The Meaning and Use of Housing

Originally published in 1993, as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, The Meaning and Use of Housing presents a re-evaluation of the use and meaning of residential environments. It integrates methodological and philosophical approaches to assist in the making of comparisons across issues, concerns, disciplines and countries, and links theory, research and practice. It spans the globe, reviewing studies of every conceivable form of housing. In these studies a wide range of social science, design, management and policy perspectives are harnessed to enrich our understanding of the central place in people’s life, their homes.

Author Biography

Ernesto G. Arias Clare is a Professor Emeritus of Planning and Design, and a Faculty Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Colorado, and Ad Honorem Professor of Urban Research in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Costa Rica. He selected Fulbright Fellow as Teaching Scholar (1984) and Research Scholar (1990) to Latin America on housing policy and sustainability respectively.

The pursuit of his research experience has been towards a contribution in collaborative framing and resolution of planning problems through participation.

This pursuit has been supported by major US and international foundations. It started with his initial work on the Resident Participation and the Residential Quality of US Public Housing at the University of Pennsylvania; to the research on residential environments of the poor as a Fulbright Scholar in Latin America; in community redevelopment work at major US cities; at his later developments of participatory decision-support technologies; and to present efforts introducing technology in public education in Costa Rica as a Board of Director’s member of the Omar Dengo Foundation.

He is author of various academic and professional publications in disciplines spanning his experiences from city and regional planning, environmental psychology, architecture, operations research, and computer science.