: PusH Precarious Housing in Europe
: Sybille Münch, Anna Siede
: Precarious Housing in Europe A Critical Guide
: Edition Donau-Universität Krems
: 9783903150942
: 1
: CHF 2.70
:
: Geowissenschaften
: English
: 590
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Precarious housing conditions are on the rise across Europe. Precarious housing refers to housing that is either unaffordable or unsuitable, for example, because it is overcrowded, in poor dwelling condition, poorly located or even unsafe. While there is much literature on the strong link between employment and housing insecurity and abundant investigations into different aspects of precarious housing, hardly any attempt has been made so far to provide a consolidated overview of the whole topic and thereby put these different facets into the joint perspective of housing-related poverty. This Critical Guide adds to the debate on causes, symptoms, consequences and possible solutions and makes them accessible for teaching, learning and self-study across multiple disciplines. It is the result of 'PusH - Precarious Housing in Europe', a Strategic Partnership funded under Erasmus+. The seven chapters of this book examine a range of themes, focusing on how experiences of precarious housing intersect with other dynamics of precariousness, associated with insecure immigration status, racism and discrimination, class, wealth, and income disparities, and forms of homelessness and displacement. Each chapter draws on examples from across Europe to explore different experiences of precarious housing, and different responses to these conditions.

This book and the corresponding e-modules are the product of intensive inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration and intellectual exchange that received funding by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union as"PusH - Precarious Housing in Europe". Between 2019 and 2022, this Strategic Partnership united colleagues from seven institutions from both older and younger EU member states. It was coordinated by Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. In addition to Leuphana's Center for the Study of Democracy, the consortium comprised four further institutions of higher education involved in undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate education - Utrecht's Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning of the Faculty of Geosciences, Durham's Department of Geography, the IUAV in Venice hosting the"SSIIM UNESCO Chair on the Social and spatial inclusion of international migrants -Urban Policies and Practices" and the University for Continuing Education Krems with its cluster on social space based research in built environment. These universities were joined by two partners from Bulgaria and Hungary representing countries where informal and precarious housing is a long-standing phenomenon. The Centre for Economic and Regional Studies in Bu-dapest is a public research institute and the Open Society Institute in Sofia is a non-governmental, non-for-profit organization. Both have an established repu-tation for providing scientific evidence and policy advice on precarious housing.

Chapter 1 – Introduction: Understanding Precarious Housing

Gideon Bolt& Jonathan Darling

What does ‘home’ mean to you? What are your requirements relating to housing? What are the implications when adequate housing is not available? In this chapter, we introduce the concept of precarious housing and give an overview of the themes that will be dealt with in the following chapters of this book. The chapter starts with a section on the concept of home and the importance of housing. The second section (1.2) shows that the recognition of housing rights by EU member states has not led to a reduction of housing precariousness. On the contrary, we see an increasing problem of housing unaffordability and a rise in homelessness. Section 1.3 delves deeper into the concept of precariousness based on studies in the field of labour markets, where the concept originated. Section 1.4 gives a short introduction to the effects of neoliberalism on housing precariousness. The case study of Grenfell Tower is then brought forward as an illustration of how precarious housing conditions, shaped through years of neglect, austerity, and profit-seeking at the expense of public housing provision, can interact with precarious social conditions of immigration status, race, and class, to create tragedies that are all too avoidable. Section 1.5 provides an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapter 1.1 - Home and the importance of housing

What does ‘home’ mean to you? For many of us, thinking of home will bring to mind housing of some form. It might be a house or an apartment, a rural cottage or an urban tower. It might be the place we grew up in or the place we now occupy. A sense of home changes and develops over time, with some places retaining their importance whilst others come and go – for example, despite having moved out twenty years ago, Jonathan still has his parents’ house listed as ‘home’ in his mobile contacts list!

Irrespective of where home is for you, it is likely that home carries some kind of attachment. Whilst not always a positive place, home is most often associated with elements of security, comfort, and belonging. Yet despite their intimate connections, home and housing are not always aligned. Many of us have lived in properties that never quite feel like home, perhaps because they are temporary, uncomfortable, or do not quite fit our imaginaries of what ‘home’ would or should be like. Yet to feel at home relies on housing of some form, as at its most basic level shelter and security are crucial for us to feel at home. Being housed is not the same as being at home, but it is an essential starting point.

Through the chapters of this book, we want to get you to interrogate what it means to be housed in contemporary Europe, and to question how rights to housing are asserted, denied, averted, and contested. How we are housed, in what conditions and under what constraints, is fundamental to our wellbeing and to our sense of how we fit within society. Studying housing thus sheds light on the various social, cultural, economic and political forces that are shaping our lives. At the same time, as the chapters to come will illustrate, housing is a site of considerable struggle, as multiple groups challenge those same forces and claim rights to housing that extend beyond a demand for adequate shelter and towards a right to feel ‘at home’.

For many groups across Europe, the right to housing is increasingly under threat, as economic inequality, housing market discrimination, and the risk of displacement combine to make housing precarious. At the same time, new arrivals to Europe seeking asylum and refuge face significant barriers to accessing security and shelter, and minority groups across the continent continue to face discrimination and displacement. It is these issues of inequality, access, and discrimination that we foreground in the coming chapters, to encourage you to think about who is affected by precarious housing conditions, how those conditions are responded to, what implications precarious housing has for different groups in society, and in what ways European societies might address the challenges of precarious housing. To begin with, we want to explore the right to housing in more detail and outline what we mean by ‘precarious’ housing in particular.

Chapter 1.2 - The right to housing and the rise of precarious housing

Housing provides a wide variety of functions for its residents (e.g. Harvey, 1973: Hooimeijer, 2007; Kearns et al., 2000). These include being:

(1) A safe haven: Housing is more than shelter. It can also provide privacy, personal safety and ontological security1.

(2) An activity centre: The house is the location where people perform a wide range of activities (like sleeping, eating, caring for others, relaxi