs about spatial order. This chapter explores that socio-spatial convergence through the lens of ‘design-politics,’ applying this to the racialized redevelopment of public housing in the US since 1990. City leaders across the US constructed a great deal of the nation’s public housing in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on a racially segregated basis, rewarding and reinforcing an ideological ideal of the small white nuclear family – both explicitly through tenant selection criteria and implicitly through the sizing and design of apartments. Such ideological preferences – while largely unstated – continue to infuse 21st-Century efforts by urban public housing authorities when they redevelop such projects. Once again, their design decisions combine space and race, linking the presumed panacea of ‘mixed-income’ redevelopment projects to an ongoing racial politics aimed at restoring mainstream ideological norms while resisting expressions of non-white identities. More optimistically, a few redevelopment efforts have challenged this with more progressive forms of poverty governance, emphasizing not-for-profit organizations and valuing resident voices.
