Bringing Disability to the Forefront: Highlighting the Work of the ENHR Disability and Housing Working Group by Dianne-Dominique Theakstone (University of Stirling)

Foreword by Jenny Hoolachan (University of St Andrews)

Despite decades of sociological work highlighting that ‘society’ and all that it encompasses is intersected by gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and a myriad of other facets, the relationships that these social structures have with housing are sometimes downplayed in favour of understanding the markets, policies and implications for suppliers and consumers.  Take disability, which is the focus of this post.  Recently, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the ‘bedroom tax’ is discriminatory against families with disabled children[1].  This decision followed a legal challenge by Paul and Susan Rutherford who require an additional bedroom in their home for overnight carers and the storage of specialist equipment needed for their severely disabled son.  Indeed, many challenges to the legality of the ‘bedroom tax’ policy have been based on the subject of disability, and quite rightly so.

However, disability only tends to enter public discussions of housing when it relates to financial matters or changes in legislation.  While specific cases, such as that of the Rutherfords, certainly help to bring disability to the forefront of policy debates, the full extent of the disability-housing relationship remains largely hidden.  What follows is an overview of the work of the ENHR Disability and Housing Working Group which is still in the relatively early stages of development.  The post provides a small flavour of the scale and depths of the challenges that disabled people face when navigating a world that has been built for non-disabled people.  It is the hope of the Working Group that promotion of their work will attract the attention of fellow researchers, funding bodies, policymakers and the general public in order to advance the housing rights and improve the experiences of people with disabilities.

 

The Disability and Housing Working Group by Dianne-Dominique Theakstone (University of Stirling)

In 2014 the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR), Disability and Housing Working Group began. This post shares the activities of the Working Group over the past 18 months and upcoming plans. Comments and suggestions are welcome around events, knowledge exchange or research collaborations.

The ENHR 2014 conference enabled the Chairs to hold a kick-start meeting for the proposed Disability and Housing Working Group. We recognise that a lot of effort is required to raise the profile of disability within international housing research strategies and debates. The following central themes were identified at the meeting:

• Disabled people and their housing conditions, housing preferences, housing design, access to housing services, legal rights (housing and anti-discrimination), housing options and accessible environments.
• Housing research on disability that adopts a holistic approach towards impairment (loco-motional, sensory and cognitive).
• Promote application of interdisciplinary perspectives to housing research and practice which is related to disabled people.
• Examination of central concepts to disability and housing such as ‘empowerment’, ‘user-led’, ‘vulnerability’ or ‘special needs’.

The working group held its first workshop at the ENHR 2015 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Diverse papers were submitted from representatives from Russia, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, Germany, Scotland and Norway. These can be viewed at: http://www.enhr.net/enhrconferences.php

The aim of the Working group is to stimulate debate around the policy and practice implications of disability and housing research. An evidence base will enable a holistic perspective across countries. For example, at the 2015 ENHR conference the papers submitted to this working group exhibited diverse insights into the living conditions of disabled people across Europe.

Solvar Wago & Karin Hoyland’s paper highlighted that the Norwegian Disability Discrimination and Accessibility Act (2009) requires adjustment to take into account the needs of different groups of disabled people within society.

María Aránzazu Calzadilla Medina delivered a law perspective in relation to disabled peoples’ housing in Spain. The paper critically assessed the various amendments that the Spanish Horizontal Property Act 49/1960 (21^st July) has gone through which revealed that progress is going in the right direction. However, barriers still exist where it is not a right to have freedom to access a person’s home or work environment.  Furthermore, payment schemes for adaptations are subject to variable supplementary fees and there has been opposition from communities for potentially expensive costs.

Andreas Plum’s paper illustrated the lived experiences of disablement. This paper presented results from a survey of disabled people in Dresden. It concluded that there is a need for more barrier-free housing and living spaces, especially with current ageing populations with associated increasing impairment levels.

In the Netherlands, Clarine van Oel outlined the ways practice can be improved through the user perspective. Her research demonstrated a methodology involving 3D virtual reality preferences whereby participants with dementia chose colour schemes, surface finish and space dimensions of a care-home hallway. Results indicated areas of conflict between the preferences of users and caregivers. For example, the former preferred a white or warm colour scheme, while caregivers’ assumed a warm colour scheme would feel more welcoming.

Aleksandra Burdyak discussed the emotional implications for disabled people living in inaccessible homes in Russia. Attention was particularly drawn to the challenges of estimating the numbers of disabled people through national statistics, different definitions of disability and potential areas where disabled people can be missed from data sets. Results from a telephone survey showed that disabled people in Russia experience social isolation, low incomes and high medical costs. Aleksandra Burdyak concluded that policy is required for future barrier free homes/environments and to address the emotional wellbeing of disabled citizens.

In Thailand, Sasicha Sukkay’s paper outlined the benefits of joint working. She explained that collaboration between physiotherapists, architects and disabled people, has helped to identify the need for improved accessibility standards within bedrooms and bathrooms. This work will be presented to the Thai Government to shape future policy.

Finally, Dianne-Dominique Theakstone presented a proposition of a Citizenship of Humanity. This emerged from a comparative study of disabled peoples’ access to independent living in Scotland and Norway. The Citizenship of Humanity model addressed the need for disabled peoples’ access to independent living, in policy and practice, to be facilitated at micro, meto and macro levels of societies.

The discussions that followed these papers highlighted the following issues:

• The need for policies or guidelines to incorporate the needs of sensory and cognitive impairment groups, as well as those who have loco-motional impairments.
• Accessible housing contributes towards prevention of health conditions which may have arisen, for example, through falls.
• More work is required to promote a holistic perspective where accessible housing is located in accessible environments with accessible services and accessible public transport.
• Accessible housing should not solely be perceived as wheelchair user specificity, as suitability for the needs of other disabled people or families should be recognised.
• Projects should ensure that research methods are evaluated for accessibility (not just wheelchair accessibility – see previous point).
• Research plays an important role to enable users’ voices to be heard by caregivers, frontline organisations and policy-makers.

Future plans

The Co-Chairs would like to thank David Thomson for his participation as an intern with the Disability and Housing Working Group. David will be providing invaluable IT and administrative support. To find out more about his work visit: www.thomsondesign.net.

For the ENHR conference 2016 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we will welcome papers that fit the central theme(s) of the working group and that are based on qualitative, quantitative or mixed-methods research. Theoretical papers are strongly encouraged that might potentially shape the future research in this field. The working group would support ongoing collaborations with the goal of fostering future joint publications and project proposals. Hopefully this will raise the profile of disability as a distinct significant area within housing studies.

Connections shall be made with other conferences such as the Disability Studies 2016 conference held at Lancaster University, UK; as well as the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR). The NNDR will be held on 3rd-5th May 2017 in Orebro Sweden and we will be keen to submit a paper, poster or symposium on behalf of the Working Group. Further information can be found at this link: http://www.oru.se/jps/nndr2017/

Finally, I have now set up a Facebook page where people can keep up-to-date with the ongoing work of the group.  This can be found at https://www.facebook.com/DHWgroup/

 

By Dianne-Dominique Theakstone (University of Stirling)

d.d.theakstone2@stir.ac.uk

[1] The ruling was also based on the bedroom tax being deemed discriminatory against victims of domestic violence.

Quantum Subjectivity – Understanding the Dual Consciousness of David Cameron by Joe Crawford (University of St Andrews)

In September, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to Oxfordshire County Council to ask what more they could do to ameliorate the very cuts that his government has imposed across the country as part of its never-ending-austerity programme.   The irony of this needs no further elaboration.

I wish to use this blog post to propose three possible explanations for David Cameron’s actions.

The first and most simple explanation is that the man known as ‘Call me Dave’ is a ‘liberal’ in the general (and worst) sense of the term.  Among a great many other problems, the liberal condition has a very strong tendency to decouple all that is inextricably linked while aligning all that is disparate.  For example, on one level (say, the liberal myth of meritocracy) there is no ‘perceived’ connection between rich and poor in the sense that the existence of one has no ‘obvious or visible’ determining effect on the existence of the other (rich people are seen as being talented and hardworking, poor people are lazy and feckless).  Yet in another sense liberalism aligns a diverse range of people (with vastly uneven and unequal volumes of economic and cultural capital) with politically motivated rhetorical sound bites such as ‘we are all in this together’, ‘we all need to tighten our belts; or ‘we should all pay our fair share’…etc.  Dave has himself produced a very useful example by recently decoupling any connection between the rise of ISIS and western military intervention in Iraq, and by aligning disparate groups of people who oppose the bombing of Syria under the broad rubric of ‘terrorist sympathisers’.  This is what liberal politicians, journalists and academics have a strong tendency to do, they decouple all that is linked and align all that is disparate.  So, in his letter to Oxfordshire council, Dave seems to have decoupled any link between his own party’s austerity measures and the cuts being made to his local council services and aligned the government, local and county councils and the public in sharing responsibility for the task of doing all they can to lessen the impact of the cuts (which his government is responsible for imposing).

The second explanation for understanding this situation revolves around the notion that Cameron is exercising a form of ‘cynical practice’ (see Crawford and Flint 2015).  This form of cynicism arises when professionals (often public sector managers) are all too aware of the distance between the reality (what can realistically happen) and the mask they wear in public (the pretence they wish to promote), yet still insist on wearing the mask (despite everyone’s acknowledgement of the distance between the two).  Carlen’s (2008: 20) example is useful’

For while ‘everyone knows’ that the chief inspector was only ‘doing his job’, ‘everyone else knows’ that in-prison programmes and decent regimes are almost certainly not in themselves going to reduce offending…So why lose credibility (or your promotion, or even your job if you are a prison officer or a prison governor) by continuing to say what everyone else always and already knows?

Perhaps then, since Cameron knows that austerity is a political rather than economic programme, his letter to Oxfordshire council could well be a cynical ploy.  He knows what he’s doing but pretends he doesn’t know.  Dave could be playing a double bluff.

Thirdly, there is what I’ve decided to call ‘quantum subjectivity’ a concept similar to the psychological  notion of ‘cognitive dissonance’ but without there being too much ‘dissonance’ involved.  Quantum subjectivity arises when an agent harbours two (mostly contradictory) positions on the same subject.  The position which emerges depends almost entirely on the situation within which the agent finds him/herself.  We don’t know a person’s position  until we engage them, an activity which always takes place within a context, located within both social and physical space.

Think Schrodinger’s cat.  Is it alive?  Is it dead?  Until you look (thus pinning it down to one state or the other) it is both at the same time.  A quantum particle can be in two places simultaneously, only once you pin it down (by observing it), does it provide its location.  In sociological terms, what a person ‘thinks’ is often determined, not by their social position (as classical sociology might suggest), but by the situation in which they find themselves when they are ‘pinned down’ to having to express an opinion.  My own research provides useful examples.  When discussing eviction practices with housing professionals, they would freely alternate between structural and individual discourses depending on the context. On one hand they would adopt a position in which structural factors played the most significant role in the causes of rent arrears (the problem was collectivised and therefore depersonalised), and in another context would adopt a position quite the opposite of that, where it was the irresponsible behaviour of the tenant which was the issue (the problem is then individualised and thoroughly personalised).  So, in short, the same professionals, from the same offices, oscillated between the same binary frames in order to deal with the contradictions contained within the practice of evicting tenants.  Quantum subjectivity, it seems, allows professionals to deal with the inherent contradictions, political tensions, and moral ambiguities which have come to characterise modern ‘public service’ provision in the UK.

The ‘quantum subjectivity’ explanation suggests that David Cameron’s position on austerity is determined by the situation in which he finds himself.  When Dave is at home, in Oxfordshire, drinking tea in the garden with his wife and children, the effects of the cuts to his local services appear to him to be so severe, he is compelled to write to the council to ask why more cannot be done to reduce their impact.  When David Cameron is in Parliament, surrounded by his Bullingdon Club chums, all braying like donkeys, manically waving their order papers as they ridicule and berate those in opposition, the government’s austerity programme seems the most sensible policy for dealing with problems, the real impact of which David Cameron appears to know absolutely nothing about.

Two entirely different positions.

Two entirely different worlds.

Pictures [from David Cameron’s (Tenant’s) special relationship with Scotland] are published with kind permission from Greg Moodie

 

By Joe Crawford (University of St Andrews)

 

The Rentier and the Lumpen by Basak Tanulku (Independent researcher based in Istanbul)

This blog post will discuss the logic and the factors behind the current dual class structure, characterised by increasing lower and upper classes and declining middle classes. In this class structure, the upper and the lower classes, i.e. the rentier and the lumpen tend to have similar aspirations of speculation and consumption. From a psychological approach, the relationship between the lower, upper and middle classes can fit into a Freudian framework of id, superego and ego. In this framework, id corresponds to the animal inside a person, which needs to be satisfied, like sexual libido, hunger and thirst. Superego is the human part above all, corresponding to the narcissistic personality, which sees the self above everything and separates the good from the bad. Ego is in between the two, the suppressed part of the human personality. In this current society, superego is the rentier, free to do anything; id is the lumpen, who is unable to control basic instincts and to be satisfied; and ego is those in the middle, pushed from all sides, living in constant debasement. In this context, it can be argued that the rentier (the superego) and the lumpen (the id) vote for the same political parties, and share the same political and ideological ambitions and sexual fantasies. However, the ego, those in the middle, is pushed from both sides, envied and debased at the same time:  ridiculed for being ordinary and conservative and isolated from mainstream life because of the power of the new rich and other parasitic forms of life that are seen to deserve the high life as the result of their material and symbolic wealth.

How have we ended up here? This psychosocial context fits into the political economy, which emerged in the 1980s, all over the world. This era has many names, such as “neoliberal”, “consumer”, or “global”, along with many more beginning with a “post-” prefix, although all these terms may have alternative meanings in different theoretical paradigms. During this period, particularly the developed countries restructured their economies through post-industrialisation, and shifted to service-based economies in which innovation and high technology became very important for any economy to be considered successful and competitive. The membership of the conventional working class has declined due to the impact of outsourced production to developing countries, a process accelerated by “globalisation”. In this process, the conventional working classes have transformed into people dependent on ‘ready’ money which prevented them from forming class consciousness. This led to the erosion of class solidarity among them, and the decline of trade unions and class-based politics. The offspring of the working classes became stigmatised through terms such as “benefit scroungers”, “chav”s or “asbo”s, which refer to the underclass or lumpen, or people with neither class consciousness nor solidarity who live in an era of consumption, celebrities, football superstars and tabloid newspapers. They become symbolised through long-term unemployment, low levels of education, and an attitude towards life which can be summarised as “no future”. Their situation is legitimised by political actors and those who profit from such a political context. In this new class structure, the conventional middle classes have also experienced a decline both in numbers and prestige, best represented by public sector workers stigmatised for their perceived “non-job” jobs. Their declining status corresponds to a declining sensitivity towards accumulation and planning for the future, since a more differentiated consumer market with many products necessitated a throwaway society, with an apathetic attitude towards the environment, people and the future. The middle classes correspond to an ordinary, conventional and boring way of life, restricted in 9-to-5 work shifts and two-up two-down households consisting of a married couple with two children and pets.

However, there are also the winners of this new economic system. Despite their small numbers in the workforce, they had a high social status and important symbolic power in society: they are the “new middle classes”, i.e. people working in financial, real estate or various service or creative sectors. Within the new middle classes, new groups emerged, such as “yuppies”, “bohos”, and “hipsters”. Their lifestyle is characterised by an urban buzz around nice neighbourhoods, independent cafes, boutiques, small restaurants, art centres, and luxurious retail, residential and business complexes. At the same time, the “new rich” emerged, corresponding to a lifestyle characterised by spending sprees, luxury brands, and seven-star hotels in cities like London, New York, Istanbul, and Dubai, which created by world-known architects became highly standardised. The new rich create money out of thin air and can be regarded as ‘rentiers’, people who derive income primarily from speculation.

These changes have created a more polarised and unequal class structure. However, many have become fascinated by the power of money and lifestyles of celebrities. And in this context, there is a symbiotic relationship between rentier (the upper classes or superegos) and the lumpen (the lower classes or the ids). In this relationship, the rentier eats most of the cake made of easy money based on a principle of profit. Meanwhile, the lumpen lives with a hope of one day catching up with the status of rentier. This continuous hope, fueled by the promise of continued consumption, kills the lumpen day by day without them ever noticing. In this relationship, while the rentier is free to do anything they want behind closed doors, the lumpen feels free to do so in streets. Because of that, we see people who we would never expect to find together in a photograph, such as aristocrats of various ranks, rentiers and celebrities who are regarded as national treasures in their countries.

 

By Basak Tanulku (Independent researcher based in Istanbul)

A Return to Purer Waters? The Supreme Court Re-Casts the Pereira Test by Jed Meers (University of York)

In his oral arguments in the recent Supreme Court decision in Hotak, Jan Luba QC argued that ‘the safest course when dealing with a statute is to drink from its pure waters.’[1] He was talking about s.189(1)(c) Housing Act 1996, which details the ‘priority need’ hurdle homeless applicants must navigate to be owed a housing duty by their Local Authority.

Another post on this blog has outlined s,189(1)(c) and the problems with its interpretation through the so-called Pereira Test. The approach taken was to assess the applicant’s vulnerability against that of an ordinary street homeless person, which in turn led many homeless applicants who plainly appeared to be in need of assistance – such as Mr Ajilore – to be denied a housing duty under s.193 Housing Act 1996. This position had come under sustained criticism for moving far beyond the ‘pure waters’ of the statute, and creating discretionary space for the infiltration of considerations absent from the original intentions of the legislation.

However, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court has reconsidered the meaning of ‘vulnerable’ under s.189(1)(c), ruling that its interpretation should be revised.

The facts of the three claimants (outlined in detail in paras.19-33) each turn on a particular element of the Pereira Test. In his lead judgment, Lord Neuberger outlined the three key issues addressed in the case: (i) whether the assessment of vulnerability requires an exercise in comparability, and if so, to whom; (ii) whether support from others can be taken into account when assessing vulnerability; and (iii) what role, if any, does the Public Sector Equality Duty under the s.149 Equality Act 2010 play. I will deal with each of these.

Firstly, the judgment is clear that ‘vulnerability’ necessitates some exercise of comparability, as an adjective which carries ‘a necessary implication of relativity’ (para.51), akin to the assessment of being ‘tall’ (para.92). Clearly, comparison demands a comparator. Here, the Court dispensed with the ordinary street homeless person, which was considered to be against the original intentions of the legislation and lead to ‘arbitrary and unpredictable outcomes’ (para.56). In other words, in the use of a street homeless person as a comparator, the test was assessing vulnerability using an already incredibly vulnerable benchmark. Instead, the Court assessed that an ‘ordinary person who is in need of accommodation’ (para.59) was the appropriate comparator.

The question in interpreting s.189(1)(c) therefore, is – simpliciter- whether the applicant would be, when homeless, significantly more at risk of harm than an ordinary person in need of accommodation (para.52). Perhaps with some of the more ornate constructions of comparators by Local Authorities in mind, the Court was clear that this ‘ordinary person’ is: ‘robust and healthy’ (para.71), made without reference to the resources available to the Local Authority (para.39), and cannot be formed from the ‘very dangerous’ use of statistics (para.43).

Secondly, the majority of the Court considered that taking into account support from third parties was a relevant factor which flows from the ‘contextual and practical’ nature of s.189(1)(c) (para.62), albeit with the requirement that such support would – if it were to mitigate a finding of priority need status – have to be provided on a ‘consistent and predictable basis’ (para.65).

The final key issue is the role played by the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). The judgment highlighted it as ‘complementary’ duty, requiring a sharp focus on: (i) whether the applicant has a protected characteristic under Chapter 1 of the 2010 Act, (ii) the extent of this, (iii) the likely effect of the protected characteristic in the broader context of the applicant’s position if they were to be made homeless, and (iv) whether this results in them being ‘vulnerable’ (para.78).

The ruling of the Court is a long-awaited decision which is likely to have far-reaching consequences. There are two points worth noting here.

Firstly, the revised judicial interpretation coupled with the complementary PSED, appears to enhance obligations towards those with disabilities. Indeed, it may well be the case that the findings of fact inherent in the process to claim DLA (or PIP) would prima facie render the applicant vulnerable. Even for lower rate components, the factual tests inherent – such as being unable to walk outdoors ‘without guidance or supervision from another person most of the time’ (s.73(1)(d) SSCBA 1992) – would appear to indicate that such an applicant, when homeless, would be significantly more at risk of harm than a ‘robust and healthy’ (para.71) ordinary person in need of accommodation (para.52).

Secondly, there is clear anxiety in the lead judgment to ‘emphasise the primacy of the statutory words’ (para.59), and consequently avoid the construction of already highly vulnerable ‘street homeless’ comparators. However, this inevitably leads to the question of what characteristics – if any – such a comparator possesses, and how ‘significantly more at risk of harm’ should be interpreted with reference to them (para.51).

Though this judgment is a positive step forward from the old downward drag of Pereira, the spaces it leaves in its re-casting will result in significant further litigation. In emphasising the original meaning of the statute, the Supreme Court has attempted to return to ‘purer waters,’ but quite how the revised interpretation of s.189(1)(c) will work in practice within Local Authorities already straining under huge financial pressures, remains to be seen.

[1] Incidentally, for those looking to fill a quiet evening, it is now possible to watch all UKSC hearings on their ‘on demand’ service. The footage of Jan Luba QC’s remarks can be see here https://www.supremecourt.uk/watch/uksc-2013-0234/151214-am.html at 58:04 – 58:17.

 

By Jed Meers, University of York

The importance of knowing comfort for sustainability in the built environment by Line Valdorff Madsen (Aalborg University Copenhagen)

What is the meaning of comfort?

As a social scientist finding my way into the research field of energy consumption and sustainability in the built environment, I find that the concept of comfort is often taken for granted. Comfort seems to be everywhere in discussions and research on energy efficient buildings but mostly inscribed as thermal comfort, if defined at all. The meaning of the word comfort is implicit in energy research as are the implications of comfort for energy consumption, particularly in technical literatures which do not regard comfort as a social concept, nor sufficiently explores the underlying reasons for expectations and levels of comfort. For the most part, such research explores how technologies can provide (thermal) comfort more efficiently – without compromising expected standards and levels of comfort. The emphasis is thus on how to make ‘users’ adapt and use more efficient technologies in the ‘right’ energy efficient way. Such scholarship seldom deals with how to adapt technologies to a sustainable everyday life, or questions what comfort really is and how it influences sustainability. To me significant questions remain, such as: What does comfort mean to people in their everyday life? How much and what kind of comfort do we need? Can we ask people to compromise their comfort to reach goals of reducing energy consumption? These questions are not dealt with, at least in the more technical research focusing on technologies. The socio-technical research on comfort does offer some additional insights about people, practices and conventions but it too links comfort to indoor temperatures and the like (e.g. Shove et al 2008).

The technological fix vs. ideals of home and comfort

To me it seems that the limitations of existing research perpetuate a common belief in a technological fix that has not yet proven able to turn our high levels of energy consumption around. This reflects research which has traditionally had a strong focus on behavioural theory and individualised agency, as has already been pointed to in sociological energy research (Gram-Hanssen 2010, 2014, Shove 2003, 2010, Strengers 2011, 2013). Since Fanger defined levels of thermal comfort, as early as the 1970s, understandings and standards of comfort levels have not changed much, apart from a more adaptive approach to the relation between users and buildings (e.g. Nicol & Stevenson 2013, Roaf et al. 2015). I therefore propose that it is necessary to understand comfort in housing from an everyday life perspective, and that we ought to understand comfort as something that gives meaning to, and guides, many everyday practices in the home. Not least, to understand comfort in housing is also to understand how we feel at home and what makes a house into a home (see blog post by Katherine – I can put in a link here to another blog post).

In Denmark, where I am based, households stand for around 30 percent of the energy consumption and we are finding that the amount of energy used in homes (e. g. for heating) is not decreasing significantly despite homes becoming ever more efficient (Danish Energy Authorities 2013, Gram-Hanssen 2013). I believe that this trend has to do with social conventions and the aspiration for greater comfort, through ideals of ‘better’ and bigger houses. In the western world there are very strong ideals related to housing, that portray the ideal home as a detached, owner-occupied house that should have at least one (bed)room for every family member to ensure privacy (see for instance Maller et al. 2012). In Denmark one-family houses make up 44 per cent of the housing stock. The average dwelling size is 111.5 m2, while the average household size is 2.1 persons. More rooms, larger communal space and an increasing amount of energy consuming appliances is now combined with fewer occupants per square metre (an average of 52 m2 per occupant in 2013) (Statistics Denmark). From an historical perspective, it appears that as family size has decreased, the size of our homes has increased.

As such it is imperative to explore ideas of comfort and how these carry meaning in relation to our everyday life and homes, since this may help to explain some of these phenomena. Comfort in housing is bodily, sensory, social and related to the ‘home’ as a socio-spatial system (Blunt & Dowling 2006, Mallet 2004). Explicitly, to feel at home is closely related to feeling comfortable and vice versa – to feel comfortable in a house is very much related to homeliness. This relationship can be examined by looking at everyday home-making practices, specifically how we perceive and construct comfort through such practices. Thereby also pointing to reasons why energy consumption in housing is often not linear to what is expected, as we practice comfort in different ways. Indeed, comfort cannot be measured solely by the means of average temperatures as there is more to comfort than what is measureable. Looking at the concept of comfort via the social practice theory framework, changes the focus from technologies and measureable parameters, to the relationship between the material and the social that characterizes daily comfort in our homes, by focusing on shared everyday practices of, for example, heating, refurbishing, laundering and cooking: practices involved in home-making. This can also shed light on how conventions guide everyday practices of comfort and how other meanings (of e.g. family life, gender roles, taste) take part in this. It means that the ‘building user’ is not merely a user of a technology, but rather an everyday practitioner and home-maker that interacts with energy technologies, the material structures of the house, the social relations of families and others and that have both bodily and mental sensations. All these things are involved in shaping comfort. So, what does this mean for the future of energy consumption in the built environment? Well, one thing is sure, the concept of comfort needs a redefinition, as we cannot achieve truly sustainable homes without recognising that comfort is shaping our homes and the practices within them, and this is essential to the way energy is consumed within the four walls of the home.

References

Blunt, A. & Dowling, R. (2006) Home, Routhledge, London

Danish Energy Authorities (2014), Energistatistik 2013, Energistyrelsen, København

Gram-Hanssen, K. (2010) Residential heat comfort practices: understanding users, Building Research & Information, 38 (2)

Gram-Hanssen, K. (2013) Efficient technologies or user behaviour, which is the more important when reducing households’ energy consumption? Energy Efficiency, 6 (447-57)

Gram-Hanssen, K. (2014) New needs for better understanding of households’ energy consumption – behaviour, lifestyle or practices? Architectural engineering and Design Management, 10

Maller, C., Horne, R. & Dalton, T. (2012) Green renovations: Intersections of daily routines, housing aspirations and narratives of environmental sustainability, Housing, Theory & Society, vol 29 (3)

Mallet, S. (2004) Understanding home: a critical review of the literature, The Sociological Review, 52

Nicol, F. & Stevenson, F. (2013) Adaptive comfort in an unpredictable world, Building Research and Information, vol. 41 (3)

Roaf, S., Brotas, L. & Nicol, F. (2015) Counting the costs of comfort, Building Research & Information, vol. 43 (3)

Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience – the Social Organization of Normality, Berg, Oxford

Shove, E. (2010) Beyond the ABC: Climate change policy and theories of social change, Environment & Planning A, vol. 42

Shove, E., Chappells, H., Lutzenheiser, L. & Hackett, B. (2008) Comfort in a lower carbon society, Building Research & Information, 36 (4)

Statistics Denmark (2014) Statistical Year Book 2014: Living, Danmarks Statistik, København

Strengers, Y. (2011) Negotiating everyday life: The role of energy and water consumption feedback, Journal of Consumer Culture, 11 (3)

Strengers, Y. (2013) Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life – Smart Utopia? Palgrave Macmillan, London

 

Line Valdorff Madsen Aalborg University, Copenhagen

 

 

From rags to riches? New planning implications of temporary use in Germany By Thomas Honeck (Leibniz Institute for Regional Development & Structural Planning, Germany)

Those who have visited German cities such as Berlin, Leipzig or Stuttgart in recent years might quickly have noticed the importance of temporary spatial uses for local identities. During the last 25 years, temporary uses have developed from informal – often even illegal – civil society initiatives to institutionally funded features of formal urban planning in Germany. While planners’ appreciation of temporary uses first grew in transforming cities in the East of Germany, such projects are nowadays also planning options in prospering cities and form part of the local business promotions. During the last two decades, German urban planning embraced temporary uses and gradually institutionalized related practices: in 2004 the building code was changed; nowadays many cities conduct public agencies or hire private consultants to facilitate temporary uses, and different administrative levels up to the federal ministry instruct studies on the potential of transient spaces.

In our project InnoPlan funded by the German Research Foundation (similar to British ESRC) at Leibniz-Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS) and Stuttgart University we research such drastic changes from former planning routines and ask how new planning approaches emerge, institutionalize and spread. Focusing on intentional acts of stakeholders during these processes we conceive the new way planning involves temporary uses as a social innovation. It is critical to point out, that our understanding of innovation does not include any normative assignments: in contrast to most notions in international literature, we do not conceive social innovation as ‘positive’ from a moral or ethical standpoint. Instead, we apply the analytical conception of social innovation proposed by the sociologist Werner Rammert.

Projecting Rammert’s understanding of social innovation (2010: 39) on the “rise of temporary use” in German planning, three aspects appear as essential. First, temporary uses can be understood as recombinations, reinterpretations and redesigns of already existing elements of planning or other fields. Second, temporary uses have been perceived as improvements and have, hence, been imitated in other contexts and adapted to them. And third, the new meaning of temporary uses may lead to a larger scale conceptual change of planning in Germany. Furthermore, we define social innovations in planning as social constructions with fluid identities, meaning for example that first experiments with temporary uses may differ to recent transformations and adaptations of the concept (Braun-Thürmann 2004: 4).

The long tradition of innovation research provides a large diversity of analytical and methodological concepts and tools that can be applied to the fields of urban planning. The possibilities of our proposed perspective as well as the results of our research will be presented in a full paper soon; but a few appetizers shall be mentioned here already. As a result of a discourse analysis, we identify five main phases in the lifecycle of the innovation. In a first phase of latency starting in the 1960s, the stage for the innovation process had been prepared in two main discourses: on the one hand, the planning system was criticised for its top-down dominance and tabula rasa approaches in urban renewal. On the other hand, the consequences of multidimensional structural changes such as large inner city vacant sites became more obvious, and planners and academics started to notice a lack of tools to react to them. The second is a phase of formation, in which the first experiments with temporary uses were carried out especially in East German cities such as Leipzig and Berlin or the Ruhr area, one of Europe’s largest deindustrialising regions. In this phase, the duality between informal temporary uses and formal urban planning slowly turned into dialectic. More and more positive notions of temporary uses appeared in related discourses. A third phase of fermentation was mainly characterised by processes of learning. From this time on, the literature on temporary use increased rapidly, research projects have been carried out and different administrative and political levels drew attention to temporary uses. Particular groups can be understood as agents of change since they facilitated symbioses between different actors and intentions. During a fourth phase of stabilisation, the new ways of planning involving temporary uses gradually became formalised and normalized. As a strong legitimation for the formerly new practices, the discourse on creative cities and creative industries gained attention in Germany. Subsequently, the economic dimension of temporary uses for a city became more evident. More prosperous cities considered temporary uses as relevant for their cultural and economic development.

Parallel to the normalisation of temporary uses in planning, in a fifth phase of critique, conflicts related to temporary uses reached the surfaces of several discourses. Temporary uses were described as “motors of gentrification” and “fields of self-exploitation”. Due to conflicts related to the immanent temporality, as for example in the case of the Berlin airport Tempelhof, planners started to be more careful involving temporary uses. In reaction to the critique – and similar to the phase of latency – nowadays, new forms of projects involving temporary uses develop as “innovations of the innovation” or “process innovations”.

As our short teaser suggests, the German debates on temporary uses are extensive. The innovation-perspective we chose is an analytical and non-normative one. Nevertheless, the presented results may provoke critical interpretations and inspirations for further research: how did the constellations of actors and motives of temporary uses in planning change from early to current implications? Can we maybe conceive the way planning recently embraces grassroots-practices as a commodification?

 

References:

Rammert, W. (2010): Die Innovationen der Gesellschaft. In: Howaldt, J. and Jacobsen, H. (ed.): Soziale Innovation. Auf dem Weg zu einem postindustriellen Innovationsparadigma. Wiesbaden: VS Verl. für Sozialwissenschaften, 21-51.

Braun-Thürmann, H. (2004): Zum sozialwissenschaftlichen Verständnis von Innovationen. Planungsrundschau. 9, 9-17.

 

Thomas Honeck (Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning)

‘When an uprising of the property owning classes in Hampshire is your best hope for the future you know you’re in trouble’ By Andy Inch (University of Sheffield)

This is a post about the land-use planning system in England. This is not a subject that makes it high up the list of topics that ‘critical urbanists’ tend to consider sexy, or even perhaps remotely interesting. Still, I make no apologies for that. You see planning is in a pretty parlous state in England. Successive governments have identified governmental control of the use and development of land as a regulatory burden and a significant barrier to economic growth. At times the construction of planning as a key economic problem has reached heights of absurdity that a fine comic writer would be proud of.

I remember watching the BBCs ‘Newsnight’ not long after the 2010 election when Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Harriet Harman’s favourite ginger rodent was on. Asked how the Coalition was going to sort out the broken British economy following the worst economic crisis in living memory Alexander cited planning reform as one of the two or three key ways in which the Government was going to unlock growth. That’s right. Planning Reform. It was as if he had stumbled across Michael Heseltine’s infamous speech from the early ‘80s and taken literally his reference to planners having ‘jobs locked in filing cabinets’. All they had to do was find the keys the idiot planners had lost.

Some time after that the government announced the first relaxation of permitted development rights. This somewhat arcane change to what homeowners are allowed to build without the need for planning permission was widely trailed in the media as another key plank of the government’s recovery package. As if the hassle of securing planning permission was the only thing preventing people from unleashing the wave of conservatories that was needed to bring back sustained prosperity. Bugger endogenous growth theory. We just need everyone in Hampshire to build a bigger sunroom.

Since then there has been initiative after initiative. According to Steve Quartermain, the lucky man who until recently went by the title ‘Chief Planner’ at the Department for Communities and Local Government, there wasn’t a single pre-budget statement in which George Osborne didn’t announce further deregulatory planning changes during the last parliament. It’s a trend that seems to be continuing.

This is hardly surprising. The ‘Treasury view’ of planning has long been informed by the basic Hayekian assumption that any attempt to plan economy or society is just another step along the road to serfdom. The fact that the right to develop land remains nationalized in England must seem like a painful anachronism from this perspective.

Depressingly the only thing that seems to be holding back the neoliberal attack are the thousands of Conservative voters sitting in their already amply proportioned sunrooms in Hampshire, tutting over the Daily Telegraph and relying on the planning system to preserve their green and pleasant views.

As Malcolm Tait and I argue in a forthcoming paper on the Coalition governments’ approach to planning reform, the Conservative political tradition has an uneasy and somewhat contradictory relationship to the idea of planning control. Different forms of conservative thought suggest very different attitudes towards planning, from the one nation ‘conservationism’ of the National Trust and CPRE through to neoliberal advocates of the raw efficiency of the market. These attitudes also draw on very different ‘spatial imaginaries’, the former generating deeply felt attachments to primarily rural landscapes, the latter viewing place as little more than a ‘competitive asset’. We argue in the paper that the balance of forces between these traditions defined the coalition government’s politically troubled oscillation between discourses of ‘growth’ and ‘localism’.

Since we shaped that argument, however, the steady onslaught of deregulatory pressure has built further. I now wonder whether we need to consider a slightly different interpretation, one with even bleaker political implications.

Speaking in 2010, Nick Boles, who was soon to become planning minister, suggested a seemingly more Schumpeterian view of planning. A view premised on the value of ‘creative destruction’:

Do you believe planning works? That clever people sitting in a room can plan how people’s communities should develop, or do you believe it can’t work? I believe it can’t work, David Cameron believes it can’t, Nick Clegg believes it can’t. Chaotic therefore in our vocabulary is a good thing.

What if we read the steady feed of deregulatory measures that have been passed since as a fairly successful programme for chaos; a strategic attempt to manage and overcome the tensions between different Conservative traditions whilst steadily pushing back against the idea of planning control?

Hugh Ellis from the Town and Country Planning Association is one of the few voices to highlight the significant negative effects that key, detailed changes to the policy regime are having. This includes, in no particular order:

• The strengthening of a presumption in favour of (sustainable) development, coupled with the need for local authorities to have an up-to-date five year supply of land for new housing has made it much harder for local authorities to defend against unwanted speculative development.
• The heightened emphasis on the financial ‘viability’ of development that has led to the loss of significant public benefits including large amounts of affordable housing that is typically negotiated from developer profit.
• The changed definition of affordable housing that means developers only have to produce housing at 80% of market rates
• The loss of space and sustainable building standards
• Further changes to permitted development rights which mean that authorities now have no control over the conversion of existing offices, warehouses etc. into new housing. This is leading to the ongoing loss of large amounts of office space in high demand areas, particularly London; converted into homes without any means of checking whether the construction or space standards are adequate, or whether there is adequate provision of schools or open space.

It can be hard to get excited about these details of planning law and policy. But taken together these changes are substantial and represent the further hollowing out of planners’ capacity to regulate in the public interest.

Some of the changes, like the loss of control over new housebuilding, are bothering the retirees in their sunrooms and so may generate further political trouble for the Conservative party. Others, however, like the new permitted development rules, are not likely to affect them very much at all. As Ellis argues, however, these changes risk creating the slums of tomorrow; poor quality places that will have significant impacts on people’s lives, particularly those who have no other choice.

Planning control was created as a response to the effects of ‘chaos’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prompting the society to react against the all too visible hand of the market. The legacy and reputation of planning is now so tarnished that we seem to have forgotten those lessons. Perhaps it will take the slums of tomorrow to remind people. In the meantime advocates of planning as a politically progressive force are left with few allies – when an uprising of the property owning classes in Hampshire* is your best hope for the future you know you’re in trouble.

 

*with all due apologies to the good people of Hampshire.

 

Andy Inch (University of Sheffield)

 

PLEASE NOTE: This post was originally received in January 2015 and therefore was written before the May 2015 general election.  Andy has kindly made a few tweaks in recent weeks to update the post.

 

 

 

Why segregation studies are stuck in Chicago By David Manley (Univeristy of Bristol)

The way in which we study segregation hasn’t really moved forward since the 1950s. Much of the literature that we use and the measures that we employ owe their conception to the Chicago urban school of thinking.  The thing is, these traditional ways of understanding segregation do not fit the modern urban environment. Of course, they didn’t really fit the 1950s urban landscape in the United States either but that was not the point: a measure that described the proportion of people that wold need to move to gain an equal distribution of whatever characteristic was of interest was sufficient. In the US that characteristic was racial inequality, and there wasn’t really a need to debate how the segregation had come about or what drove it: what they needed to know was how much segregation was there. Recently, scholars have noted that the city of Chicago isn’t particularly representative of US cities (no surprise), but that it also isn’t particularly representative of the other rust belt cities either.  Given that our understanding of segregation comes from a unique place at a particular time frame in history it is perhaps time to rethink how we investigated segregation more generally.
The most common measure of segregation is known as the Index of Dissimilarity. The thing is, it is biased. Studies by economists which simulated urban data have demonstrated that the Index of Dissimilarity has a tendency to record higher values of segregation than actually exist – that is to say it is upwardly bias. Actually, more recent work has suggested that it is more complicated than that and that the bias in the Index tends to move values towards 0.5 (or saying that to achieve an urban landscape with no segregation around half the population would need to move home). This is troubling because it suggests that what we thought we knew about segregation is wrong – or at least not as clear as we thought. However, even if the index was not biased there is a bigger problem that pervades the studies that have used it. I mentioned above that in the US segregation studies were, rightly, concerned with racial inequality. The modern segregation literature is much more diverse than this and not only considers segregation along racial or ethnic lines but also include multiple other factors as well: class; social; economic, and; cultural to name a few and the index has been deployed to measure all of these and more beside. But in doing so researchers trying to understand how segregation is playing out in our urban environments are forced to over simplify. In the urban environment people do choose where to live (or get forced to live) purely because of their ethnicity or social status or age. There is a complex interaction between these factors (and others) which can serve to intensify or the resulting distribution of individuals within neighbourhoods. But the index has no way of help us determine which of the factors is the most important (remember that the index is bias so a higher value may not necessarily mean that there is more segregation, just that the index was bias) and nor can it help us understand how much age segregation there is once we have accounted for the level of educational segregation that occurs. Moreover, index values calculated for units of one size (say small neighbourhoods based on a couple of streets) cannot readily be compared with units of another size (say large neighbourhoods or even regions within a city) because the index is relative to the size of the units used. Crucially, this prevents us from identify the scale at which segregation is occurring.
What should we do about this, are all segregation studies doomed to repeat the same mistakes as before? No. Recent work undertaken with colleagues at the University of Bristol has developed an approach using multilevel models harnessing the idea that segregation is about the variability in the numbers of different groups within neighbourhoods, the greater the variable in the number of a group within neighbourhoods over a city the greater the segregation. Importantly, once measured in a modelling framework we are able to include multiple different types of segregation at once and even multiple scales. In doing this we might be able to further our understanding of one facet of the complex urban environment.

My Generation? The Use and Abuse of Generational Labelling By Adriana Soaita (University of St Andrews) & Beverley Searle (University of Dundee)

The ‘Lost Generation’, ‘Baby-Boomers’ and now ‘Generation Rent’ are popular labels attached to groups of people who are deemed to share particular social experiences. Such labels not only confuse distinct demographic, sociological and genealogical concepts but uncritically cast generational winners or losers. Drawing on 112 interviews from the Mind the (Housing) Wealth Gap study, we aim to clarify the concept of ‘generation’ using four key understandings. We tease out ideas of generational belonging among people aged 35-65 and reflect on generational identities and inequalities.

Demographers conceptualise ‘generations’ as birth cohorts – a population born in any one year often aggregated by decades. The examination of social change in relation to different cohorts at similar life stages through longitudinal analysis requires long term data series in order to differentiate between period, cohort and lifecycle effects. Although demographers clearly separate the concepts of cohort and age, our study indicates that peoples’ generational identities are generally not constructed within these categories:

I look around and there are older people similar to me and younger people similar to me! I don’t really see generations (male, 45).

I associate on a daily level with people of all ages, so I don’t really feel myself as part… There aren’t generations of people in society, there’s just a constant grey area, a constant flux of people (female, 40).

While rigorous longitudinal birth cohort analyses are welcome for the understanding of the enduring effects of socioeconomic events (such as economic growth or decline), cohorts need to be theoretically specified in relation to the subject of enquiry (Arber & Attias-Donfut 2007).

Mannheim’s (1927) concept of sociological generation tries to move away from simple chronological contemporaneity – ‘potential generation’/cohorts – to a more meaningful co-presence in a shared geographical location ‘where a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization’ (182-183). As the social context is differently interpreted by different individuals, these bonds emerge from, and coalesce in, ideologically and culturally different ‘generation units’ whose members share indirect ties of exposure to similar events. Mannheim’s theoretical contribution helps to question generational labelling while raising awareness of substantial socioeconomic inequality and socio-cultural difference within cohorts. Yet the concept of sociological generation was considered to be too static given that formative learning was exclusively located in early youth. We exemplify the idea of generational units and intra-generational inequality by two contrasting views from early Baby Boomers, the cohorts most likely to accept generational labelling:

I’m a baby boomer born 1949, so we’re the ones who’d never had it so good. We had everything (male, 63).

What generation I belong to? The poor one! (female, 61).

In the context of austerity, aging societies and low economic growth, the concept of ‘welfare generation’ has permeated public discourses. By differentiating between welfare contributors and receivers, several studies documented the changing balance of public spending between the young and the old and differentiated between winner and loser generations (Thomson 1996, Kotlikoff 1992). These studies were criticised on methodological and philosophical grounds (Buchanan 2009, Piachaud, Macnicol and Lewis 2009) as well as for their disengagement with the horizontal macro-distribution of resources across socioeconomic classes (Hills 2014) and the vertical micro-distribution within families (Kohli 1996, Arber and Attias-Donfut 2007, Hills et al. 2013). Generational changes in the balance of welfare were fully recognised by our participants – as captured in the quotation below – but so were the important differences in generational opportunities arising from technical advances and broader socioeconomic changes:

I am a late baby boomer born in 1964… early baby boomers have had the best time, they’ve done exceptionally well… Late baby boom, myself, are going to have a difficult end of life… Generation X, they had a good start but struggled in the middle… Then generation Y, or Z, or where are we now? They are going to have good schooling, health service but have to pay for education, are going to start paying for pensions for previous generations and their own… And they have to try getting on the housing ladder, which is going to be difficult if not impossible (male, 50).

Finally, the concept of genealogical generation was particularly employed in sociology. Linked genealogical generations [1] are often the most appropriate unit for the study of intra- and intergenerational inequalities since family is the recognised social institution that transmits privilege/disadvantage along individual life-course (Hills et al. 2013). Sound theoretical sampling allows linking family generations to Mannheim’s (1927) generational units. Our study suggests that while individual belonging to a genealogical generation is least problematic, its role in the transmission of social inequalities is generally overlooked on the assumption that gifts/inheritances are relatively equal and universal within particular cohorts (which of course runs against the evidence):

We are the generation that will reap the rewards of inheritance that grandparents and parents are able to pass on (male, 36).

The Mind the (Housing) Wealth Gap team continue to explore the multiple ways in which housing wealth reinforces inequalities within and between families, cohorts and generational units.

Adriana Soaita (University of St Andrews) and Beverley Searle (University of Dundee)

 

[1] Dyads or triads of children-parents-grandparents.

References

Arber, S. & C. Attias-Donfut. 2007. The Myth of Generational Conflict London: Routledge.

Buchanan, NH. (2009) What Do We Owe Future Generations? The George Washington Law Review, 77, 1237-1297.

Hills, J. 2014. Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us. London: Policy Press.

Hills, J., et al. 2013. Wealth in the UK: Distribution, Accumulation, and Policy Oxford: OUP .

Kohli, M. 1996. The Problem of Generations: Family, Economy, Politics. Budapest: IAS.

Kotlikoff, LJ. 1992. Generational Accounting: Knowing Who Pays, and When, for What we Spend. New York: Free Press.

Mannheim, K. 1927. The Sociological Problem of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Piachaud, D., J. Macnicol & J. Lewis. 2009. A Think Piece on Intergenerational Equity. London: Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Thomson, D. 1996. Selfish Generations: How Welfare States Grow Old. Cambridge: White Horse Press.

 

 

Adding to the Neighbourhood Effects Debate: a response to Crawford. By Bo Malmberg (Stockholm University)

In his Oct 17 2014 blogpost,  Joe Crawford argues that neighbourhood effects research is flawed because it focuses on only on how neighbourhood factors influence individuals and not on how individuals shape neighbourhoods. This is a valid point to raise but I am not sure that this argument fully acknowledges how neighbourhood effects studies are related to research on patterns of urban segregation.

“Neighbourhood effects research fails to acknowledge the simple assertion that where there are stratified societies there will be stratified areas of residence”, Crawford argues. I do not think that this is correct. To the contrary, if areas of residence were not stratified no-one would, in my view, consider it worthwhile to engage in a study that looks for effects of residential social context on the life-course of individuals. The existence of residential stratification is, thus, the starting-point of contextual effects studies. Maybe sometimes a taken-for-granted starting point but if some studies do not mention it explicitly it is nonetheless a starting-point.

But what Crawford argues is perhaps that neighbourhood effects research has another implicit assumption, namely that if there are neighbourhood effects then more socially mixed neighbourhoods could be a means to reduce urban inequality. But even if this is what Crawford claims it is not a valid argument against neighbourhood effects studies. The motive for such studies is, instead, to find out if residential stratification not only reflects social stratification, but if it also can contribute to deepen social stratification.

As demonstrated in a recent study by Chetty et al (2014) this very much seems to be the case, at least in the US context. It is possible that Crawford would argue that the Chetty study reflects a liberal world outlook and I would agree. But where I and Crawford might differ is that I find it is of interest to know if segregation can be one driver of social inequality, whereas Crawford from a critical perspective maybe looks at this as a non-issue.

It is understandable that Crawford after a reading of Bourdieu has come to the conclusion that neighbourhood effects studies have little interest. But to base an evaluation of neighbourhood effects studies on Bourdieu is not necessarily a good idea since Bourdieu’s analysis of the role of spatiality in social reproduction is exemplarily weak. “Socially distanced people find nothing more intolerable than physical proximity”. Yes, but this is not exactly news, and it is not an absolute truth. What Bourdieu in general fails to acknowledge that taking up residence in privileged neighbourhoods can be an important means by which privileged groups seeks to ensure the reproduction of an appropriate habitus.   Bourdieu’s analysis of how this reproduction is maintained in schools is ground-breaking but he more or less totally lacks an analysis of the role of neighbourhoods in this process.

Yes, neighbourhood effects research does face important challenges as argued by David Manley in a follow-up to Joe Crawford’s blog. And every research fields has examples of less well-designed studies. There are, however, no strong reason why such challenges cannot be overcome and I would argue that much progress has been made in recent years. Especially important here is the use of longitudinal designs. But also improved measures of residential context that overcomes the problem with using fixed statistical areas (Andersson and Malmberg 2015), and the use of exposure time for identifying neighbourhood effects (another Chetty et al 2015 paper).

Finally, in contrast to Crawford I would argue that a good understanding of how residential context shape the life course of individuals is central concern in urban research precisely because of the dialectic between the subjective and the objective. Neighbourhood contexts constitute objective factors that shape life-course trajectories, which in turn are instrumental processes of neighbourhood change. If the first part of this process is not understood then the second part cannot be understood either.

Bo Malmberg, Dept. of Human Geography, Stockholm University

 

References

Andersson, E. K., and B. Malmberg. (2015) “Contextual Effects on Educational Attainment in Individualised, Scalable Neighbourhoods: Differences across gender and social class”, Urban Studies 52 (12):2117-2133.

Chetty, R.; Hendren, N.; Kline, P. and Saez, E. (2014) “Where is the Land of Opportunity?  The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States”, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 19843.

Chetty, R.; Hendren, N. and Katz, L.F. (2015) “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighbourhoods on Children: new evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment”, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 21156.