STREAM 2: The global urban housing question

For many across the world, housing is an unfulfilled human right. Contemporary housing production is evermore related to processes of privatisation and financialisation linked to the increasing importance of transnational investors in local housing markets. Simultaneously, housing policies are designed to encourage capital circulation in the built environment, enforcing various forms of deprivation, exclusion and urban enclosure.

We encourage papers tackling the housing question by addressing one or several of the following questions:

1)  How is the global urban housing question manifested in everyday experience, and what are its primary causes?

2)  What is the relation between housing policies, real estate markets and the right to housing?

3)  What processes of transnationalisation and financialisation of housing markets are taking place in different local contexts? Who are the new global landlords?

4)  What challenges to the housing question are being posed by contemporary housing movements?  What is the emerging alternative right to housing?