The Shelter Revolution: Housing and Community Planning In
THE SHELTER REVOLUTION: HOUSING AND COMMUNITY PLANNING IN TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA, 1940-1990 AN ABSTRACT SUBMITTED ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF JUNE 2017 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY Peyton Lee Jones ! Abstract: In the last half of the twentieth century, a major transformation occurred in American residential living. While in the 1950s and 1960s the single-family, detached home dominated residential development, in the 1970s and 1980s new forms of residential dwellings and communities, ranging from private retirement communities, to mobile homes and trailer parks, to condominiums, to gated, privately governed “towns,” proliferated across the metropolitan landscape. The changes in residential living, what can be understood as a “shelter revolution,” played an integral role in the spatial, political, and social formation of metropolises in the Global South. This dissertation examines the “shelter revolution” in Tampa Bay, Florida, between 1940 and the 1985. In so doing, it explores the changing relationship between housing and community design, community formation, and residential and metropolitan political culture. It argues that changes in residential living fueled and shaped metropolitan growth and expansion. At the same time, innovations in residential design and development, along with new legal instruments of property ownership, altered the residential experience. Over time, these changes rippled throughout metropolitan life, transfiguring the built environment and transforming the ways Americans built, purchased, and experienced residential housing and community. These changes drove the physical, cultural, and economic formation of the Tampa Bay, from a series of scattered urban settlements into a regional metropolis.
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