David Clapham: Remaking housing policy: an international study
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David Clapham: Remaking housing policy: an international study Routledge, 2018, 226 pp, ISBN: 978-1-138-19393-2 Marja Elsinga1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This book reflects on more than 30 years of neoliberalism in housing policy. It is written by a close witness who explains why neoliberalism had a huge impact on housing; probably far more than the 1990s housing experts he was among might have expected. David Clapham succeeds in describing the impact of neoliberalism on housing around five key concepts: privatisation, marketisation, commodification, financialisation and individualisation. This journal serves the housing research community I am part of. However, I need to declare that as part of a faculty of architecture, I learned that “housing (policy)” has quite a negative and neoliberal connotation among architects as well as urban planners. Urbanists emphasise housing as part of the neighbourhood and environment, whereas architects prefer the word “dwelling” over “housing”, since it is about the way people live. So, housing is more than a physical structure produced by markets and supported or not by housing policies. In his 12 chapters, Clapham makes it very clear that he masters this complexity of the topic. This book is very multidimensional and ambitious in analysing policies and therefore a great follow-up to “The meaning of Housing: a pathway approach (2005)” that focuses on households. I very much appreciate his selection of topics in these chapters. He thoroughly digs out the mechanisms and consequences of the neoliberal powers and manages to go beyond mere markets and policies. For example, he devotes chapters to neighbourhoods, homelessness and environmental sustainability. The chapters are nicely illustrated with six different cases. The selection of cases/countries, however, is rather unbalanced: UK is very dominant in the book; there are two other Anglo-Saxon cases (USA and Australia); and then three others from different continents (China, Argentina and Sweden). It made me pause, to think if this a matter of access to material, or does it illustrate an Anglo-centrist world view? The first chapter explains the aim of the book: analysing the neoliberal discourse and building an argument to guide readers to think beyond this discourse. The second chapter deals with housing policy and explains how the neoliberal thinking influenced policy, resulting in a shift of policy instruments. It concludes by emphasising the importance of * Marja Elsinga [email protected] 1
Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
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shared values and political ideology and, more in particular, equality and sustainability. The third chapter deals with housing regimes and explains a number of approaches: welfare regimes, path dependency and varieties of capitalism. It also presents housing regimes represented by the six “cases” that will play a role in the rest of the book. Chapter 4 deals with housing markets and housi
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