The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have exposed rental housing as a mechanism that generates important inequalities of wealth, health and wellbeing in much of the world, failing to give many tenants a ‘home’. Academic interest in the Anglo-Saxon and the old EU member states has recently contributed perturbing insights (e.g. poor housing quality; insecurity, eviction), raising legitimate concerns about tenants’ wellbeing in more hidden, hence riskier private renting sectors (PRS) where informal transactions increase risks and hide vulnerability away from state regulatory gaze.
Sharing these important concerns, this project (AFFECTIVE-PRS) engages with the affective economies of emerging, ‘hidden’ PRS, taking as a case-study the post-communist space, specifically Romania. It aims to: Understand a hidden social world, by asking why tenants and landlords engage in the sector, whether their practices permit making a private tenancy home, and how they construct ideas of power, risk and trust; Advance theory by conceiving home as an assemblage of materials, money, relations and affects; Inform the national and international debate on PRS regulation.
Methodologically, this project has developed a synthesis of the international literature; has approached tenants and landlords in Romania through an online qualitative questionnaire, which allows them to freely and fully describe their experiences; photo-elicitation interviews to obtain deeper insights; and a co-production workshop with policy, practice and academia in order to imagine a sustainable and fair PRS in Romania and inform the national debate on its regulation.
As the PRS generates important inequalities of wealth and wellbeing, it is important to maximize the project impact. Academic impact has been and will continue to be attained through publications and dissemination through conferences, seminars and workshops. Findings have been and will continue to be communicated to the general public through briefing papers, blogs, media articles and a “Guide for Good Practice” as well as through interactive digital platforms. By helping construct a shared understanding of good practice in the PRS, the project could theoretically improve the lives of many private tenants, whether it be the officially registered 252,000 or the estimated number of over one million.
