From Puritans to the Projects

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Other Titles from Lawrence Vale

From the Puritans to the Projects:
Public Housing and Public Neighbors
Harvard University Press, 2000

From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.

Architecture, Power, and National Identity
Yale University Press, 1992

Because government buildings serve as symbols of the state, we can learn much about a political regime by observing closely what it builds. In this book, Lawrence J. Vale explores parliamentary complexes in capital cities on six continents, showing how the buildings housing national government institutions are products of the political and cultural balance of power within pluralist societies. By viewing architecture and urban design in the light of political history and cultural production, Vale expands the scope and cogency of design criticism and demonstrates that the manipulation of environmental meaning is an important force in urban development.

Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions (due June 2001)
edited by Lawrence Vale and Sam Bass Warner

How does the public form its perceptions of urban places? Is the mental imagery we carry of a place we have been--or never visited--created from the built environment? The printed word? Visual images? How did pilgrims in medieval days learn enough of faraway places to want to make the journey? A thousand years later, how do electronic media color our perceptions? This book takes the reader on a visual odyssey through place and time, narrated by a host of city planners, designers, architects, media experts, and historians

The Limits of Civil Defence in the USA, Switzerland, Britain and the Soviet Union: The Evolution of Policies Since 1945
London, Macmillan and New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1987

Vale is to be congratulated on seeing the possibilities of a study of civil defence which is both dispassionate and comparative.... {The author} offers a full and balanced explanation of why civil-defence policies differ from country to country.... Vale's book is a model for published doctoral theses and a worthy tribute to its first supervisor, the late Hedley Bull.
-- Martin Ceadel, The Times Literary Supplement

Titles recommended by Lawrence Vale

Jane Roessner, A Decent Place to Live: From Columbia Point to Harbor Point, a Community History (Northeastern University Press, 2000).

Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Harvard University Press, 2000).

Susan Popkin et al., The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago (Rutgers University Press, 2000)

John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (Eds.) From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).