Social housing
Social housing is housing built or subsidised by the public sector and rented or sold below market price to those who cannot afford it. Its share of the total stock —from 3% in Spain to over 20% in Austria or the Netherlands— explains much of the price difference between cities.
Vienna is the reference case: more than half of the population lives in municipal or subsidised housing, and the public stock is kept, not sold off. In Latin America the dominant model was the purchase subsidy on the periphery, which provided a roof and created distance. The pieces under this term compare both paths.
Videos on this term (56)
- Urban economy
Capitalist Accumulation in Space: David Harvey and the Urban Struggle
David Harvey explains why capital keeps remaking the city: spatial fix, uneven development and housing as an asset.
David Harvey 3 min read - Urban economy
Who Wins When the City Becomes a Business: Molotch's Growth Machine
Harvey Molotch's growth machine explains who really wins when the city becomes a business: developers, politicians.…
3 min read - Housing
Why People Buy Buildings to Leave Them Empty and Who Is to Blame
Emptying a tenanted block converts a wholesale valuation into retail profit: Savills figures, the Fidere, Patrizia…
4 min read - Urban ecology
Where Does Your Trash Go? Waste and Environmental Injustice
Household waste ends up burned or buried next to the neighbourhoods with the least power to refuse.
3 min read - Urban economy
Who Benefits from Luxury Built with Public Funds?
How a luxury district is manufactured in four steps, rezoning, public investment, brand and phased sales, and who…
3 min read - Housing
Empty Homes and Price Crisis: How Does the Market React?
Why homes stay empty amid a housing crisis and how the market reacts to correction: the home as store of value,…
3 min read - Urban ecology
Green Gentrification: When Parks and Trees Push Residents Out
Green gentrification is the paradox of the sustainable city: the park that a neighbourhood fought for raises rents…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The City Written by Speculative Funds: Why Planning Lost the Pen
How investment funds, not planners, order the city: Madrid's price surge, public housing sold to funds and Harvey's…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Housing
Di Virgilio: social housing and participatory urbanism
María Mercedes Di Virgilio on habitat, housing and the city in Latin America: precarious housing, social housing…
2 min read - Urban history
Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow: A History of Urban Planning
Cities of Tomorrow (1988) by Peter Hall traces the twentieth century's planning ideas, from Howard to Le Corbusier,…
Peter Hall 2 min read - Shrinking cities
China's Ghost Cities: Failure or Strategy According to Wade Shepard
Ghost Cities of China (2015) by Wade Shepard explains why China built empty districts, what became of Ordos or…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Edgar Pieterse: Spatial Justice and Sustainable Cities in Africa
Edgar Pieterse of the African Centre for Cities proposes radical incrementalism for African cities: improving the…
Edgar Pieterse 3 min read - Urban economy
Peter Marcuse: Social Justice and Urbanism Against Neoliberalism
Peter Marcuse explained how neoliberalism put planning at the service of capital and what a just city requires.…
Peter Marcuse 2 min read - Housing
Tom Slater: The Critique of Gentrification and Displacement
Tom Slater argues that gentrification is a policy, not a natural process, and that its real cost is displacement.
Tom Slater 2 min read - Urban economy
Jamie Peck: Constructions of Neoliberal Reason and the City
Jamie Peck's Constructions of Neoliberal Reason explains neoliberalism as a process that finds its laboratory in…
Jamie Peck 2 min read - Urban economy
Urban Change and Social Conflict: Roger Lee's Perspective
Urban change redistributes advantages and losses and therefore produces conflict. What the volume Urban Change and…
Roger Lee 3 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urbanism: What It Is and What Harvey and Brenner Propose
Critical urbanism analyses the city as a product of power and capital. What David Harvey and Neil Brenner…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
James Scott: Why the State's Grand Plans Fail
James C. Scott explains in Seeing Like a State why high modernist plans fail: legibility, Le Corbusier, Brasília…
James Scott 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local
Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999), edited by Çağlar Keyder, explains how Istanbul turned its…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Hong Kong as a Global City: Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui
Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui explain how Hong Kong went from colony to global financial centre and what that means…
Stephen Chiu 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
City Politics by Judd and Swanstrom: Power and Urban Governance
City Politics by Dennis Judd and Todd Swanstrom explains how US cities are governed: private power, growth…
2 min read - Urban economy
Land Policy: Power, Value Capture and Spatial Justice
Land policy decides who gains from urban growth. What it is, how Edward Soja links it to spatial justice and which…
2 min read - Housing
Sonia Hirt and Zoning: The Roots of Urban Inequality in the USA
Zoned in the USA (2014) by Sonia Hirt shows that the exclusive single-family zone, unique in the world, raises…
3 min read - Housing
Loretta Lees: Urban Regeneration as State-Led Gentrification
Loretta Lees shows that urban regeneration demolishes public housing and scatters communities in the name of social…
Loretta Lees 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity
Teresa Caldeira explains how São Paulo grew through self-built peripheries and split into fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read - Urban economy
Poverty Capital by Ananya Roy: The Critique of Microfinance
Poverty Capital (2010) by Ananya Roy shows how microfinance turned poverty into a market. From Grameen to…
Ananya Roy 2 min read - Public space
Susan Fainstein's Just City: Equity, Diversity and Democracy
The Just City (2010) by Susan Fainstein proposes judging urban policy by its equity, diversity and democracy.
Susan Fainstein 3 min read - Housing
Alfredo Rodríguez: Santiago, Social Housing and Los con Techo
Alfredo Rodríguez documented how Chilean housing policy produced ghettos on Santiago's periphery.
Alfredo Rodríguez 3 min read - Housing
Loretta Lees: Gentrification, Super-Gentrification and Displacement
Loretta Lees widened gentrification with super-gentrification, new-build and planetary gentrification.
Loretta Lees 2 min read - Urban economy
The Spectacle City: Consumption and Exclusion per Debord and Zukin
The spectacle city is built to be seen: events, icons and showcases that exclude residents. What Guy Debord and…
3 min read - Housing
Anna Minton: Ground Control and the Privatisation of Public Space
Anna Minton exposed in Ground Control and Big Capital the privatisation of public space, security by design and…
Anna Minton 3 min read - Shrinking cities
Postindustrial Cities: How They Reinvent Themselves and Who Wins
Postindustrial cities replaced factories with services, culture and technology. What David Harvey, John Friedmann…
2 min read - Urban ecology
Jennifer Wolch: Environmental Justice and Green Planning
Jennifer Wolch measured park poverty in Los Angeles and formulated the urban green paradox: the park that corrects…
Jennifer Wolch 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces: Globalisation and Urban Governance
Neil Brenner's New State Spaces explains how globalisation reorganised states in space: from spatial Keynesianism…
Neil Brenner 2 min read
