All That Is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, and What We Can Do About It

by Danny Dorling

In All That is Solid Danny Dorling offers an agenda-shaping look at the UK's dangerous relationship with housing - and how it's all going to come crashing down Housing was at the heart of the financial collapse, and our economy is now precariously reliant on the housing market. In this ground-breaking book, Danny Dorling argues that housing is the defining issue of our times. Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, All That Is Solid shows that the solution to our problems - rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership - is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome. 'An urgent book about an urgent topic' - Lynsey Hanley, New Statesman 'A brilliantly original study of our national obsession' - Nick Cohen, Observer Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor in Geography at the University of Oxford. He has worked both with the British government and the World Health Organization and is frequently asked to comment on current issues on TV and the radio. He has published more than twenty-five books, including Injustice: Why Social Inequality Exists, So You Think You Know About Britain? and The 32 Stops for Penguin Underground Lines.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Geography, Cities, Sociology, History, Economics

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Danny Dorling is a British social geographer researching inequality and human geography. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford.

Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org).
He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. Much of this work is available open access and will be added to this website soon.

His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.