Architecture and the Housing Question examines the mechanisms whereby architecture has framed the social and political implications of housing in the second half of the twentieth century, and the architecture profession’s intersections with the evolving discourses of habitation, modernization, welfare, and humanitarianism. The book features a critical introduction by the editors, Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim, and a collection of case studies from contexts as diverse as Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, United States, China, Pakistan, Peru, Turkey, Kenya, and Somalia. The thematic organization of the collection offers a comparative history of architecture and highlights the methodological issues that underpin its global outlook. The epilogue, “Housing and History” by Reinhold Martin offers new insight into the historiography of housing and is an original contribution to architectural theory.

Can Bilsel is professor of architecture at the University of San Diego. His research bridges the history of modern architecture and urbanism, the history of archaeology, museum reconstructions, and architectural conservation with cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, published in 2012 by the Oxford University Press. His most recent article, "Crisis in Conservation: Istanbul's Gezi Park Between Restoration and Resistance" appeared in June 2017 in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Bilsel received a PhD in architecture at Princeton University, an MS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a professional BArch from METU in Turkey. For nearly a decade, Bilsel served as the chair of the Department of Art, Architecture and Art History, and the founding director of the University of San Diego's Architecture Program.

Juliana Maxim, associate professor and director of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego, is an art and architectural historian whose work focuses on the history of modern aesthetic practices—from photography to urbanism—under the communist, centralized states of the Soviet Bloc. She completed her PhD dissertation in the history, theory and criticism of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. Maxim was a recipient of the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research Award (2008–10) and was an American Council for Learned Societies post-doctoral fellow (2012–13). Her forthcoming book titled The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1948–1965 (Routledge), explores the intense and multifaceted architectural activity in postwar Romania and the mechanisms through which architecture was invested with political meaning.