Policy movement in housing research: a critical interpretative synthesis

Abstract

The movement of housing policy across space/time has attracted considerable policy and scholarly interest. But once we accept that policy moves, interesting questions arise. Particularly: what is it that moves? Why do some policies move but others do not? Academic conversations have involved concepts like "policy diffusion", "policy transfer", "lesson-drawing", "fast policy", "policy mobility" and "policy translation"-but a clear picture of how these concepts have been used to interpret housing policy developments is absent. Through systematic bibliographical searches, we identified 55 'housing' publications to review. Our concern is the theoretical assumptions underlying these studies and their implications for the questions stated above. Through a grounded analysis, we identified 'dominant knowledge' as the key element shaping housing policy movement; highlighted five strategic conditions for mobility (summarized as ontological, ideological, institutional, legitimizing devices, and contingency); presented the sporadic engagement with questions of immobility; and synthesized authors' policy recommendations, particularly their calls for deeper engagement with the people affected by policies.

Cross-fertilizing knowledge, translation, and topologies: learning from urban housing policies for policy mobility studies

“…Accordingly, mobility scholars explore the circulation of urban policies by studying the inter-local movement of policy programmes, instruments, and concepts across time and space (see for overviews McCann, 2011;Temenos and Mc-Cann, 2013). Yet, within housing studies, the policy mobility approach has only recently gained currency (Soaita et al, 2020(Soaita et al, , 2021. Previously, comparative housing studies focused on national policies, along with a tendency towards methodological territorialism (Kemeny and Lowe, 1998; for an exception see Pickvance, 2001).…”

“…Urban housing policies present a particularly interesting example for analysing interurban policy circulation. The policy mobility approach has recently gained currency for studying housing policy movements (Soaita et al, 2020(Soaita et al, , 2021. Studies on the mobility of urban housing policies have focused on the movement of selected elements such as community land trusts (Thompson, 2018) or land value capture (Dembski et al, 2020).…”

“…Studies on the mobility of urban housing policies have focused on the movement of selected elements such as community land trusts (Thompson, 2018) or land value capture (Dembski et al, 2020). In their review of studies on the movement of housing policies, Soaita et al (2021) however criticize that "the way the relevant concepts are deployed does not always fully reflect the sophistication of the literature from which they are drawn" (Soaita et al, 2021:17). So, in order to develop a nuanced understanding of urban housing policy movements, I draw from studies focusing on knowledge circulation in the built environment, addressing transnational building practices (Faulconbridge and Grubbauer, 2015) and the translation of ideas (Jacob and Lees, 2013).…”

Mind the housing inclusion gap: The voice of people with disabilities in German housing politics

“…Housing is back on the discussion table. While politicians and researchers neglected the social relevance of housing for a long time (von Einem, 2016), the topic has reemerged onto the political agenda since the 2010s (Anacker, 2019; Elsinga, 2017; Fields & Hodkinson, 2018; Marquardt & Glaser, 2020; Scanlon et al, 2015; Soaita et al, 2021). In many industrialized countries, housing markets and politics face multiple challenges in generating sufficient, especially affordable housing (Galster & Ok Lee, 2021; Haffner & Hulse, 2021; Wetzstein, 2017; Wijburg, 2021).…”