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9781477331620

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Building codes remain understudied, not least because they are impenetrable, technical, and preposterously long. Perhaps more importantly, the organizations that write these codes have carefully guarded their decision-making from public scrutiny. In her timely exploration of Type V buildings, Jeana Ripple blows open building codes, allowing readers to view them not just as technical tools for fire safety, but as regionally specific and politically reactive determinants of neighborhood form. This clear and accessible book offers a vital window into how codes shape cities, making it an essential resource for architects, urban designers, planners focused on climate change, and scholars of environmental justice both within and beyond academia. -- Lily Baum Pollans, Hunter College, author of Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities The Type V City exposes how building codes—often seen as neutral safeguards—are, in fact, powerful tools that shape urban inequality. Through five American cities, Jeana Ripple uncovers the hidden consequences of material regulations, revealing how policies originally meant to ensure health, safety, and well-being have instead evolved to codify risk, disinvestment, labor exclusion, and environmental vulnerabilities. A sharp and compelling analysis of regulatory inertia, this one-of-a-kind book draws much-needed attention to building regulations most of us barely understand—let alone question—and challenges us to recognize their role in shaping social and economic systems while reinforcing political agendas. -- Aleksandra Jaeschke, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Greening of America's Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes Building codes are not a given but socially constructed, revealing much about the society that creates and implements them. This book illuminates how construction types as social artifacts code salient environmental and political concerns such as safety, durability, adaptability, health, affordability, and labor. By articulating the relations between low-quality forests, low-quality lumber, low-quality housing, and low-quality urbanism, Jeana Ripple helps explicate how Type V construction sanctions and structures inequity in American urbanism. -- Kiel Moe, architect and author of Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

Author Information

Jeana Ripple is the chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Virginia and the founder and principal of Mir Collective Architects.

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