Towards a virtual statecraft: Housing targets and the governance of urban housing markets (original) (raw)
Related papers
Future trends and challenges of urban governance in UK's housing crisis.pdf
The research question that is posed in the research is what are the future trends and challenges of urban governance in the UK’s housing crisis? This is exploratory research that aims to set guidelines for future development of housing by local authorities based on current issues. The objective of the research is to develop a new understanding and the effects of Brexit and Covid-19 on housing. The research will be conducted using interviews with councillors of randomly selected samples and qualitative research in the UK. Considering the scale of the research only housing crisis will be considered for the research. Currently, the UK is facing a shortage of housing. The recently published August 2020 white paper by the government shows significant emphasis given on housing delivery. However, the question is how to implement what has been written? Whether planning system is equipped to implement the housing policies in the UK? In doing so how to address the questions of environmental sustainability? All these questions will be answered in the research. There will be an in-depth study and analysis of legislation that influence the decisions and governance. Besides, there will be guidelines given by studying the policies of urban governance in other developed countries such as Switzerland. The future trends in the UK show promising results with newly formed independent UK. The research will try to extract the new standards set by the UK in housing policies and how the government will make housing a priority. With projects like Heathrow 3rd airstrip underway, it seems that this government has taken the initiative for the new UK to launch global trade policies after Brexit. Such policies will in turn boost the economy and the housing demand and supply.
Jahrbuch StadtRegion, 2019
Housing is one of the most regulated policy areas in Germany and a highly controversial political field in Berlin. Against a backdrop of significant growth-whether population figures, tourism, or rising rents-we scrutinize recent efforts of municipal authorities in Berlin to tackle the 'new housing question'. On a theoretical level we argue that the housing market is made, and the interesting questions centre on this process of making as the object of study. Performativity theory (Butler 1997) provides a way of seeing the housing market, a language to describe the interaction between planning rules and their lived expression as practised and produced via the roles of different actors. Our case study is the development and implementation of a regulatory planning instrument 'Koop-erative Baulandentwicklung' introduced in Berlin in 2014. Commonly known as 'developer contributions' the instrument requires developers to pay for the physical and social infrastructure needed for a new development, in addition prescribing 30 % social housing. Drawing on expert interviews with actors involved in implementing the planning tool in Berlin, we use performativity theory to discuss the "role-playing" of politicians, lawyers, planners and administration employees, who produce the instrument through everyday performances. While developer contributions only work within a cycle of economic growth and cannot provide a cardinal solution to the Housing Question, dynamic and subtle role-playing has meant that the Berlin housing market is a more regulated space since 2014. Our paper is not only a local story, but also one of wider political relevance-indicating what it takes to tighten the regulatory screws.
Journal of Housing and the Built Environment
This paper introduces a Special Issue of the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment entitled “Housing estates in the era of marketization – governance practices and urban development”. The issue includes 10 European case studies on how marketization has impacted large housing estates (LHEs) across Europe. The collection includes novel contributions from well-studied countries like France or the United Kingdom, cases from Scandinavia and Mediterranean countries, as well as articles from post-socialist cities where the majority of LHEs are situated, and as such presents the diversity of experiences that has emerged in housing estates across Europe in the last two decades. Since the global turn towards neoliberal governance regimes at the end of the 20th century the commodification of housing, accompanied by the financialization of real estate, has not left any housing markets or market segments untouched. All articles focus on the interconnections between problems found in the d...
Emerging problematics of deregulating the urban: The case of permitted development in England
Urban Studies
Urban planning systems, processes and regulations are often blamed – by many mainstream economists – for constraining the supply of housing by interfering with the efficient allocation of land by the market and unnecessarily delaying development. In England, this orthodox view has influenced the government’s deregulatory planning reforms, including – since 2013 – the removal of the requirement for developers to apply for planning permission for the conversion of an office building to a residential one (making it ‘permitted development’). Drawing on original empirical research in five local authority areas in England, this article examines the impacts of this deregulation of planning control on the ground. We find that, although more housing units have been delivered than were expected, a focus on housing numbers is eclipsing problems of housing quality, the type of housing being made available and whether it is in sustainable locations. There are also costs of deregulating planning,...
Governments in a wide range of contexts have long pursued policies of social mixing to disperse poverty concentrations, attract middle class residents, and manage disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Drawing on longitudinal and spatial housing data for the case of Amsterdam, this paper shows that the dominant instruments to facilitate social mixing have changed over time. Policy focus has shifted from large-scale urban renewal projects and the demolition of social rental housing to the sale of existing social rental dwellings. The changing nature of tenure restructuring also brings about a changing geography: while urban renewal was mostly concentrated in post-war neighbourhoods of socio-economic decline, social housing sales are increasingly concentrated in inner city neighbourhoods where already existing gentrification processes are amplified. These shifts need to be considered within their wider policy context. Local policies increasingly focus on catering to the preferences of middle class households, while welfare state restructuring and national austerity measures push policies that cut back on social rental housing. Thus, this paper demonstrates that the demise of social rent has accelerated under conditions of market-oriented housing restructuring, and increasingly occurs in high demand neighbourhoods where current housing policies push gentrification.
Privileging the “Objective”: Understanding the State’s Role in Shaping Housing Aspirations
Housing, Theory and Society, 2017
This paper is to be read as one half of a twofold analysis of recent qualitative research on the housing aspirations of the people of Scotland, focusing specifically on the dimension of housing tenure. Moving beyond individual subjective preferences (i.e. what people 'consciously' want or desire in relation to housing), this paper draws influence from David Harvey's historical materialist approach to illustrate the importance of understanding the dialectical relation between objective reality and subjective preferences. We argue that it is by examining the broad homologies between the qualitative data on one hand, and the corresponding epochs of capital accumulation on the other, that important power structures can be made visible, and changes in housing aspirations over time better understood.
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2022
Housing issues have dominated urban policy discussions in many cities in recent years. Real estate speculation, rising rents, and displacement indicate an intensification of social conflicts around housing. In addition to demographic changes that increase housing demand, it is primarily political and economic causes that manifest in housing issues in the 21st century. In response to the housing crisis, social movements and tenants' organizations have formed in many cities to put the provision of social housing on the agenda. In addition to traditional street protests and attempts to enforce social rights directly against landlords, grassroots movements are increasingly pursuing strategies to enforce a different kind of urban policy. New municipalism, a strategy to implement transformative demands of grassroots movements at the local level, is consistently common good oriented, aims at overcoming various forms of exclusion, improving everyday living conditions, and includes the democratization of political institutions through expanded co-determination procedures and the feminization of politics. Since the strength of social movements and the scope of urban policy are very much determined by specific local conditions, the study “Municipalism in Practice”, funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, examines the introduction and implementation of new housing policy instruments in four cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and Vienna. In recent years, under the slogans of new municipalisms, social movements in particular but also academic researchers have been discussing new strategies and local political power constellations for the social orientation of urban policy, and how the development of inclusive and radical democratic procedures can become the programme of governance. Drawing on these discussions, we first summarise our understanding of municipalist politics and attempt to apply the principles to the field of housing policy (chapter 2). In order to present the specific starting points of each of the four case study cities, we first provide a general overview of the housing market in each of the cities. In particular, we shed light on landlord structures and the respective ways to ensure affordable, adequate, and sustainable housing provision (chapter 3). In the main part of the study, we present the challenges, the newly developed instruments and the participation of grassroots social movements in specific housing policy issues in each of the four cities studied. In doing so, we take a closer look at the strategies of rent con- Introduction 11 trol (chapter 4), tourist apartment regulation (chapter 5), anti-eviction strategies (chapter 6), and the use of planning law instruments to create affordable housing (chapter 7). In a summary review at the end of the study, we discuss the elements of municipalist housing policies across cities and sectors to identify the specific features, strengths but also weaknesses of municipalist policy approaches (chapter 8).
Political Geography, 2009
The analysis of neoliberalism has become a key point of departure in critical urban studies and political geography. Its application in theorising new forms of residential environments is no exception. Common interest developments, gated communities and, in the Australian case, masterplanned residential estates (MPREs) are cast as vehicles of neoliberalist privatisation, extending private property rights and embedding market logics and neoliberal modes of privatised governance. This paper is a critical theoretical and empirical engagement with the interpretation of these residential developments as iconic expressions of urban neoliberalisation. We bring poststructuralist thinking on neoliberalism as an assemblage of diverse practices and projects together with poststructuralist conceptions of the public and private as contextual and enacted political constructions, to provide an alternative analyticdan analytic of assemblagedfor investigating putative pathways of neoliberal privatisation. We suggest the purchase of this extended framework through an exploration of MPRE development by Sydney's largest MPRE developer. In this framework, MPREs become contingent productions in which multiple and overdetermined projects, practices and paradigms of governance are at work including, amongst others, social sustainability and interventionism. Rather than producing neoliberal privatisation, we explore how MPRE developments involve the complex constitution of new forms of public and private that exceed coding as neoliberal. We conclude that the framework engaged with here can enable productive advances for urban theorising. Its emphasis on practice, enactment, multiplicity and assemblage can resist a tendency to reify urban neoliberalism and nurture the development of new conceptions and discourses of urban governance less bound to the neoliberal imaginary.
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022
This paper contextualises the political economy of land value capture (LVC) within the shift to an increasingly financialised, rentier-dominated capitalism. Contributing to an emerging dialogue between social constructivist planning literature on performativity in LVC and the critical political economy literature on rents and rentiership, we overview Salford's planning policy trajectory in recent decades in order to highlight how the UK planning system has increasingly been reconfigured as a mechanism to increase land values. In doing so, we explore both Salford's shift to neoliberal planning and its municipal socialist counter-turn in recent years, reflecting on how the centrality of LVC to the latter still leaves it dependent on rentier logics. In doing so, we locate these policy conjunctures within the governance dynamics of Britain's transformation into a rentier economy; wherein the stimulation, disbursement and capture of land values have become central objects of spatio-economic policy.