Collection

Housing estates in the era of marketization – governance practices and urban planning

Submission status
Closed

Since the global turn towards neoliberal governance regimes at the end of the 20th century the commodification of housing, accompanied by the financialization of real estate, has not left any housing market or market segment untouched. This special issue, entitled “Housing estates in the era of marketization – governance practices and urban development”, contains 10 European case studies on how marketization has affected the governance of large housing estates across Europe. The collection includes novel contributions from well-studied countries such as France or the United Kingdom, cases from Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden) and Mediterranean (Spain) countries, as well as articles from a variety of post-socialist countries (Estonia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Russia, Romania, Czech Republic). With this, the issue provides a yet unique collection of the diversity of experiences that have emerged in housing estates across Europe over the past two decades.

All articles focus on the interconnections between problems found in the development of housing estates and the processes of privatization and marketization. Collectively, the papers address two main research gaps: (1) we demonstrate that marketization and financialization, rather than being a challenge for housing policies, are now preconditions for the development of contemporary housing, incl. housing estate neighborhoods. Present-day housing policy and governance analyses thus need to live up to this state of affairs; (2) we address the need for an up-to-date pan-European overview on contemporary urban governance and planning practices related to LHEs, with the ambition to draw conclusions based on the extremely diverse institutional landscape of European countries (incl. from less studied cities of Central and Eastern Europe).

Editors

  • Kadri Leetmaa Kadri Leetmaa  &

    Kadri Leetmaa

    Kadri Leetmaa holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Tartu, Estonia. Currently she works as the Director of the Centre for Migration and Urban Studies and an Associate Professor in human geography at the Department of Geography, University of Tartu. She is the member of the Scientific Board of the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany. Since 2017, she has served as the Estonian responsible coordinator of the Estonian National Contact Point of the EU territorial cooperation programme URBACT. Her research topics include, inequalities in urban and rural space and segregation, policies and planning, and more.

  • Matthias Bernt Matthias Bernt

    Matthias Bernt

    Matthias Bernt is the acting head of the research area "Politics and Planning" at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (Erkner) and adjunct professor at the Institute for Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has formely worked as a research associate at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig (2001–2008) and at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Rostock. Since 1998, he has held teaching positions at various German universities. He received his doctorate in July 2001 with a dissertation on Berlin's urban renewal policy.

Articles (11 in this collection)