41.7 Comparative urban housing market neoliberalization – A methodological framework

Wednesday, August 1, 2012: 12:00 AM
Faculty of Economics, TBA
Distributed Paper
Justin KADI , GPIO, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
For some three decades neoliberalism has dominated housing policy discourse and formulation across advanced capitalist societies. In recent years, particularly urban housing markets have become central to market-based reforms. Initially, theories of housing neoliberalization have been developed mainly in the North-American and UK context. But over the last years a growing body of work focusing on the continental European and Asian experience has become available. However, studies that deal with housing policy change at the level of cities and systematically compare reforms across diverse political, geographical and cultural contexts have so far been rare. As a result, to date, little is known about contextual differences in form and effects of marketization across cities. This paper presents a methodological framework to investigate market-based housing reforms in a comparative manner. Housing marketization thereby is understood as a general feature of contemporary urban development, which however takes path-dependent, locally-specific forms in different contexts. The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated with a case study of reform experiences in three world cities located on different continents, New York, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Main argument of the paper is that a comparative perspective on urban housing market neoliberalization is urgently needed to shed light on the context-contingent forms of market-based policy changes that transform cities across (advanced capitalist) societies in the contemporary period.