Matthew Lasner
Housing, community planning, urban design.
Matthew G. Lasner is an interdisciplinary historian of housing and community planning. His first monograph, High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, a history of housing co-operatives, condominiums, and townhouse complexes in the United States, was awarded the Vernacular Architecture Forum's Cummings Prize. His second, Apartments: A Postwar American History (Or How the Pill, Fair Housing, Social Security, Cars, and the Loneliness Epidemic Transformed Apartment Design), will be published by University of Texas Press. Lasner is also co-editor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City, Real Estate Development and the Built Environment (forthcoming), and the in-progress Catherine Bauer: Making Housing Modern. He has written widely on housing topics in scholarly and popular journals, including The New York Times, The Nation, and The Atlantic, and is a founding co-editor of the web journal PLATFORM. He was previously associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, CUNY, and assistant professor of history at Georgia State University.
High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (Yale University Press, 2012)
Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City (Princeton University Press, 2016)
"Retirement Planning: Charles Warren Callister, the Neighborhood Unit, and the Architecture of Community at Rossmoor and Heritage Village," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2021)
"Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment," Journal of Urban History (2020)
"The Complex: Suburban Architectures of Difference and the Postwar U.S. Apartment," in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, ed. John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
"'Swingsites for Singles’: New Housing for New Households in Mid-century America," Places Journal (2014)
"Architect as Developer and the Postwar U.S. Apartment, 1945-1960," Buildings & Landscapes (2014)
"Own-your-owns, Co-ops, Town Houses: Hybrid Housing Types and the New Urban Form in Postwar Southern California," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2009)