The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce the release of the new book The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities and Contingencies in the Modern City Co-edited by Dr. Najib Hourani (Anthropology) and Dr. Edward Murphy (MSU Department of History), the book is publishing by Ashgate Publishing.
The volume explores how housing raises a series of vexing issues surrounding rights, identity, governance, and justice in the modern city. The volume analyzes the ways in which homeownership and other types of housing tenure embody suppositions about the proper nature of the urban order, such as the rights of citizenship, ideologies of the nation, and forms of spatial development. Through finely detailed studies that illuminate national and regional particularities— including analyses of urbanism in the Soviet Union, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, and squatting in contemporary Lima— the volume underscores how housing questions matter in a wide range of contexts. Drawing on approaches from architecture, sociology, anthropology, history, and geography, the book develops an interdisciplinary, integrated perspective. This approach illuminates ruptures and continuities between high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, ultimately demonstrating how housing and the dilemmas surrounding it are central to modern governance.
Featured Image Photo credit: Najib Hourani