An intimate study of urban change, unveiling how a single block of flats in Romania tells a larger story about architecture and the art of making a home.

Maria Salaru takes readers inside a Romanian apartment block, tracing its evolution from 1974 to the present as residents navigate shifting political and economic landscapes. Through rich ethnographic detail, this work exposes how everyday acts of repair and maintenance reshape both individual apartments and the broader urban fabric of Piatra-Neamț. As state support for housing recedes, new forms of solidarity emerge—whether through self-organized communities, housing associations, or activist interventions—presenting a new perspective on the lived experience of architectural transformation.

This book opposes the view of architecture as static and instead presents buildings as dynamic spaces co-created over time by their inhabitants. It will appeal to social scientists exploring the intersection of materiality and urban change, as well as architects interested in the evolving relationship between people and the built environment. By capturing the micro-scale transformations that collectively redefine city life, An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation provides a persuasive case for rethinking how we study and inhabit our shared spaces.

The Guide to Electrical Maintenance provides guidance on carrying out maintenance activities and using good practice techniques. It examines the operational risks, mitigations and processes that may be used in carrying out electrical maintenance, and also provides insights and philosophies to ensure that electrical maintenance activities are not only safe, but are satisfactorily planned and properly carried out.

Power system reliability and security is highly dependent on the practices employed in both the commissioning and maintenance processes. Both must be to a high standard to ensure that equipment does not enter service with latent deficiencies. This demands engineers who understand the necessary management involved as well as the technical processes. There is very little literature currently available on the subject; a situation which this book seeks to redress.

HGTV has perfected stories about creating and capturing value in the housing market. But according to Robert Goldman, this lifestyle network’s beloved flagship programs, Flip or Flop, Property Brothers, and Fixer Upper—where people revitalize modern spaces and reinvent property values—offer “fairy tales” in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. The cable channel’s seductive, bingeable programs may show how to find and extract value from properties, but, in fact, they insidiously ignore the realities of the real estate and mortgage markets, housing inequality, gentrification, economic insecurity, and even homelessness. In effect, HGTV has turned house flipping into a master narrative about getting ahead in America during an era of otherwise uneasy economic prospects.

HGTV pictures its insular moral economy as an alternative to a crisis-ridden neoliberal finance system that shaped landscapes of foreclosure and financial uncertainty for millions of households. Renovating Value explores the circuitry of consumer credit and debt, and a rent-gap model of gentrification that charts a path to the rehabilitation of Value. Goldman shrewdly critiques the aspirational myth of adding value to a home simply by using imagination, elbow grease, and aesthetic know-how.