Atlanta, Georgia was the site of the first so-called “slum clearance” project in the United States, in 1934, and America's first completed—racially segregated—federally-funded public housing projects. Techwood Homes (for white families) and University Homes (for Black families), both composed of low-slung brick apartment buildings set in footpath-crossed open spaces, became architectural and planning models in the years following enactment of the National Housing Acts of 1934 and 1937. Through a detailed investigation of Techwood and University, this project expands the interwar architectural map to establish Atlanta’s role as a clearinghouse for European social housing ideas into the US. The research, writing, digital modeling, and cartography that emerge from this project will result in a monograph and allied digital public history project to test the capacities of new hybrid publishing formats.

Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and assistant professor of architectural history at Emory University whose research specialties are socialist space and social housing. Her monograph Spatial Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2022) explores the foundations of early Soviet urban theory and practice, and her coedited book, Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945, will be published with MIT Press in 2023. Additional scholarly writing can be found in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Urban History, and Harvard Design Magazine. Her research has been supported the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the College Art Association, among other institutions. She serves on the board of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA). Crawford received her PhD and MArch from Harvard University, and her BA from Yale University.