Identifying post-marital residence patterns in prehistory: A phylogenetic comparative analysis of dwelling size.

Post-marital residence patterns are an important aspect of human social organization. However, identifying such patterns in prehistoric societies is challenging since they leave almost no direct traces in archaeological records. Cross-cultural researchers have attempted to identify correlates of post-marital residence through the statistical analysis of ethnographic data. Several studies have demonstrated that, in agricultural societies, large dwellings (over ca. 65 m2) are associated with matrilocality (spouse resides with or near the wife's family), whereas smaller dwellings are associated with patrilocality (spouse resides with or near the husband's family). In the present study, we tested the association between post-marital residence and dwelling size (average house floor area) using phylogenetic comparative methods and a global sample of 86 pre-industrial societies, 22 of which were matrilocal. Our analysis included the presence of agriculture, sedentism, and durability of house construction material as additional explanatory variables. The results confirm a strong association between matrilocality and dwelling size, although very large dwellings (over ca. 200 m2) were found to be associated with all types of post-marital residence. The best model combined dwelling size, post-marital residence pattern, and sedentism, the latter being the single best predictor of house size. The effect of agriculture on dwelling size becomes insignificant once the fixity of settlement is taken into account. Our results indicate that post-marital residence and house size evolve in a correlated fashion, namely that matrilocality is a predictable response to an increase in dwelling size. As such, we suggest that reliable inferences about the social organization of prehistoric societies can be made from archaeological records.

The enduring impact of historical and structural racism on urban violence in Philadelphia.

Public health approaches to crime and injury prevention are increasingly focused on the physical places and environments where violence is concentrated. In this study, our aim is to explore the association between historic place-based racial discrimination captured in the 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) map of Philadelphia and present-day violent crime and firearm injuries. The creators of the 1937 HOLC map zoned Philadelphia based in a hierarchical system wherein first-grade and green color zones were used to indicate areas desirable for government-backed mortgage lending and economic development, a second-grade or blue zone for areas that were already developed and stable, a third-grade or yellow zone for areas with evidence of decline and influx of a "low grade population," and fourth-grade or red zone for areas with dilapidated or informal housing and an "undesirable population" of predominately Black residents. We conducted an empirical spatial analysis of the concentration of firearm assaults and violent crimes in 2013 through 2014 relative to zoning in the 1937 HOLC map. After adjusting for socio-demographic factors at the time the map was created from the 1940 Census, firearm injury rates are highest in historically red-zoned areas of Philadelphia. The relationship between HOLC map zones and general violent crime is not supported after adjusting for historical Census data. This analysis extends historic perspective to the relationship between emplaced structural racism and violence, and situates the socio-ecological context in which people live at the forefront of this association.

Can health equity coexist with housing inequalities? A contemporary issue in historical context.

The housing policies established by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration transformed the American housing market. However, these policies intentionally excluded communities of color from the postwar American housing boom by defining them as contaminants eroding national property values. Hence, racially restrictive federal housing policies established an inequitable generational trajectory for residents in communities across the United States. Public health practitioners are faced with the monumental challenge of addressing health disparities that were in part created by non-public health policies. The purpose of this article is to examine how federal housing policies historically contributed to creating the built environment and therefore establishing a foundation for health disparities. These pervasive, exclusionary policies and the generational stigma associated with this issue raise serious questions about the ethics of contemporary policies, practices, and research aimed at achieving health equity.

Labour mobility and housing: the impact of housing tenure and housing affordability on labour migration in the Czech Republic.

This article examines whether housing tenure and regional differences in housing affordability have an impact on labour mobility. This relationship is important for understanding the sources of structural unemployment and impediments to economic growth. Using two sample surveys from the Czech Republic, this research reveals that at the individual level housing tenure is the most powerful factor determining willingness to change residence for employment reasons. A time-series regression analysis reveals that the impact of housing affordability on observed interregional migration patterns is relatively weak and that this effect is concentrated among the highly educated seeking employment in the capital, Prague. These results demonstrate that housing tenure has a significant impact on labour migration plans in case of unemployment and that the dynamic impact of regional differences in housing affordability on labour mobility is concentrated within the most highly skilled segment of the labour force.

CFTC/CFDT attitudes towards immigration in the Parisian region: making immigrant workers' condition a cause.

This paper, which is based on the detailed analysis of the post-war archives of the French Christian union Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC), which became the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) in 1964, highlights the difficulties, both from a practical and ideological point of view, for a militant organisation to embrace the cause of immigrant workers and to give them a voice. The CFDT had to 'construct' immigrant workers as a group they could represent, which means as a group that relates to French workers, despite possible xenophobia. A key moment was the denunciation of their housing conditions that make immigrant workers not competitors in the job market but victims of injustice. The union had to reinvent its engagement frames in order to include the specific problems faced by the immigrant workforce. The study shows that the urban dimension was essential in this process as Paris slums made visible an important plight of migrants and provided the opportunity to change public opinion.

The "housing question" and the state-socialist answer: city, class and state remaking in 1950s Bucharest.

Housing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state-socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state-socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor.

No place, new places: death and its rituals in urban Asia.

In many land-scarce Asian cities, planning agencies have sought to reduce space for the dead to release land for the living, encouraging conversion from burial to cremation over several decades. This has caused secular principles privileging efficient land use to conflict with symbolic values invested in burial spaces. Over time, not only has cremation become more accepted, even columbaria have become overcrowded, and new forms of burials (sea and woodland burials) have emerged. As burial methods change, so too do commemorative rituals, including new on-line and mobile phone rituals. This paper traces the ways in which physical spaces for the dead in several east Asian cities have diminished and changed over time, the growth of virtual space for them, the accompanying discourses that influence these dynamics and the new rituals that emerge concomitantly with the contraction of land space.

Residential segregation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century: evidence from the Netherlands.

A case study of three early modern Dutch cities (Alkmaar, Delft, and Amsterdam) using geographical information systems and confronting earlier historical, sociological, and geographical models finds clear patterns of segregation below the level of the city block, thus necessitating block-face mapping. The remarkable continuity in patterns of residential segregation is best explained by the workings of the real-estate market, allowing the well-to-do and middle classes to realize their preferences. In Amsterdam, the merchant elites were able to use their political dominance to plan a scenic and expansive residential environment free from noisy and odorous activities.

Power to the people: working-class demand for household power in 1930s Britain.

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility­gas­was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution effects between fuel types­as alternative fuels constituted the only local competition. Using newly-rediscovered returns from a major national household expenditure survey, we employ geographically-determined instrumental variables, more commonly used in the industrial organization literature, to show that gas provided a significant competitor, tempering electricity prices, while electricity demand was also responsive to marketing initiatives.

Suburbanization and sustainability in metropolitan Moscow.

Although Soviet-era urban-growth controls produced relatively sustainable metropolitan development patterns, low-density suburban sprawl has accelerated markedly in modern Russia. Distinctive features of Moscow's development history are its greenbelt, which dates from 1935 and is becoming increasingly fragmented, proliferation of satellite cities at the urban fringe, conversion of seasonal dachas into full-time residences, the very exclusive Rublevo Uspenskoe Highway development, and today's crippling traffic congestion. The recent economic crisis has slowed development and actually increased the supply of "economy-class" single-family homes, for which there is much pent-up desire but insufficient credit availability to meet the demand. A renewed commitment to sustainability's triple bottom line­environmental quality, equity, and economic prosperity­will require greater government transparency and fairness, stronger planning controls, and an expanded public transportation system.

The Bruce Report and social welfare leadership in the politics of Toronto's "Slums", 1934­1939.

Slum clearance and rebuilding first became a serious political project in Toronto during the 1930s. Following the release of a systematic housing survey known as the Bruce Report (1934), a set of actors distinguished by their planning authority with respect to social agencies, influence over social work education, coordination of social research, and role as spokespersons of religious bodies inaugurated a political struggle over state power. While the campaign failed, it called forth a reaction from established authorities and reconfigured the local political field as it related to low-income housing. This article gives an account of these processes by drawing upon correspondence and minutes of meetings of city officials and the campaign's organizers, newspaper clippings, and published materials.

Land rent and housing policy: a case study of the San Francisco Bay area rental housing market.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where residential rent is among the highest in the United States, an analysis of data from several sources demonstrates that high rent cannot be accounted for by higher quality, higher operating costs, or higher construction costs. At least one-third of the total rent paid is land rent. Despite increases in real incomes, very-low-income tenants in the Bay Area today have less income remaining after payment of rent than tenants did in 1960. High land rent is a long-term feature of the Bay Area rental market that results mostly from its geography, the density of its urban centers, and a strong economy, rather than from regulatory barriers to new multifamily construction. Deregulation is not a sufficient response to the effects of land rent on low-income tenants. Government should subsidize non-profit housing organizations, particularly land trusts that remove residential land from the market. Taxes on land rent would be a particularly appropriate funding source.

Age 55 or better: active adult communities and city planning.

Active adult, age-restricted communities are significant to urban history and city planning. As communities that ban the permanent residence of children under the age of nineteen with senior zoning overlays, they are unique experiments in social planning. While they do not originate the concept of the common interest community with its shared amenities, the residential golf course community, or the gated community, Sun Cities and Leisure Worlds do a lot to popularize those physical planning concepts. The first age-restricted community, Youngtown, AZ, opened in 1954. Inspired by amenity-rich trailer courts in Florida, Del Webb added the "active adult" element when he opened Sun City, AZ, in 1960. Two years later, Ross Cortese opened the first of his gated Leisure Worlds. By the twenty-first century, these "lifestyle" communities had proliferated and had expanded their appeal to around 18 percent of retirees, along with influencing the design of intergenerational communities.

The role of the public sector in the provision of housing supply in Turkey, 1950­2009.

This study examines the changing role of the public sector in Turkey with regard to housing provision since 1950, and particularly since 2000, and seeks to clarify how public intervention has affected housing provision and urban development dynamics in major cities. Three periods may be identified, with central government acting as a regulator in a first period characterized by a 'housing boom'. During the second period, from 1980 to 2000, a new mass housing law spurred construction activity, although the main beneficiaries of the housing fund tended to be the middle classes. After 2000, contrary to emerging trends in both Northern and Southern European countries, the public sector in Turkey became actively involved in housing provision. During this process, new housing estates were created on greenfield sites on the outskirts of cities, instead of efforts being made to rehabilitate, restore or renew existing housing stock in the cities. Meanwhile, the concept of 'urban regeneration' has been opportunistically incorporated into the planning agenda of the public sector, and ­ under the pretext of regenerating squatter housing areas ­ existing residents have been moved out, while channels for community participation have been bypassed.

The politics of urban informality in Philadelphia's recovery house movement.

There are some 60,000 vacant properties in the city of Philadelphia, 30,000 of which are abandoned row houses. In the neighbourhood of Kensington, street-level entrepreneurs have reconfigured hundreds of former working-class row homes to produce the Philadelphia recovery house movement: an extra-legal poverty survival strategy for addicts and alcoholics located in the city's poorest and most heavily blighted zones. The purpose of this paper is to explore, ethnographically, the ways in which informal poverty survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the broader political economy of Philadelphia. It is argued that recovery house networks accommodate an interrelated set of political rationalities animated not only by retrenchment and the churning of welfare bodies, but also by the agency of informal operators and the politics of self-help. Working as an alternative and partially vestigial boundary institution or buffer zone to formal regimes of governance, the recovery house movement reflects the 'other story' of the new urban politics in Philadelphia.

Neighbourhood and class: a study of three neighbourhoods in Hong Kong.

This paper investigates the relationship between neighborhood cohesion and organization and class in Hong Kong. It draws on a survey of 1200 face-to-face interviews in an up-market private housing estate on Hong Kong Island, a large, neither rich nor poor public housing estate in the New Territories and a mixed-use, low-income inner-city neighborhood in Kowloon. Four indexes measure interneighborhood and intraneighborhood differences­namely, attraction to neighborhood, neighboring and psychological sense of community adapted from the Buckner scale of social cohesion, and social organization developed by the author. There are significant differences between the neighborhoods. However, these differences are not duplicated between occupation-defined class within the neighborhoods, although there are some differences based on self-defined social class. The likely explanation lies in the character of the three neighborhoods, government policy, effect of private housing management and the low level of spatial differentiation by income across the city.

Squatting and urban renewal: the interaction of squatter movements and strategies of urban restructuring in Berlin.

Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting ­ mainly in the eastern parts of the city ­ is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.