About This Book
The usual story of housing privatisation begins in the 1980s, with a policy shift and a new set of contracts. Ioanna Piniara argues that this gets the chronology wrong and the mechanism wrong with it. Privatisation, on her reading, was a postwar urban strategy long before it was a policy — a slow reorganisation of the ethos and culture of housing, in which the state was never the market's opponent but its steady partner.
The consequence is the book's title. If the state and the private sector jointly authored a pedagogy of domestic privacy, then the neoliberal idea of the private as institutionally autonomous does not survive contact with the evidence. The private, Piniara contends, has hardly existed as such at all.
Key Features
- A typological study rather than a policy history
- Three cities read as a single chronological vector: London, Berlin, Athens
- Full-colour throughout
- Graphic design by Olga Pipnik
What You'll Discover
- How postwar housing schemes taught particular habits of domestic privacy
- Why the state's role in privatisation was partnership rather than retreat
- The arc from neoliberal anticipation in London to severe crisis in Athens
- What a typological method can surface that policy analysis misses
About the Author
Ioanna Piniara is an architect and researcher whose work addresses housing, domesticity and the politics of the private realm in contemporary Europe.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 15.0 × 21.5 cm
- Pages: 239
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781638401346
- Publisher: Actar Publishers
Perfect For
Housing researchers and policy people, architects working on social and affordable housing, and readers of critical urban theory who want the argument grounded in actual buildings.