Centring Housing in Political Economy

By M. Aalbers, Brett Christophers. 2014

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism.

Subfields: Finance, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c52b1ec6b3a07a0c4f4c85d4ce7a832ec1a6142

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Citations in the corpus

Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe (2019, result): “Ultimately, we concur with the argument by Aalbers and Christophers (2014) that there is a real need to put housing at the centre of political economy, particularly when trying to understand the politics of financialisation.”
The false promise of homeownership: Homeowner societies in an era of declining access and rising inequality (2020, background): “Just as fundamental as a vision of wide-spread access in homeowner societies has been the assertion that the means to such a goal is through market mechanisms (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014; Flint, 2003; Shlay, 2006).”
The Great Moderation, the Great Excess and the global housing crisis (2015, background): “The ideology of homeownership (Aalbers & Christophers, 2014; Kemeny, 1981; Ronald, 2008) has spread to so many countries that we could speak of an international, or perhaps even global, trend.”
Financialization and housing: Between globalization and Varieties of Capitalism (2016, background): “Housing is central to the real-world political economy, but remains peripheral to academic political economy (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014).”
The global urban housing affordability crisis (2017, positive): “By framing the intellectual challenge in this particular way, this paper follows a recent call to urgently bring back political economy into housing questions (Aalbers and Christophers, 2014).”
The alternative financialization of the German housing market (2017, neutral): “In the next section, we discuss the supposed non-financialization of the German housing market and introduce our alternative framework of analysis that is inspired by a political economy approach (cf. Aalbers & Christophers, 2014).”
Constructing a New Asset Class: Property-led Financial Accumulation after the Crisis (2018, background): “The SFR asset class affirms the fundamental role for housing in the ideology of capital by assuring private property ownership, resource allocation by market exchange, and satisfaction of the accumulation imperative (Aalbers and Christophers 2014).”