Lecture22: How Housing Systems are Changing and Why

2017/12/1 13:44:06

Lecture22: How Housing Systems are Changing and Why                                                             Dec . 01 . 2017

Speaker: Professor Mark Stephens, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Urban Institute at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Host: Professor Jiannan Wu, Executive Vice Director, China Institute for Urban Governance, Head, Division for Development of Liberal Arts and Social Science

Time: December 5, 2017, Tuesday, 13:00-14:00

Location: Room 201, Jixie Building, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Xuhui Campus (No. 125 Huaihai West Road)

Organizations: China Institute for Urban Governance, School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Mark Stephens is Professor of Public Policy and Director of The Urban Institute at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He specialises in comparative housing research and has a particular interest in the way in which housing systems inter-act with wider economic and social institutions. Mark is an Editor of Urban Studies and a member of the Co-ordination Committee of the European Network of Housing Research.

Professor Stephens wish to explore the relationship between the housing and wider welfare regime (by which I mean the labour market, and tax and social security system). He will argue that wider welfare regimes create the superstructure around which housing regimes can be created because they have distinct distributional outcomes. He further argues that the growth in mortgaged home-ownership since the 1980s has eroded the ability of social rental systems to define the rest of the housing system in countries including the Netherlands and Sweden, whilst in Germany direct regulatory interventions are increasingly required to maintain the integrity of the rental sector. Overall, changes in the wider welfare regime and the wider economic system are narrowing the choices open to housing policy makers.