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In the years of reconstruction and economic boom that followed the Second World War, the domestic sphere encountered new expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This book brings together an international group of scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design to reappraise mid-twentieth century modern life, offering a timely reassessment of culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life. This collection contains essays that examine the material of art, objects, and spaces in the context of practices of dwelling over the long span of the postwar period. It asks what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism's ordinary denizens, and how this role informs their legacy today.

The rehabilitation and sustainable transformation of residential heritage of the Old City of Aleppo (Syria) is one of the most pressing issues to regain the livability of this city. This research paper aims to gain insight into the residents’ conditions and needs by studying/mapping/analyzing the status of the residential heritage and the interventions on it during the aftermath of the city’s devastation. It also intends to provide a better understanding of the residents’ attitude towards living in the Old City, their expectation for its reconstruction and transformation, and the difficulties they encountered in the process. In fact, in order to start a collective reconstruction and transformation process, it is important to understand the readiness of the inhabitants and their financial capabilities to engage in this process. A combination of research methods was used to explore the above-mentioned issues and their relation to the socio-cultural sustainability. These methods included: gathering data in the field (specifically, Al-Jalloum, Al-Farafra and Al-Aqaba, three neighborhoods in the Old City of Aleppo, were used as case studies), and setting up a questionnaire (Winter 2020) and conducting interviews (Summer 2021) with 39 returnees and their families. AutoCAD and Excel programs were used for data visualization. This research has highlighted the main problems and factors that have affected the interventions on courtyard houses in the Old City of Aleppo since 2012—the outbreak of the Syrian War in Aleppo City. Lack of funds and craftmanship, high costs and long bureaucratic procedures related to the enforcement of the regulations have been identified as the main causes that discouraged the residents to carry out repairs in a proper way.

The advent of state-sponsored mass high-rise housing in post-war Britain brought into view a range of issues about the role of technology in everyday life. This paper draws on approaches in the study of science and technology in order to deepen our understanding of the socio-technical aspects of such high-rise housing, past and present. This thinking is elaborated empirically by examining a 1960s high-rise development, Red Road, Glasgow. The paper examines the inaugural phase of development and the most recent phase of 'redevelopment', the first stage of which is demolition. The paper extends existing accounts of residential high-rises generally and Red Road specifically, as well as elaborating an alternate analytical framework for understanding high-rise and supertall dwellings.

Developing countries have still shortage of housing due to natural disasters. Houses get destroyed wholly or partly and it causes the increase of lack of housing stock of a country. In disaster management cycle, rehabilitation or reconstruction is an important issue to protect, reduce or mitigate the effect of disasters. For sustainable urban development, disaster consideration is as important as it helps to maintain the development growth rate and tries to make sure that the settlements are in a stable way. The paper describes the natural disasters and issues related to proper disaster housing for sustainable urban development on the basis of literature.

The scene in Iraq is most troubling; and further failure therein - especially failure in sustainable reconstruction - will compound the tragedy and bring grievous harm to too many: in Iraq, the United States, the Middle East and the Western world. Yet, the current efforts at reconstruction cannot succeed -- as we seem to be making many of the same mistakes that were made post-invasion. Simply put, a national occupying power cannot reconstruct a massive societal vacuum by working only top down. Reconstruction is not the simple reversal of destruction. Sustainability requires serious localized reconstitution of localized community infrastructure. Accordingly, in order to explore how Iraqi communities could be rebuilt in a manner that promotes social justice, economic and political sustainability, and the full participation of all stakeholders, the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, USA, hosted a four-day international conference of Iraqi and international scholars and practitioners in July 2007. This volume collects some of the papers that were presented at the conference.Amongst the topics that the contributing authors have explored are the following: the role of organizations and institutions in defining strategies for sustainable rebuilding of community; rebuilding the Iraqi Oil Industry; and, successful project strategies in Iraq's Kurdistan region. The book concludes with a presentation of a number of international perspectives and their lessons for Iraq. These studies spring from Afghanistan, the United States of America and Africa.

This article explores the question of housing need in post-war Toronto by looking at the diverse reasons why families applied to the few public housing projects that were constructed after the war. It identifies a number of often overlapping causes for the housing dilemmas of low income families, including outright inability to pay, landlord intransigence to families with children and evictions, illness, overcrowding, deprived housing conditions, racism and social factors within the family. It aims to make a contribution to a growing body of work that complicates accepted notions of post-war prosperity and the benefits of the welfare state for low-income earners in advanced capitalist countries. The first section is based on adaptations of various statistical indicators of housing hardship generated by researchers for Toronto's public housing administration as well as analyses by social agencies, contemporary observers and recent scholarly research. It briefly looks at pre-World War II developments and then chronicles housing need from the 1940s to the 1990s. Various methods and databases were used in these studies and rarely did they originally attempt to chart processes over time. Nevertheless, we can make a reasonable assumption that this information offers us sound indications, if not exact measures, of the housing difficulties faced by low-income families. The second section of the article elucidates the informative if partial statistical record of housing need by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, tenant correspondence and other documentary voices of low-income families. My interests in exploring this subject emanated from a larger study of Regent Park (RP) in Toronto, Canada's first and largest rent-geared-to-income housing project. The archival records, which contain numerous letters from prospective tenants and rare resident case files, and the interviews I conducted with former tenants of RP, speak directly to the question of housing need. I use the evidence both of families that secured places in RP and of prospective tenants who expressed a need for state assistance. By no means does this exhaust the low-income housing experience in Toronto but it provides readily accessible qualitative evidence to explore the question of housing hardship in the post-war era. The article thus highlights individual accounts of housing hardship, allowing us to put a much-needed human face on those left out of the much-vaunted, post-war \"age of prosperity.\"