Trends in the transformation of housing

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: Diversification and digitization, privatization and financialization, social and spatial polarisation and precarity, and the global climate crisis and ecologization of housing. Contradictory developments characterize these four closely related trends and harbor the potential to deepen the social and ecological tensions associated with housing or generate transformative forces to resolve them. From a spatial perspective, they impact contexts with different framework conditions, actor structures, and path dependencies.

The Research Training Group aims to examine the four trends of change in housing in their interrelationship and their respective spatial materialization, in which they become concrete manifestations of social conditions. Due to its inertia and longevity, this materialization influences everyday practices, social interactions, and future paths of social development. Housing, therefore, lends itself to a relational analysis of social processes, everyday practices, and spatial-structural form. In it, the social and political conflicts of objectives over limited spatial resources recur.

The concept of the “ideal modern lifestyle” was defined by the separation of work and home life and the distinction between public and private spheres. The home was a space for the nuclear family and personal intimacy. However, social transformations have significantly changed everyday living practices in recent decades. Following a greater individualization of social relationships and a pluralization of lifestyles with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, housing as a central place of reproduction has once again been transformed under the conditions of flexibility capitalism, including its technological developments, since the 2000s: The increase in socio-economic and socio-spatial inequality, the pluralization of household structures and family forms, the flexibilization and dissolution of boundaries in work, migration movements and changing mobility patterns, the renegotiation of gender relations and new demands of care work as well as the digitalization of all areas of life have impacted on housing practices and ideals in many ways and are reflected in everyday coping.

The associated shifts in the spatial organization of housing are currently visible, for example, in the sometimes contradictory increase in the importance of micro-apartments, shared care homes, collective accommodation and communal forms of housing. Furthermore, the reciprocal transformation of housing and housing practices can be seen in the flexibilization of floor plans, in multi-local living and urban nomadism, in the socially selective shift of gainful employment back to the home office or in the form of the introduction of digital smart home technologies.

In almost all European housing regimes, public or non-profit housing companies and the state as owners have lost ground over the last 30 years. Given the privatization of public housing stock, the responsibilization of social security systems, the reduction of social housing stock, and the long period of low interest rates in the 2010s, which has now come to an end, private home ownership has gained importance. In addition, given the financialization and globalization of housing supply since the 1990s, institutional financial market-oriented owners have become considerably more critical. Their investment strategies range from segregated luxury new buildings and upgrading existing buildings to the operation of ‘junk properties’ that are poorly maintained and rented out to recipients of transfer services. Since the financial crisis of 2008, this process has gained momentum in some European countries, with institutional investors in Spain and Ireland, for example, buying up residential units from indebted mortgagees and transferring them to a financialised rental sector.

What often goes unnoticed is that these processes also impact structurally weak or rural areas: Delocalised ownership structures and yield-oriented management strategies encourage disinvestment in housing, particularly in areas where the expected returns are low. They thus reinforce the effects of emigration, demographic shrinkage, and the lack of housing quality. In contrast to the process of financialization, cooperatives and other actors oriented toward the common good have recently developed a new appeal. Their strategies are credited, in particular, with permanently low rents, socio-
spatial integration functions, and potential for innovative architecture. However, the sustainability and transformative power of these initiatives remain to be determined.

Given rising rents and land prices, the housing issue is returning in Europe’s growing cities and urban regions in the form of increasing housing poverty, homelessness, and housing shortages, which primarily affect lower and middle-income groups and have taken on a new urgency in light of recent migration movements. In contrast, structurally weak, peripheralized towns and villages struggle with vacant housing and a lack of investment to provide high-quality and affordable housing.

Because of drastically rising energy prices, the housing affordability crisis will become even more pressing in both urban and rural contexts in the future. The social crisis in housing supply is reflected in a multi-layered spatial polarization and housing restructuring: at the housing level, in an unequal distribution of housing quality and living space, and in terms of urban space in social segregation and displacement processes. Regionally, this development is reflected in the expansion of suburban settlement areas, the growing importance of new ‘rurban’ lifestyles near growing regions, and the ongoing disqualification of living space in peripheralized regions.

Given these new housing issues, the political debates surrounding the contradictory interpretation of housing as a social or economic good and the associated policies, e.g., in planning, tenancy, or property law, are becoming increasingly conflictual at local, regional, national, and European levels. A continuity of market-compliant (or neoliberal) perspectives, on the one hand, is contrasted by increasingly post-neoliberal strategies, on the other, which are being demanded not least by social protest movements and civil society initiatives and have also characterized municipal policies in recent years. The subject of housing serves as both a reflection and an amplifier of social inequality and as a place where the crisis of social reproduction can be experienced in socially diverse and gendered ways; it became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now becoming visible again because of the precariousness of energy supply.

Finally, housing is also changing due to the climate crisis and the associated ecological challenges. For example, housing practices are changing due to the climate, and strategies for climate impact adaptation and carbon dioxide avoidance are being implemented. The latter goes hand in hand with requirements for existing buildings, new construction, utilization, and residential environment design to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality, reduce land and resource consumption, and adapt residential areas to changing urban climatic conditions and diversified housing needs.

The associated design, urban planning, urban ecology, and construction requirements represent an opportunity for the sustainable design of the environment. At the same time, however, their realization is accompanied by economic, social, or fiscal policy conflicts of interest. Such as, climate upgrading of existing buildings is brought into play against demolition and new construction, the reduction of living space is demanded first and foremost in social housing construction, and the preservation of inner-city or peri-urban green spaces collides with new construction projects from a microclimatic perspective. Additional conflicts might be energy-efficient construction limiting the income of private investors, the social justice of the cost distribution of energy modernization or high heating costs due to inadequate energy standards is up for debate, or new single-family home neighborhoods designated in shrinking municipalities for fiscal policy reasons instead of using vacant properties.

At the same time, the greening of housing raises questions about the relationship between the city, the suburban hinterland, and rural areas. It is closely interwoven with the regional organization of work, mobility, and supply, the associated reconfiguration of urban-rural relationships into ‘rurban’ landscapes and lifestyles, and their often ecologically problematic effects. Given the trends described above, it appears to be an unrivaled social challenge.