Close
Thesis title: National Housing Strategy and Market Mediation in London
Primary supervisor: Professor Nick Gallent
Secondary supervisor: Professor John Tomaney
We hear that the housing market in the UK is broken. This break down has been associated with a shift in the function of housing from a ‘utility’ to an ‘asset’, or ‘asset-based welfare’. When we speak about this ‘function’ of housing, we are in part talking about market demand: the function that housing can serve to individual consumers as a (complex) commodity. But home ownership, and the wealth accumulation it affords owners, also serves a socio-economic function at national and global levels. The demand for housing in local markets and the broader place of housing in our economy are therefore linked. What is the nature of this relationship?
This study traces the emergence and institutionalisation of housing as an asset in broader, ‘macro’ national housing strategy, as well as in more ‘micro’ market practices that embed the function of housing ‘as an asset’. Using a structurational approach, it also asks how the political economy of these two levels interact.