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Housing is a basic need. Suppose only this banal statement is so undisputed that it serves as the basis for an internationally recognized social right. In that case, housing as a practice and the conditions that socially and spatially structure it is of enduring and compelling social importance. It is precisely for this reason that housing, more than any other aspect of human life, reflects processes of social change. For this very reason, housing reflects social transformation processes like hardly any other aspect of human life.

In the context of globalized, financialized, and flexible capitalism, housing, primarily organized on a market basis and marked by social individualization, is again undergoing significant transformations. From the perspective of interdisciplinary housing research, four fundamental and sometimes contradictory trends of change can currently be recognized.

The Research Training Group approaches the transformation of housing along three areas of work: subjective housing practices (everyday life and appropriation), social organization and distribution (regulation and control), and the design, construction, financing, and operation (production and management) of housing. From different perspectives, the projects examine how social transformations and spatial materializations are reinforced, linked, or persistently blocked and manifest themselves in particular ways in housing transformation.