Matthew Gordon Lasner studies the history and theory of the U.S. built environment, with particular focus on housing, and the relationship between the home and urban and suburban form. Lasner’s first book, High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, published in 2012 by Yale University Press, examines the emergence and growth of co-owned multifamily housing – the co-op and condominium apartment, as well as the townhouse complex — as an alternative to single-family suburbia in the twentieth century.
Lasner has also written for Planning Perspectives, Buildings & Landscapes, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Architectural Education, caa.reviews, as well as for several edited volumes, encyclopedias, and regional journals and Websites. His research focuses on housing, urban renewal, and urban development engages planning and the social sciences, cultural landscape studies and geography, and urban and architectural history.
He earned his PhD and A.M. in the interfaculty program in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning at Harvard and holds an M.Sc. in urban and regional planning studies from the London School of Economics. He earned his BA in urban studies at Columbia. Before joining Hunter, Lasner was an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, in Atlanta.
undergraduate courses: Housing and the American City
graduate courses: Introduction to Housing, Housing and the Global City, Introduction to Planning
past courses: The American Built Environment, The American Suburb, American Cities, American Architectural History, Global Cities
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