Michael Klein

is the editor of dérive and one of the curators of the urbanize festival. He studied architecture and works in the fields of housing, theory and urbanism at the Department of Housing and the Institut für Städtebau at the Vienna University of Technology. Co-author of the books The Design of Scarcity (2014) and Modelling Vienna: Real Fictions in Social Housing (2015), co-editor of Building Critique – Architecture and its Discontents (2020)

Articles

When spectres return

Housing reform and the idea of the good home

The ‘housing question’ was formed not by the issues of poverty and necessity, but by bourgeois norms and demands – often intended to tame social unrest. From minimal dwelling to air quality, Michael Klein surveys the 19th-century discourses which still influence political thinking, and tend to exclude concerns of the underprivileged.