Original
Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design
Abstract
The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposure to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form—the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.
中文
乡土建筑与基层城市政治：政治如何嵌入住宅设计
摘要
城市生活所发生的物理结构，是基层城市政治如何展开的一个未受充分重视的决定因素。在许多快速发展的城市中，住房短缺迫使居民进入多户住宅楼，从而形成与邻居的日常接触。我们认为，这些接触通过塑造居民获取政治信息的渠道和采取集体行动的能力，影响其政治行为。我们聚焦于西非主导性城市住房形式——院落式住宅（compound house）——的非正式、乡土建筑。加纳城市中院落式住宅的居民，比其他住房类型中的相似居民更多参与政治。利用一项原创调查，包括对租户在其住宅楼内空间网络中心性的新颖测量，我们提出，这一关系的关键机制源于建筑设计对共同租户之间可见性与社会联系的影响。最终，要最好地理解环境对政治行为的影响，必须将建成环境与人口环境一并研究。
关键词
乡土建筑、基层城市政治、政治参与、政治行为、住房、社会网络、加纳、西非