In Defense of Housing

Peter Marcuse has long been recognized as one of the foremost critical urban scholars of our era. He has been writing about and participating in urban politics since the 1950s and remains on the cutting edge of urban activism today. In this book, written with David Madden, a rising scholar in urban sociology, politics and theory in New York, London and other cities, Mar-cuse argues that the housing question is not an architectural or moral question, but a political and economic one with architec-tural and moral implications. He calls for a comprehensive transformation in the production, distribution and regulation of housing and details a number of progressive possibilities for today’s housing situation, offering an account of how a movement for housing justice can be part of a movement to transform the city itself.