Lawrence Vale - "After the Projects"

"How we house the most needy is a clear barometer of our success and failure as a culture. Lawrence Vale has given us both the potential heaven and hell of this defining social nexus as well as a sense of the huge stakes at play."—Ken Burns, Filmmaker

The Urban Readers Series presents Lawrence Vale on After the Projects: Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans. He will be joined in conversation by Emily Talen. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with
UChicago Urban, UChicago Program on the Global Environment and Chicago Studies.

About the Book: In "After the Projects", Lawrence Vale investigates the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with public housing residents, real estate developers, and community leaders, Vale analyzes the different ways in which four major American cities implemented the federal government’s HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, while also providing a national picture of this program. Some cities attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, but other cities tried to serve as many low-income households as possible. Through examining the social, political, and economic forces that underlie housing displacement, Vale develops the novel concept of governance constellations. He shows how the stars align differently in each city, depending on community pressures that have evolved in response to each city’s past struggles with urban renewal. This allows disparate key players to gain prominence when implementing HOPE VI redevelopment.

About the Author: Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2002 until January 2009. He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988, and he is currently the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), a unit of the School’s Center for Advanced Urbanism.

About the Interlocutor: Emily Talen is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago, where she teaches urban design and directs the Urbanism Lab. Her new book is titled "Neighborhood" (Oxford University Press, 2018).

About the Urban Readers Series: In collaboration with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, UChicago Urban has launched the Urban Readers Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations at the Seminary Co-op. At Urban Readers, people from all over Chicago can hear from the university’s scholars and connect with one another over urban issues, histories and futures. All books in the series are written by UChicago’s faculty, alumni, and affiliates.