BUCHAREST, Romania. May 20-22nd, 2015
Caroline Dewilde (Tilburg University)
John Doling (University of Birmingham)
Richard Ronald (University of Amsterdam, University of Birmingham)
Liviu Chelcea (University of Bucharest)
In the last decade it has become increasingly clear that the social, economic and political roles of housing markets and owner-occupation have been transformed. Support of home ownership as a social project, characteristic of the 1980s and early-1990s, has been largely subsumed by a more neoliberal one demanding even greater efforts to both promote market housing and sustain housing markets. This has had a remarkable impact on the nature of state housing interventions, on the one hand, and the mobilization of families around the acquisition and distribution of housing goods and assets, on the other. Both governments and households have had to adapt to new conditions and adopt new expectations of homes, housing careers and property markets. At the same time, the impact of new global imperatives have been mediated by historical contingencies, socio-cultural practices and geographic dynamics that vary remarkably from country to country and city to city. The domestic and political economies of home ownership are thus being renegotiated in different contexts with significant outcomes in patterns of inequality. In this short workshop we will engage with new theoretical developments and the latest empirical research that inform the complex relationships between housing and society, and in particular systems of, and differentiation in, home ownership practices. We welcome participation and papers submissions covering a diversity of contexts and disciplines for the first meeting held by this working group in Eastern Europe.
Lisette Damstra enhr-hog-fmg@uva.nl