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Housing the Lowest Income Americans: The Past, Present and Future of Public Housing

Lawrence J. Vale SM '88: June 7, 2003; Running Time: 43:43

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Vale provides a historical overview of public housing in America and shares insights from his most recent book Reclaiming Public Housing. He shows provocative images from early advertisements to demonstrate some of society’s long held attitudes toward public housing and those who live in public housing. He analyses government policies as they evolved to provide housing to “reward people who are most deserving” of assistance, or to provide housing assistance as a “coping mechanism”.

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

About the Speaker

Lawrence J. Vale SM '88

Professor and Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT School of Architecture and Planning
Margaret MacVicar Fellow

Lawerence Vale is the author or editor of six books examining urban design and housing. Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), a book about capital city design on six continents, received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians. Vale is also Co-Editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions (Center for Urban Policy Research Press, 2001), and co-editor, with Thomas J. Campanella, of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005), which was recognized as one of the “Ten Best Books for 2005” by Planetizen, the Planning and Development network.

He attended Amherst College, and received the S.M.Arch.S. degree from MIT and a D.Phil from the University of Oxford. He has been a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of the 1997 Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. He has taught at the MIT since 1988.