Ken Gibb: The International Journal of Housing Policy Conference

Ken Gibb

This week the International Journal of Housing Policy (IJHP) celebrated its 25 the anniversary through a conference ‘Reflections and Developments in Housing Research: What’s Next?’. The conference was held at the University of Glasgow and CaCHE was delighted to co-organise the event.

Around a hundred delegates attended over two days to participate in two plenary sessions, one reflecting back and another looking to the future of housing research, as well as a lecture from Duncan Maclennan on housing policy governance. The main part of the conference involved four sets of parallel sessions contributing 45 papers from delegates from the UK, Ireland, Europe, Australia, North America, Africa and Asia.

We are very grateful to the IJHP for providing financial support for the conference, such as room hire and all catering, including the conference dinner. Mark Stephens and I would also like to thank our colleagues Julie Lyle, Kalina Raeve and Calum Thomson who provided excellent administrative support to make sure all the bits and pieces of a busy conference function smoothly, both before and during the event.

Reflecting Back

I was struck by the impact of big external shocks on housing research over the last tumultuous 25 years, particularly the continuing ripples of the credit crunch and global financial crisis, the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine. These have intertwined with long term trends regarding financialisation and commodification and help explain structural breaks in housing tenure patterns experienced in the Anglosphere and to different degrees in parts of Europe. This has shaped housing research considerably, but has also seen some changes which we regret: Mark Stephens highlighted the shift away from civil servants and other policy leaders actively writing in our academic journals, as was once much more common than now. 

IJHP has shifted for a European to a global focus and we debated the strengthening record of the journal on this dimension but also how to overcome the gaps in country coverage that still exist and are a source of concern. 

Future Agendas

We discussed the implications of future tenure patterns apparent in post ownership societies, including the challenges of widening (hyper-commodified) shared living; although Hal Pawson persuasively argued that we may be seeing a fracturing of non-ownership housing as several countries are reporting a plateauing and even reduction in what has been resurgent private renting over most of the last 25-30 years.

We also examined AI, digital platforms and such innovations relating to different emerging aspects of housing and planning, calling for a careful and critical theorisation of these uneven and often challenging practices on housing outcomes.

One area of interest for me in this space concerns the recent legal challenges in the United States over alleged algorithm-based rent setting in the PRS conferring cartel-limited monopoly price setting powers. Does such anti-competitive behaviour exist elsewhere? This would make for a difficult but important research agenda in its own right.

Strategy, Governance and Housing Outcomes

Duncan’s lecture followed research he is to shortly publish in Canada, which argued for genuine systems thinking approaches to counter silo (non-joined up) housing policy in our complex and uncertain world. He lamented the failure of not combining the policy developments of other larger policy systems with that of housing, as well as the failure to properly monitor, review and bend housing strategies and policy programmes in the light of changing contexts and possibilities. He argued clearly for a place-based focus at metropolitan and regional levels and a much more collaborative relationship focused on that spatial level across all relevant levels of government.

This was a stimulating event and one which allowed for old friends to reacquaint and new conversations start. This is only possible because of the delegate interaction and willingness to share and participate. I thank all of them for their willingness to do so.

This article was originally published on the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence website.