The “Densification” of Modern Public Housing: Hong Kong and Singapore

In the Asian mini-city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, massive public housing programmes, far more extreme in density and height than their European and North American predecessors, have played an unexpectedly prominent role in development policy since the 1950s. This article explores some of the ways in which the original conventions of public housing were transformed and “densified” in these territories, and argues that the key influences in this process were not so much avant-garde modernist architectural discourses as the organisational mechanisms and political pressures within late British colonialism and decolonisation

Mass housing and extensive urbanism in the Baltic Countries and Central/Eastern Europe: A comparative overview

This chapter provides a comparative overview of the post-war housing programmes of the Central and Eastern European post-war socialist states, arguing that they, like the Baltics, were in some ways distanced from the highly standardised orthodoxies of mainstream Soviet mass housing. With the aim of underlining the extreme diversity of the political/organisational and architectural solutions of mass housing within Central and Eastern Europe, the chapter demonstrates that while public housing was generally dominant in most parts of the region, this concealed wide variations, from the programmes of Poland and East Germany, dominated from the late 50s by large, powerful cooperatives, to the highly decentralised, even anarchic system in Yugoslavia and the prominence of home-ownership in both Hungary and Bulgaria. Architecturally, the conservative policies of street-façade monumental architecture that prevailed in Ceauşescu’s Romania contrasted very strikingly with the idiosyncrasies that sprouted elsewhere, ranging from the sinuous and extraordinarily long ‘falowiec’ (wave-form) blocks of Gdańsk and Poznań to the wildly variegated design solutions of the various ‘blok’ sections of Novi Beograd. The chapter compares these varied patterns closely with those of the Baltics, to demonstrate that the latter were not alone within the socialist bloc in their individuality and intermittently ‘western’ sensibilities

Experience-based behavioral and chemosensory changes in the generalist insect herbivore Helicoverpa armigera exposed to two deterrent plant chemicals

Behavioral and electrophysiological responses of larvae of the polyphagous moth species Helicoverpa armigera to two plant-derived allelochemicals were studied, both in larvae that had been reared on a diet devoid of these compounds and in larvae previously exposed to these compounds. In dual-choice cotton leaf disk and pepper fruit disk arena assays, caterpillars reared on a normal artificial diet were strongly deterred by strychnine and strophanthin-K. However, caterpillars reared on an artificial diet containing strychnine were insensitive to strychnine and strophanthin-K. Similarly, caterpillars reared on an artificial diet containing strophanthin-K were also desensitized to both deterrent chemicals. Electrophysiological tests revealed that the deterrent-sensitive neurons in taste sensilla on the maxillae of caterpillars reared on each deterrent-containing diet displayed reduced sensitivity to the two chemicals compared with the caterpillars reared on normal diets. We conclude that the experience-dependent behavioral plasticity was partly based on the reduced sensitivity of taste receptor neurons and that the desensitization of taste receptor neurons contributed to the cross-habituation to the two chemicals