Rowland Atkinson and Keith Jacobs: House, home and society
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Rowland Atkinson and Keith Jacobs: House, home and society Palgrave, 2016, 192 pp (Paperback), ISBN: 978-1-137-29402-9 Jana Verstraete1
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Studies on housing are performed by a wide number of disciplines such as geography, architecture, sociology, political sciences and economy, each focusing on specific issues. In House, Home and Society, Rowland Atkinson and Keith Jacobs bring together discussions and research on a wide number of issues related to housing and the position of different social groups within this field. The authors strive for an articulation of ‘the scope of the sociology of housing to shed light on contemporary societal values, policy challenges and demographic changes that, in combination, continue to influence the way we live’ (p. 2). Relying on the work of Kemeny (1992), the authors alert us that a sociology of housing should be aware of possible risks when creating a specific discipline. Firstly, the endeavour aims to introduce a critical perspective which is often lacking because housing studies is largely an applied area of policy-driven and policy-oriented research, looking for solutions for specific issues rather than questioning societal structures behind those issues. Secondly, it should go beyond an empiricist account that lacks conceptual focus and provide more indepth, explanatory frameworks. The book is designed to be easily used by students and teachers. At the end of each chapter, a number of questions are given which enable discussions and further analyses by its readers. The book opens with an introduction of primary concepts and their interrelations, such as home, household, housing pathways and tenure (chapter 1), and a brief discussion of key theoretical perspectives that have been applied in the field of housing studies (chapters 2 and 3). In the next part of the book, the authors discuss house and home through the lens of gender and sexuality (chapter 4), groups losing their home for various reasons such as & Jana Verstraete [email protected] 1
Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Ghent, Belgium
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J. Verstraete
eviction, gentrification and warfare (chapter 5), and crime, harm and victimization (chapter 6). The following chapters (7–8) bring in society more strongly by connecting housing to the state and the market. Atkinson and Jacobs show how inequalities within the field of housing are related to wider societal, political and economic structures. A central line throughout this part of the book is the shift of housing as a consumption good or a place for shelter to an investment good used to accumulate wealth and make profit by both individual households and larger economic actors (chapter 7). The authors investigate the role of the government in this shift by looking at, among other focuses, how governments are primarily concerned with the interests of homeowners and rental investors, and maintaining investment opportunities for wealth accumulation while only in second instance being comm
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