Welfare‐state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.

About Appreciation and Care

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, 2014

The UNECE Social Housing Study examines the current trends, challenges and social housing models in the UNECE region. It provides recommendations for possible future activities based on an extensive literature review of housing issues in over 50 countries and interviews with over 30 representatives of governments, private and non- governmental organizations.

Nowadays, participation is a core issue in the broad field of social sciences. In the specific context of social policy, citizen participation is viewed as a key element of local welfare systems, and particularly for the planning activities that are linked to it. The institutional documents which formalise these activities-‘Piani di Zona’ (PdZ, local 3-year social plan)-contain discourses that strongly emphasise the role of ordinary citizens and third sector organisations. Yet, despite the intentions proclaimed within the texts of the Plans, the type of participation effectively promoted by these documents seems restricted to certain organisations of civil society-well-structured interest groups-rather than to the general citizenry. So the texts of the PdZ do not describe in a clear and plausible manner the procedures by which the involvement of ordinary citizens should be made possible. This article aims to demonstrate that this discrepancy be-tween the purposes declared within the PdZ and the means to be deployed is a catalyst for a process of privatisation of social policies. To this end, the article focuses on the PdZ as documents containing dis-courses, and analyses them through the lens of critical discourse studies (CDS)

In 1842, an impressionable 21 year-old named Friedrich Engels was despatched by his industrialist father from his native Germany to the city of Manchester, England, in order to learn the practices of sound factory management, and in particular, how to extract maximum value from the proletariat. The outcome of that particular parental decision was not what was intended. Engels was so horrified by the abysmal living conditions of the working class labourers of the Manchester cotton mills that his destiny as a cotton lord was arrested and the seeds of communist theory were sewn. As the historian Jonathan Schofield remarked in 2006, “without Manchester, there would have been no Soviet Union, and the history of the 20th century would have been very different” (Jaffries, 2006, n.p.). Engels is of course most famous for his astonishingly productive and profoundly influential collaborations with Karl Marx, and for the poignant eloquence of his masterpiece The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). The purpose of this special issue, however is to engage with three articles Engels wrote in 1872 for Der Volkstaat, which were published that year as a pamphlet entitled The Housing Question.

The affordable housing estate Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark, has been under transformation for the past eight years. Since the final adoption in 2011 of a Master Plan, implemented by the housing association running the estate and the Municipality in close cooperation, demolitions, infrastructural projects, and new constructions have been the order of the day. New national political discussions in 2018 opened for local discussions on the future of the estate, resulting in a City Council decision to work towards further demolitions and transformations than initially agreed upon. The City Council decision aims at creating a different social mix in the estate by removing affordable housing units and building owner-occupied and private rental units, attracting affluent citizens. The decision resulted in various responses from current residents. Here I will examine two forms of “resistance” – outright protest and relocation. I relate the two cases to the ongoing development of the estate and issues of planning and the construction of a particular future for the estate. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted from 2015 to 2019.

Commodifying Danish Housing Commons

Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen, 2016

Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association‐based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this, we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in the context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non‐profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio‐spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification – and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association‐based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non‐profit housing as a housing commons.

This chapter focuses on the role of the Danish state in stigmatizing and displacing groups from targeted common, non-profit housing estates (the so-called ghettos). It looks closer at the resistance movements, with special focus on Denmark’s largest non-profit housing estate, Gellerupparken. The chapter draws on an intersection between the literature of critical urban theory and social movement research. It highlights the increasing production of inequalities in Denmark and the concentration of precarious socio-economic groups in rental housing. The chapter explores the government's ghetto politics, relevant policy documents, and state-led territorial stigmatization and displacement. It addresses how different actors have been trying to subvert the ghetto stigmatization through different forms of resistance such as the new social movement Almen Modstand (Common Resistance) as well as independent activists fighting against what they see as a racist politics. The ‘ghetto package’ has been met with a growing number of resistance movements and activities in Denmark.

The concept of the ‘right to the city’ may be just such a transformational idea, tugging at human rights norms in new ways. According to scholars Anders Lund Hansen and Eric Clark, the human rights city can, and should, embrace the concept of ‘the right to the city’, which focuses on urgent issues of social inequality, including spatial and economic rights of city dwellers. As the challenges of urban inequality become increasingly central to human rights discourse on an international scale, a flexible frame that recognises the ‘right to the city’ as a component of human rights is well-positioned to respond to these issues locally and regionally. This resonates with the observations of Interviewee Hanna Thome, a member of the Malmö City Council, who noted that in implementing human rights frames “it is especially important to work with the parts of society and groups who represent the most vulnerable”.

Social Housing: A Key Part of Past and Future Housing Policy

Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Policy Briefs, OECD, 2020

Social housing is an important dimension of social welfare policy and affordable housing provision, representing more than 28 million dwellings and about 6% of the total housing stock in OECD and non-OECD EU countries.
According to the policy brief on social housing published by the OECD at Housing Europe's annual conference on 15 October 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the enduring housing affordability and quality gaps facing many households.
Investments in social housing construction and renovation should be a central part of a more sustainable, inclusive economic recovery, reinforced by the EU’s “Renovation wave” announced in early 2020 as part of the European Green Deal.
Publication of the policy brief was co-funded by the European Union Programme for Employment and Social Innovation.

Care and Homelessness in the Shadow of Planetary Crisis

Louise Fabian, Anders Lund Hansen and Mads Engholm, 2020

This working paper will report from the lives of homeless people in Denmark, and touch upon some of the issues and challenges that many homeless people, drug users and people with mental illness in Denmark are facing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The working paper is based on interviews with homeless people, care workers and activists from shelters in Denmark, insights provided by mental health NGOs, as well as literature reviews and reports from NGOs and government reports. Furthermore, the working paper will point to important issues to be aware of when we support vulnerable people and substance users while they are in quarantine or isolation, in care sites or still living on the street in times of COVID-19 – and to be considered in the aftermath of the crisis when the long-term consequences start to show. The paper will furthermore place the current crisis in a broader discussion on how the city and its public spaces unfold and are regulated through material phenomena, economical tools, discourses, laws and policies such as e.g. policing, surveillance, corporatization, privatizations, urban design and stigmatization that aggravate existing global patterns of socio-spatial exclusion. We will explore how these different strategies for heightened urban/public space regulation, potentially strengthened by the COVID-19 have problematic implications for the disadvantaged “Other[s].” Finally we will argue, that living in the shadow of planetary COVID-19 crises teaches us that accepting our vulnerability and interdependence is the key to our survival. When the stranger is potentially turned into the contagious Other, we need more than ever to insist on our capacity to care, to relate and to be in common.

Academic and political debates about the extent to which planning influences the volume, type, location and affordability of new housing have not gained as much prominence in Portugal as in England, where planning obligations are aimed at providing new affordable housing, as well as a mix of housing tenures. Yet, in England, the use of Section 106 in planning agreements to secure affordable housing as a proportion of new developments has received mixed reactions: at times considered a successful public value-capture tool while, at others, as a neoliberal policy that is not generating the expected results. The purpose of this research, which is based on literature reviews and semi-structured interviews with government advisors, local officials, and academics, is to investigate why and how planning for affordable housing has been used in England and not in Portugal. The data shows that divergence in the adoption of planning obligations for affordable housing is the result of different but interdependent causes: path dependency (a concept which suggests that past events influence present and future ones), ideology (values, beliefs and a general political orientation regarding how society ought to be and how to improve it), and planning cultures (collective social practices with their specific roots, legal traditions, ethos, etc.).

The absurdity of bureaucracy is a contemporary implementation study that unveil how organisational complexity and inefficacy is fed and sustained by employees well-meant attempts and almost primal instinct to compensate for malfunctioning bureaucratic systems by repairing them, short-cutting them, or surpassing them.The absurdity of bureaucracy is a contemporary implementation study that unveil how organisational complexity and inefficacy is fed and sustained by employees well-meant attempts and almost primal instinct to compensate for malfunctioning bureaucratic systems by repairing them, short-cutting them, or surpassing them.

Traditionally, Germany was known for providing quality market-rate and subsidized housing for the majority of its population. But currently, the country is facing a severe housing crisis. Within the last decade, rents, and prices for residential property have steadily increased. This increase has especially, but not exclusively affected major cities and their surrounding regions.

Please send entries to the reading list to Maliq or Morten.