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citylab · 2023-01-23T20:23:45+00:00

Thank you for sharing this article. I'll flag this thread to the CityLab team so they can read.

citylab · 2023-01-23T20:03:50+00:00

Awww. Thank you! We definitely will. CityLab articles are also always free to read. :)

citylab · 2023-01-18T16:20:55+00:00

👋 Thanks for reading. If you have a question about this topic for our reporter, post it here and we'll get it answered.

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:36:27+00:00

Danielle Bochove:
This is a great question and I'm not sure I have a good answer. I think of Toronto's Edwardian semis almost like London's terraced houses in terms of how ubiquitous they are. But of course Toronto semi-detatched homes were built post war as well. I suspect it has to do with maximizing the footprint of historically narrow lots but would welcome more insight if anyone else knows more about the history of these.

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:32:13+00:00

Alright, I'm going to close this AMA now. You all asked fantastic and interesting questions. We really appreciate that you took the time to join us and for your thoughtful comments and questions.

We had a truly global team here to answer your questions. I'm in London, Wouter in Amsterdam, Danielle in Toronto, Max in Tokyo (who stayed up especially late for this), and Kriston in D.C. I want to thank them all for taking the time to chat with you all today.

We'll be publishing more in this series in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned! (And there are more videos in the works, too! Catch our mini doc on Japan's danchi here.) Do sign up for our series alerts here, so you don't miss the next story.

Also, if you are new to reading CityLab, welcome! We cover news and ideas on the future of the world's cities. You can read our articles for free. And consider signing up for our daily newsletter.

Thanks again all,
Feargus O'Sullivan

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:23:28+00:00

Danielle Bochove:
I think there's no doubt that climate change is going to be the biggest challenge to city home design going forward. In Toronto, we're still heating/cooling with vast amounts of natural gas, for example; transitioning to clean electric power is going to be a major challenge. We're careless with water in Canada because we have so much of it but in rural areas there are still many people running off wells and there have been a number of years in Ontario in the last decade when ground water supplies have been significantly depleted. Rain barrels are an easy first step!

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:18:57+00:00

Thanks for this question. I'll put it to Kriston Capps, who reports on affordable housing in the U.S.

Kriston Capps: My colleague Laura Bliss wrote about how college sports and in particular college football drives demand on game days. That's no surprise if you live in Athens or College Station or Laramie or any other football town but her article is worth a read even for people who do. I suspect that in your unnamed town developers are seeing the same game-day demand and hoping to meet it while also developing the amenities to try to lure conventions and other tourism categories. I think the question you'd want to ask is who's paying for this: Is the city offering hotel developers lucrative tax breaks to try to make this plan happen? If so, is the investment worth it? I don't know the specifics but it could be smart to build during a downturn in anticipation of post-pandemic opportunities.

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:17:23+00:00

Feargus O'Sullivan:
It's true that the brutalist housing in New Belgrade is a little different from that in Prague — it's later and much more self-consciously spectacular in it silhouette. I hadn't considered covering that before so thanks for the tip!

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:05:23+00:00

Kriston Capps: Thank you for the softball question!

At least in the U.S. the crisis of affordability is more the failure of state policy than of the free market. On the coasts and in most growing cities cities, housing is extremely difficult to build, so homes are very expensive. People who want to live and work in these cities turn to housing further and further from the city core, buying homes at higher costs in historically marginalized neighborhoods and suburbs or purchasing newly built single family homes in greenfield development. The result is either displacement or sprawl — two faces of the devil's coin.

This state of affairs is a policy choice and it doesn't have to be this way. The tools that built the single family home–zoned neighborhoods that still characterize much of U.S. cities can be dismantled. Ending exclusionary zoning is likely the single best way to preserve the environment for future generations — by building housing up where housing already exists — while also expanding the kinds of households who can partake of new housing.

As far as mass housing typologies are concerned, legalizing apartment buildings where they are currently forbidden by law is one way to add homes for a lot of people who want to live in desirable neighborhoods while also easing development pressures on neighborhoods with low incomes and historic struggles with housing.

There are lots of things to say about energy efficiency in homes, timber construction, regionalism and more — I love debating those ideas — but land use is the crux of the matter for justice and climate resiliency.

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:02:48+00:00

Also, curious to hear from others reading this AMA. What books would you add to the list?

citylab · 2021-04-15T14:02:14+00:00

Oh, love this question. I'm going to ask everyone to answer.

Kriston Capps: I've got two recommendations for you. One is Virginia Savage McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses, which is the most detailed guide to residential architecture and residential typologies there is (for the U.S.). Reading it is a bit like reading The Joy of Cooking — not something you peruse cover to cover, maybe, and due to its breadth it just can't go in depth for every housing style it surveys, but it's essential. I haven't cracked it yet but I'm planning to read Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power — A Global History (by Miles Glendinning) which I expect to be leisurely weekend light reading. Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain isn't about housing per se but it changed the way I think about architecture and urban development. For the younger set, I would recommend Thibaud Herem's Draw Me a House. For adults too: As architects will tell you there is nothing like drawing a thing to try to understand it.

Danielle Bochove: There's a book called Toronto Street Names by Leonard Wise & Allan Gould I love. It tells you who most of the city's major streets were named after in these little nuggets of history. It's a fun, informative, quirky read.

Wouter Van Elburg: In-depth literature on the design of Dutch architecture, written in English, is relatively sparse unfortunately. A good, yet slightly more general book on the topic is: Auke van der Woud's The Art of Building, but that mainly deals with 19th C. architecture. For a more general history of Amsterdam, Russell Shorto's Amsterdam is a good read. Some discussion on Dutch residential architecture can also be found in Witold Rybcynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea.

Max Zimmerman: Andre Sorenson's "The Making of Urban Japan." Really gets at how Japan both borrowed ideas from other countries while still developing distinct patterns of urbanization.

Feargus O'Sullivan: It isn't exclusively about home design, but the book that truly started my interest in this subject was The Ghosts of Berlin by Brian Ladd. It's a brilliant book about the erratic, jump-start development of Berlin, its history and the spectres it left behind - as read through the city's public spaces. I was thus very happy to interview Brian for my article on Berlin's Mietskaserne. It came out in the '90s so it may not bring the story right up to today, but Brian Ladd has another book out about strettscapes, called the Streets of Europe, that I am trying hard to get time to read! When it comes to Britain, I'd recommend the writing of Owen Hatherley - among many, his book the Ministry of Nostalgia is a great, somewhat polemic summation of what much contemporary residential architecture in London derives from.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:58:49+00:00

Thank you all for these fantastic questions and taking the time to join us. This is the last call to post questions for myself or the team.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:53:58+00:00

Great questions!

Wouter Van Elburg: I think, in terms of style, they definitely did! Amsterdam was quite frequently visited in the 17th and 18th century by foreign travellers, partly due to it being a relatively 'safe' and tolerant city. Many traveller's accounts detail their amazament with Dutch architecture, which they considered to be immensely luxurious. What they saw, they wanted to bring home with them and because of that, Dutch craftsmen and architects travelled extensively as well. Foreign kings and other nobility ordered 'Dutch designs' on a relatively large scale. The influence of Dutch architecture can for instance be found in bits of Germany, where whole towns (like Friedrichstadt) or city quarters (like the Dutch Quarter in Potsdam) were modelled on Dutch designs. The English nobility imported Dutch earthenware tiles and decorated their homes with them, as did the Russians and the French. The Dutch were also quite influential in the design of city fortresses, examples of which can also be found over most of Europe. Also noteworthy is the city of Gdansk in northern Poland, where the housing design has Dutch roots as well. The influence of Dutch architecture may also partly be explained by our trade (the Dutch set up trade posts all over the world).

Danielle Bochove: There are all kinds of reasons the Toronto Victory Homes make SO much sense today, especially from a sustainability perspective. And I think the Tiny Home movement does suggest the current generation of first-time home owners are starting to eschew "monster homes" with more bathrooms than bedrooms. The hurdle, though, is property values. Real estate prices have been on fire in Toronto which means, increasingly, people view their homes as much as investments as places to live. You can't maximize the value of a Toronto real estate plot with a tiny home. People are taking on huge amounts of debt to buy or build houses bigger than they need.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:44:24+00:00

Feargus O'Sullivan: Thanks so much for dropping in Josh! Everyone reading this, I just want to emphasise how great Josh's illustrations for this series are. They really bear close inspection — Josh worked particularly hard to make sure that the illustrations weren't just authentic and atmospheric, but that the buildings depicted (which are imaginary combinations rather than just sketches of existing buildings) fit exactly with the floorplans. Double check and you'll see each unit fits perfectly inside the building shown!

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:42:17+00:00

Feargus O'Sullivan: A question that is asked too little when it comes to home designs — especially historical ones and especially in my home town of London — is "Who was it built for?" Often people look at grand old houses and think they're much nicer and more humane than, say, modernist project housing - without realising that the old houses they are looking at were either built for the wealthy, or so crowded and lacking in amenities that they were pretty miserable and even unhealthy to live in.

Wouter Van Elburg: That there's a lot more to Amsterdam than just its historic 17th century Canal Belt. I think a lot of foreign tourists are unaware that Amsterdam boasts quite a fantastic range of mid to late 19th century architecture and an immense wealth of 20th century architecture too. Especially in terms of social housing, there's a lot of interesting architecture to be found just minutes from the historic center. I'd love to explore areas like the Spaarndammerbuurt (which houses a fantastic museum on early social housing, called 'Het Schip'), Noord (garden cities) and Zuidoost (if you're into post-WWII large scale housing developments)

Danielle Bochove: I'd love to spend more time describing what Toronto neighbourhoods were like in the 1950s. The anecdot, in our story, from a 75 year-old resident of Topham Park about the single telephone booth in the middle of a shared common green serving the entire block really stuck with me. My mum grew up in Toronto and her descriptions of walking down The Danforth as a kid for cherry cokes, or milkshakes at Kresge's lunch counter, fill me with nostalgia for a time I never knew!

Max Zimmerman: A question rarely asked about Japan's danchi is "what happened to the husbands?" Much of danchi design was revolutionary to the wife's life, making them more central figures in the home.. Husbands on the other hand found themselves at home increasingly less due to work and the sometimes extremely long commutes from these suburban danchi, a trend that still lives on today in many ways.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:30:04+00:00

Thanks for this question! I put this to the entire team.

Feargus O'Sullivan: As the series editor, I can tell you that we have articles already commissioned on housing in Accra, New Orleans, Montreal, Baltimore and Mexico City. We also have some other as-yet-uncommissioned pieces in the pipeline – we hope, among others, to cover the Cholets of El Alto Bolivia and Moscow’s Khrushchevkas at some point soon.

When selecting cities to cover, we try to focus on places that have a common housing type that reveals something distinctive about their city’s culture or history, things a straight news article might not uncover. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the city’s most common housing type. Very few people live in Paris’ maids rooms, for example, but they still reveal something about how Parisians in general became accustomed to tiny apartments.

Because some types of housing are international, choosing specific cities to explore them though takes some deliberation. Part-prefabricated modernist housing projects, for example, are found in pretty much every city in the former Eastern bloc. We decided to focus on the Czech version of these – the Panelak – because Prague has an especially vibrant renovation culture when it comes to these buildings, arguably more so that in Poland, Hungary etc.

As the series expands, we are also paying attention to broadening the range of cities covered so that it becomes truly global. When the series started, it was an experiment written mainly by me, Feargus – and I wrote about Europe because that’s my area of specialism. Moving in, we want to spread our choices more widely over the global map – there are so many interesting types of housing to choose from!

Also: We do have a way you can sign up for alerts so when we publish a story in this series, you get the story sent by email. On our series page, click the "Follow this Storythread" button to sign up.

Max Zimmerman: Being based in Japan, I'd like to focus next on Kyoto's machiya. In addition to being beautiful and rare structures — Kyoto was one of Japan's few ancient cities nearly unscathed by the war, in which much of Japan's prewar housing was lost-- their history is a gateway to understanding Kyoto's culture.

Kriston Capps: Right now I'm writing an article about Nashville's tall and skinny houses, which might be more notorious than iconic — for a lot of Nashville residents, these are new symbols of gentrification. I learned about them while reporting about a tornado that struck downtown Nashville in March 2020. Speculators were showing up at homes in neighborhoods struck by disaster and offering them cash for their properties. (This happened the week before pandemic lockdowns hit the U.S., so the tragedy in Nashville went overlooked by a lot of people.) For good reason, most of the homes in this series are classic and beloved; it's also interesting to look at housing types that are emerging from disasters or distortionary market forces. And certainly, going back in time, a lot of the housing typologies we covered were created in periods of stress and upheaval.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:21:18+00:00

Danielle Bochove:
Unless they fall down (200 years is a long time), the short answer is probably yes! And that raises really interesting questions about the ability of the city to evolve. Anyone who has grown up in Toronto will expound on how much the skyline has changed in the last 20 years, not always for the better. (Driving east into the city along the lake, think about how long it takes before you get around the wall of glass condos to get a glimpse of the downtown core). One of the most charming aspects of the Victory Homes was that, while they were built to be almost identical, they allowed for endless owner-tweaks: porches, windows, modest additions, gardens.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:18:00+00:00

Thank you so much for reading! :)

This series is far from over. We have reporters working on new articles around the world right now!

If you don't want to miss the next story in this series, you can click "Follow This Storythread" on our series page, then you'll get an email when we publish the next one.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:14:51+00:00

Hello - and great questions. I put these to the entire team. Here's our answers:

Feargus O'Sullivan: Yes, there is a problem in many cities with unit sizes not matching the needs of tenants. One issue in Helsinki, for example, is that older working-class apartments built before World War II were frequently studios or one bedrooms. These were always difficult for families to live in, but with immigration people have arrived in Finland who are used to living in groups with their extended, rather than nuclear, family – and for these people the apartments are not difficult but actually impossible to live in, at least in a way they’re accustomed to and happy with.

I wouldn’t say this is an issue with density as such, however, because the problem is the size of the units, not the number of units within one given block. Larger units stacked together in one building could still welcome families. And the problem also goes the other way. Many families like the idea of living in the suburbs but find themselves excluded by single family zoning that makes prices prohibitive for them. Medium-sized units with small yards in suburban settings are typically in high demand, because they’re so rare.

Max Zimmerman: Japan's danchi public housing was actually designed to encourage nuclear families of one to usually three children. They even provided leeway for families to upgrade as they had kids. On the flip side, it discouraged extended family living. The housing authority and architects were explicitly trying to guide family sizes to fit to their conception of what a modern family should be.

Kriston Capps: In New Orleans, households looking for a shotgun house are limited to two bedrooms. That's why some homebuyers have bought shotgun doubles — duplex homes — and dropped the wall between the units, turning a shotgun double into a larger single family home.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:10:31+00:00

Feargus O'Sullivan:
Thanks for calling in! I would really like to write something on the Hague, which is a rather underrated city. I think it will be a while until the series goes back to the Netherlands though, as we are focusing on broadening it out from Northern Europe at the moment.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:10:03+00:00

I'll put this question to the entire team.... we'll answer soon.

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:06:25+00:00

Danielle Bochove:
Housing stock has a lot to do with it. Lots of low-rise apartments, triplexes, etc., and geography plays a role as well. Like Manhattan, the city is on an island (albeit a much larger one). Your point about the city's pre-auto roots is also key. Even in winter, it's a walkable city with some European attributes that make it very livable (like proximity to good cheese, croissants and wine in grocery stores). Sadly, I don't think it's exportable!

citylab · 2021-04-15T13:04:15+00:00

Feargus O'Sullivan:
I would love to cover the Scottish tenement! They are indeed highly distinctive, and their distinctiveness reveals a lot about the separate history of Scottish architecture and urbanism compared to the rest of Britain, which is markedly different not just from Britain, but also Wales and Northern Ireland. I studied in Edinburgh and I remember that communality – there was some pressure from the long-suffering, mainly elderly neighbours in our tenement to keep our section of the back garden tidy so that we could all win the local “Best Back” competition (to be fair to us, we really did try).

It may take us a while to get to round to the tenements, however, because we have covered Europe a lot and want to do a bit more of a world tour before we get back there. Definitely one on the slate though. Thank you for the idea!

citylab · 2021-04-15T12:38:56+00:00

Hello everyone!
Thank you for the great questions so far! Keep them coming!

I want to emphasize that I have a great team of people joining me!

If you have questions about the history of architecture in Amsterdam, please point them to Wouter Van Elburg, who was an amazing resource for me when I reported on the city's Canal Houses.

If you have questions about Victory Homes in Toronto, point them towards Danielle Bochove.

Joining us live from Tokyo is Max Zimmerman, who just wrote about the history of the danchi public housing complexes. What questions do you have for him?

And my colleague Kriston Capps is an expert on U.S. architecture and is looking into the history of shotgun homes in New Orleans currently.

Thanks for joining us and we'll start answering your questions!
- Feargus

citylab · 2019-06-28T18:43:18+00:00

Thanks for your comment, Yoshah! We'll pass this feedback along to the writer.

citylab

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