Historically, the main focus of the study of housing in advanced economies has been on houses that meet the accommodation needs of households: houses as the main residence of families. In recent decades there has been the growth in the numbers of houses used for purposes other than as a main residence, for example in the forms of the recent global spread of Airbnb and of foreign engagement in housing as an investment tool; alongside a set of ‘for housing’ houses (FHH) another, overlapping, set of ‘not for housing’ houses (NFHH) is emerging. The present paper begins by identifying four types of NFHH, and considers the significance of their growth. It argues that while the NFHH sector is relatively small it has large impacts, and these are such that they challenge housing researchers and policy makers to develop additional ways of looking at housing systems.
Comparative housing research is hindered by attempts to provide broad empirical categorisations of types of Housing Regimes and their equivalents and sweeping cross-country generalisations about their effects. Regime theory is right to recognise the housing provision is and can be organised in different ways but proselytises too strongly. Real issues and policy debates in countries are instead embedded in the existence of specific, tenure related, networks of housing provision and they widely differ across the world. Taking that on board can lead to more fruitful understandings.
The article focuses on gender aspects of globalisation and global restructuring and criticises the masculine bias of mainstream theories of globalisation. It is aimed at adding a global dimension to Czech gender studies. It looks at the way in which globalisation is gendered and based on gender ideologies, and how global restructuring affects and change gender systems. Primarily economic globalisation is addressed, and the changes in the organisation of labour globally are examined. Global production is dependent on cheap women's labour in the factories of multi-national corporations in the global south. The process of rendering labour more flexible and informal is associated with its féminisation. Care work and migration are also becoming feminised on a global scale. The article also analyses domestic work performed in the United States and Western Europe by women migrants from developing countries. All these processes are occurring within the context of neo-liberal policies and the changing role of states amidst a global restructuring, which needs to be examined from a gender perspective.
The changing world economy since the 1970s and the decrease in welfare and deregulation in the Global North have led to an inefficient and declining stock of affordable housing. In the Global South, the need to economically catch up with the Global North has led to a lack of sustainable affordable housing policies. Social and affordable housing policies in the Global South have been either non-existent or very inefficient. The aim of this short paper is to start a discussion (and contribute to the existing ones) on how the social dynamics of informal settlements may be a source of new approaches to the provision of affordable housing in the Global North and South. Despite their illegal status and characterisation as urban blight, informal settlements are frequently illustrative examples of collaborative processes in the areas of planning and development that depend on the social connections and relationships among squatter households.
The aim of the paper is to discuss selected methodological problems of quantitative comparative housing research. The analysis is based on EU-SILC data and the concept of overcrowding is considered. We used two alternative definitions of overcrowding rate, both based on normative assumptions and each giving slightly different results. We tried to answer the question, which definition is better. The basic idea was that the closer the ‘objective’ rate of overcrowding is to its ‘subjective’ assessment, the better the selected method (definition) is. Moreover, it was shown that while in more advanced countries the share of households that consider dwelling space to be a problem is significantly higher than the share of households living in overcrowded dwellings based on ‘objective’ criteria, in post-socialist countries the opposite is true.