Lawrence Vale

Professor of urban design and planning at MIT, where he headed the department of urban studies, Vale began with Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), a study of how capitals, from Washington to Brasília and Chandigarh, use architecture to represent power. Since then he has alternated two lines: urban resilience and American public housing.

The Resilient City (2005), edited with Thomas Campanella, gathered the cases of Chicago, San Francisco, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Beirut and New York after 2001 and set out twelve axioms on how modern cities recover: narratives of resilience are a political necessity, reconstruction reveals and reinforces inequalities, and memory decides what is rebuilt. It is the book that put resilience into the vocabulary of planning before it became a slogan.

From the Puritans to the Projects (2000), Purging the Poorest (2013) and After the Projects (2019) follow the history of public housing in the United States and show how, in Chicago, Atlanta and New Orleans, demolition and mixed-income programmes were justified by the welfare of the poor they displaced, and how some cities did it better than others. His work is the reference for evaluating the regeneration of social housing estates.