This research theorizes the impact of property regimes on people’s experiences of citizenship in 5 countries: Greece, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. The project has now completed all 5 research phases and accomplished beyond its research aims. By placing conflicts over housing within the larger framework of “property regimes” the project expanded the analytical frame to examine how property’s market mechanisms, policy regulations, and moral discourses impact people’s lived experiences of citizenship and democracy.
Specifically, six core themes emerged from the qualitative research as salient across all five country cases: 1. the project showed the need to treat “rent” not as an amount of money people pay to live somewhere, but rather as a social relations that requires human circulation in order to produce value (Ill-Raga, 2024a & 2024b); 2. the project analyzed the way that specific property regimes require corresponding citizen “subjectivities” that transform over time (Karyotis and Sakali, 2024); 3. it demonstrated that housing precarity should be understood as a form of (racialized)”slow violence”; 4. it confirmed the need to view housing not as an individual matter that merely requires the aligning of individuals with housing units, but rather as places where individuals become integrated into specific “communities”, establish support networks, and access essential services such as healthcare, food, and education; 5. it further investigated the role of “financialization” and debt in shaping the social relations of housing; and finally, 6. it also touched on the larger philosophical and practical questions of how to develop “alternative housing” models that challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm which prioritizes growth and profit. See
https://www.propertyanddemocracy.org/themes/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana).
The findings from the quantitative analyses can be grouped into three main areas: (1) the relationship between property relations and income inequality in the aftermath of the global financial crisis; (2) the impact of technological changes on housing markets, local policies and citizenship experiences; and (3) the relationship between residential displacement, housing precariousness and citizenship status. The research identified the following important and unexpected trends: 1. an examination of three categories of housing property relationship (landlords, tenants and homeowners) reveals that the share of homeowners has declined substantially across countries, with the sole exception of Greece, 2. several countries in our sample exhibit a substantial rise in the share of landlord households, and where this has occurred, the decompositions reveal a striking rise in both overall and between-group inequality, independent of country-level variation in terms of housing policy regimes. Further analyses revealed that automation, digitalisation and platformisation are giving way to new housing practices, most notably in urban contexts.
The dissemination includes: 1 successfully defended PhD (with no corrections) and 2 more near completion, 1 co-authored book (3 more forthcoming), 7 journal articles, 7 book chapters, 32 public outreach publications, 43 presentations, 2 keynote lectures, 32 conference presentations, 4 short films, and the production of a TV-news segment. Additionally the project organized a large international inter-sectoral conference that resulted in immediate social impact through the creation of international networks and knowledge transfer to civil society organizations and the general public. For a full list of results see:
https://www.propertyanddemocracy.org/results/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)
