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The author, who covers architecture for Inhabitat.com, examines the need for new kinds of housing in the wake of disasters, poverty, and climate change, and shows projects from around the globe. 

This century's biggest architectural challenge is taking place in the developing world.

Designers strive to provide super-low-cost dwellings worthy of being called homes. When Román Viñoly, a director at his father's firm Rafael Viñoly Architects, visited Chile in 2010, he toured an affordable-housing project on the outskirts of Santiago that by all measures should have been a success. It provided clean, structurally sound houses for Chileans who had previously lived in self-constructed slums. The problem? The rows of identical, cookie-cutter units felt more like cellblocks than homes, and their one-size-fits-all approach alienated residents who were used to arranging their dwellings to suit their family structures and living habits. “You saw people vandalizing

Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. The enthusiasm with which Britain and France took to the construction of Mid-Century Modern social housing is equaled only by their present appetite for its demolition. In 2003, the French government announced a 10-year urban-renewal plan in which 200,000 dwellings would be replaced; in Britain, Alison and Peter Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens, completed in London in 1972, is one of many projects that once enjoyed international prestige and are now facing the

Two teams of architects employ very different strategies to reinvigorate a pair of ambitious 1960s apartment projects, one in the north of England and the other in Paris. Bois-le-Pêtre, Paris The $15.4 million overhaul of Bois-le-Pêtre, completed in 2011, is a more explicit manifesto for renovation. Its roots are in a combined response by Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot to the French government's 2003 demolition plan: 'We were shocked by the idea that nothing could be done except tabula rasa redevelopment,' recalls Anne Lacaton. The two architecture firms embarked on a published research project which concluded that such buildings

The architecture has evolved, joining design with support services. Over the last five decades, models for social housing in U.S. cities have continually evolved. First, the postwar subsidized brick high-rises—based on Le Corbusier's towers-in-the-park of the 1920s—were largely abandoned. Then, starting in the 1970s, smaller infill developments, often mimicking a neighborhood's rowhouses, were increasingly adopted. But low-rises with separate entries and limited communal space have not been able to serve all the needs of some populations, such as the elderly, disabled, or formerly homeless. Michael Pyatok of Pyatok Architects designed Fox Courts affordable housing in Oakland to provide 80 dwellings

This new social-housing complex in Champigny-sur-Marne, outside Paris, is dubbed Urban Collage, but what really is going on here is more of a suburban ménage à trois.

The Shape of Green by Lance Hosey. Island Press, 2012, 216 pages, $30. Did you know that a clean neighborhood experiences one-fifth less crime than an untidy one, that profit margins for businesses near Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library have risen 50 percent since it opened in 2004, that birdsong stimulates carbon sequestration by trees? Lance Hosey is on a mission to prove that society places value on beautiful environments, which makes them more enduring. His new book, The Shape of Green, leaves no case unturned for recognizing beauty as a valid consideration in green building. The Shape of Green

Even before Norman Foster presented his firm's scheme in late December to alter radically the New York Public Library's main branch, controversy swirled among scholars about plans to change Carrère & Hastings' 1897 Beaux-Arts masterpiece at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

A two-tier power system could deliver electricity more dependably to everyone. Blackouts caused by superstorm Sandy and other recent destructive weather events–coupled with dramatic system failures like the great Northeast blackout of 2003–have undermined confidence in the U.S. electrical grid's ability to keep homes and businesses humming. Those with means are increasingly installing their own power generation, and thus raising a provocative question: could the nation soon have a two-tier power system in which reliable electricity is a luxury, as is the case in many developing countries? Illustration © Andrew DeGraff Experts in electrical transmission tend to agree that the