- Timely, important and popular subject
- Integrated view of a complex subject rarely tackled in a holistic way
- Targeting a lay audience but with enough richness to be of interest to experts
- Clear writing and approach already tested through Why Architects Matter
Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She helped set up the new School of Architecture at the University of Reading and is former Head of the University of Sheffield of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and the first RIBA Vice President for Research. The author of Why Architects Matter (2018) she has spent the last decade researching the positive impact of good design on people. Her interests are now moving to land use and social justice, both key to addressing climate change. She is well known as industry advisor on the social value of the design of housing and places and a strong advocate of social value mapping. She is also known for her unorthodox writings on Le Corbusier, about whom she has published extensively. A mother of three daughters, she is based in Wales.
Title: Housing for Hope and Wellbeing
Author: Samuel, Flora
ISBN: 9780367469030
Binding:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publication Date: 2022-12-20
Number of Pages: 218
Weight: 0.4211 kg
This is a wonderful book, as wise and generous as it is hopeful. It offers a fluent and compendious discussion of housing in all its complexity that inspires us to think more about how we live and how we build, and then to act better.
Peter King, author of The Principles of Housing (Routledge, 2016)
Flora Samuel's book - or manifesto - is both timely and essential reading in a political climate where dismay and quiet desperation is widespread. Samuel expresses the burning injustices in the UK's housing and explores its quality (or lack of) but also its delivery, ownership structures, and its binary model of adding value that is exclusively measured in terms of its financial benefits to private developers and landlords. Her sense of outrage that our housing is so poor is palpable and Samuel argues passionately for a different model of a housing system where value is measured in terms of health, happiness and wellbeing and a connection with the natural world. Samuel demonstrates what practical and political steps need be taken to achieve these alternative aims, covering policy, regulation, planning and also community empowerment via locally initiated models of development, concluding with a vision of a better world expressed via a truly democratic housing system might look like for the UK.
Dr Piers Taylor, Architect, Invisible Studio
There are few people as well-placed as Flora to talk on this subject. She does so with passion, rigour and empathy, creating one of the most comprehensive books I have read on how our built environment affects our health and wellbeing. Each chapter carefully unpicks a wide range of issues and offers solutions through well-researched, tangible examples.
Professor Sadie Morgan OBE, dRMM Architects
