David Madden

An urban sociologist, professor at the London School of Economics and co-director of its urban studies programme, Madden trained at Columbia University and first studied New York's public space and the transformation of parks and plazas under private management. His work joins the critical urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey with empirical research on housing in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In Defense of Housing (2016), written with Peter Marcuse, is the book that made him known: housing is at once home and commodity, need and asset, and the contemporary crisis is not a market failure but the result of the commodity winning. Madden and Marcuse describe residential insecurity, the fear of eviction, of non-renewal, of the impossible rise, as a common condition that disciplines those who live in the city, and argue that housing is always political.

The book became a reference for housing movements in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, and its proposal, decommodifying housing through public stock, cooperatives and rent control, has entered municipal programmes. Madden has since written on financialisation, on housing in the pandemic and on the sociology of the home, and co-edits the journal City. He is reproached for a diagnosis stronger than his solutions; his answer is that naming the conflict is the first step.