Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

A Space for Place in Sociology

In Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker at the ElectroSteel Company, tightening nuts on a fast-moving conveyor belt. One scene shows a mechanical contraption designed to feed workers lunch while they remain on the assembly line, but it malfunctions, throwing soup in Charlie’s face. Other scenes depict a capitalist owner who maintains closed-circuit surveillance over the plant and demands increases in the speed of the line. Unable to keep pace, Charlie falls into the giant gears. He has a nervous breakdown, and loses his job. On the street, he’s mistaken for a communist leader and arrested. He accidentally prevents a jailbreak, is pardoned and released, but with his old steel plant idle, Charlie cannot find employment, and begins to long for the shabby security of incarceration. The political message of “Modern Times” would seem unmistakable.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/modern_times_the_soviet_union_and_the_interwar_conjuncture_0.pdf

Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture

This dissertation seeks to discern the impact of social housing on public health in the cities of Glasgow, Scotland and Baltimore, Maryland in the twentieth century. Additionally, this dissertation seeks to compare the impact of social housing policy implementation in both cities, to determine the efficacy of social housing as a tool of public health betterment. This is accomplished through the exposition and evaluation of the housing and health trends of both cities over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the cities of Glasgow and Baltimore had long struggled with both overcrowded slum districts and relatively unhealthy populations. Early commentators had noticed the connection between insanitary housing and poor health, and sought a solution to both of these problems. Beginning in the 1940s, housing reform advocates (self-dubbed ‘housers') pressed for the development of social housing, or municipally-controlled housing for low-income persons, to alleviate the problems of overcrowded slum dwellings in both cities. The impetus for social housing was twofold: to provide affordable housing to low-income persons and to provide housing that would facilitate healthy lives for tenants. Whether social housing achieved these goals is the crux of this dissertation. In the immediate years following the Second World War, social housing was built en masse in both cities. Social housing provided a reprieve from slum housing for both working-class Glaswegians and Baltimoreans. In Baltimore specifically, social housing provided accommodation for the city’s Black residents, who found it difficult to occupy housing in White neighbourhoods. As the years progressed, social housing developments in both cities faced unexpected problems. In Glasgow, stable tenant flight (including both middle class and skilled artisan workers)+ resulted in a concentration of poverty in the city’s housing schemes, and in Baltimore, a flight of White tenants of all income levels created a new kind of state subsidized segregated housing stock. The implementation of high-rise tower blocks in both cities, once heralded as a symbol of housing modernity, also faced increased scrutiny in the 1960s and 1970s. During the period of 1940-1980, before policy makers in the United States began to eschew social housing for subsidized private housing vouchers and community based housing associations had truly taken off in Britain, public health professionals conducted academic studies of the impact of social housing tenancy on health. Their findings provide the evidence used to assess the second objective of social housing provision, as outlined above. Put simply, while social housing units were undoubtedly better equipped than slum dwellings in both cities, the public health investigations into the impact of rehousing slum dwellers into social housing revealed that social housing was not a panacea for each city’s social and public health problems.

The impact of social housing on health in Glasgow and Baltimore, 1930-1980

How does the built environment become political? In this dissertation, I address this question by investigating the politics of low-income housing in São Paulo from the midtwentieth century until the mid-1990s. A growing sociological literature on materiality and power has contributed to a better understanding of the cultural dynamics of different material and spatial phenomena, but it has not led to a broader theoretical clarification of how the built environment influences meaning-making practices and how it is further shaped by the variety of meanings that circulate in society, as well as how it becomes associated with available (but constantly changing) political discourses and practices. I develop a theoretical framework on how materiality becomes incorporated in circuits of social practice based on a theoretical integration of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Charles Peirce’s semiotics. The process of articulating semio-material practices (materials, forms, methods of construction, and forms of using space) and political repertoires (discourses and practices pertaining to the exercise of power) is always situated, limited, and pragmatic. In light of these concepts, I show that progressive architects and several other actors involved in the production of the built environment came up with two main programs for low-income housing in São Paulo from the 1950s up to the 1990s: a first program centered on the quest for the industrialization of construction and a program formulated after the late 1970s that centered on the participation of future residents in the practices of design and construction. Each of these programs is a typical articulation of a certain political repertoire and a repertoire of practices of design, construction, and habitation. In addition, each of these programs relies on and helps to reinforce certain images of the people for whom those residences should be produced and that they would help to constitute as a collectivity. The theoretical framework elaborated in this dissertation sheds light on a diversity of processes of material and political articulation of the built environment in different historical and geographic contexts.

Architectures of the People: Material and Cultural Politics of Housing in Sao Paulo, 1950-1995.

.................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements....................................................................................v

The Housing Question in Buenos Aires, 1900-1925. Reformism, Technical Imagination, and Public Opinion in an Expanding Metropolis

In this book, Eve Blau looks at how ideological conflict shapedthe buildings of Red Vienna-in terms of their program, spatialconception, language, and use-as well as how political meaning itselfis manifested in architecture.In 1919 the Social Democrat city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of reforms designed to reshape the city's infrastructure along socialist lines. The centerpiece and most enduring achievement of "Red" Vienna was the construction of the Wiener Gemeindebauten, 400 communal housing blocks, distributed throughout the city, in which workers' dwellings were incorporated with kindergartens, libraries, medical clinics, theaters, cooperative stores, and other public facilities. The 64,000 units housed one tenth of the city's population. Throughout this socialist building campaign, however, Austria was ruled by a conservative, clerical, and antisocialist political majority. Thus the architecture of Red Vienna took shape in the midst of highly charged, and often violent, political conflict between left and right. In this book, Eve Blau looks at how that ideological conflict shaped the buildings of Red Vienna-in terms of their program, spatial conception, language, and use-as well as how political meaning itself is manifested in architecture. She shows how the architecture of Red Vienna constructed meaning in relation to the ideological conflicts that defined Austrian politics in the interwar period-how it was shaped by the conditions of its making, and how it engaged its own codes, practices, and history to stake out a political position in relation to those conditions. Her investigation sheds light both on the complex relationship among political program, architectural practice, and urban history in interwar Vienna, and on the process by which architecture can generate a collective discourse that includes all members of society. Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program.

The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934

This is a study on the explosion of architectural ideas during the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire and in the first years of the new republics of Central Europe. Despite the cultural battleground of competing linguistic, ethnic, religious and natural traditions and aspirations, the region was nevertheless host to a persistent cosmopolitan ideal. This publication looks at the city as both the principal site of innovation and experimentation in the period and the generator of a vibrant urban culture.

Shaping the great city : modern architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937

Transition is a condition that creates opportunities for architecture and urbanism. Zagreb is the perfect site for examining this generative dynamic: practicing in conditions of continuous instability, its architects and planners developed strategies for creatively engaging the conditional and openended - for anticipating and instrumentalizing the condition of *irresolution*. Moving between texts, maps, and diagrams, Project Zagreb reads the city as an *open work*, dynamic but coherent, in which architecture plays an active role in the formation of both urban practices and the city itself.

Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice

The maison Cubiste and the meaning of modernism in pre-1914 France, David Cottington the burden of Cubism - the French imprint on Czech architecture, 1910-1014, Irena Zantovska Murray Cubism and the gothic tradition, Kevin D. Murphy "architecture" in Leger's essays, 1913-1933, Robert L. Herbert architecture of the Cubist poem, Jay Bochner the cell in the city, Paul Overy where are we?, Beatriz Colomina unnatural acts - propositions for a new French garden, 1920-1930, Dorothee Imbert Cubistic, Cubic and Cubist, Yve-Alain Bois Jeanneret-Le Corbusier, painter-architect, Bruno Reichlin anything but literal - Sigried Giedion and the reception of Cubism in Germany, Detlef Mertins.

Architecture and cubism

The Description for this book, Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-1861, will be forthcoming.

Eve Blau

Papers

The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934

Shaping the great city : modern architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937

Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice

Architecture and cubism

Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-1861