Families, Housing and Property Wealth in a Neoliberal World

The twenty-first century has so far been characterized by ongoing realignments in the organization of the economy around housing and real estate. Markets have boomed and bust and boomed again with residential property increasingly a focus of wealth accumulation practices. While analyses have largely focussed on global flows of capital and large institutions, families have served as critical actors. Housing properties are family goods that shape how members interact, organise themselves, and deal with the vicissitudes of everyday economic life. Families have, moreover, increasingly mobilized around their homes as assets, aligning household transitions and practices towards the accumulation of property wealth. The capacities of different families to realise this, however, are highly uneven with housing conditions becoming increasingly central to growing inequalities and processes of social stratification. This book addresses changing relationships between families and their homes over the latest period of neo-liberalization. The book confronts how transformations in households, life-course transitions, kinship and intergenerational relations shape, and are being shaped by, the shifting role of property markets in social and economic processes. The chapters explore this in terms of different aspects of home, family life and socioeconomic change across varied national contexts.

Richard Ronald is Professor of Housing and Chair of Political and Economic Geographies at the University of Amsterdam. His research, focussing on housing in relation to social, economic and urban transformations in Europe and Asia Pacific, has been funded by various public bodies including the European Research Council, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He has been Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, the University of Birmingham, UK, and Kyung Hee University, South Korea, and Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. He is the current Editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s ’Contemporary City’ book series and former Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Housing Policy.

Rowan Arundel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His research focusses on dynamics of housing inequalities and interactions between housing, labour and welfare, although he has a broader interest in spatial analysis and macro and micro quantitative methods. He has been the recipient of both the European (ERC) Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship and a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Veni Fellowship. His current project, ’WEALTHSCAPES: the spatial inequality of housing wealth accumulation’, confronts the crucial role of both housing market spatial polarization and divided housing access in driving growing wealth inequalities in the Netherlands, the UK and Spain.