Sunlight and free markets: an urban political ecological perspective on social housing in Victorian London (1850–1914)

Abstract

Abstract Urban political ecology (UPE) provides an appropriate framework to consider the ways in which natural elements and concepts of nature have been incorporated into built environments, because of its emphasis on and elaboration of the concept of socio-natures and its focus on how the costs and benefits of these natural elements are apportioned between people of different classes in cities. This article considers how reformers’ ideas about nature shaped the kinds of social housing they developed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London.