A Review of Structurally Inspired Approaches in Housing Studies – Concepts, Contributions and Future Perspectives

Housing studies is a broad field, which has ploughed the disciplines of political economy, radical geography and sociology since the 1970s, making use of structural theories, concepts and methods. These studies have embroidered notions of human agency engaged in different aspects of housing provision, consumption and exchange, with the concepts of class and power embedded in historically contingent social and economic structures. Researchers have argued that housing is not only subject to commodification, but vulnerable to shifting circuits of capital, changing modes of social regulation and crises prone regimes of capital accumulation. These structurally inspired studies aim to explain why different modes of provision have been generated and highlight processes which exacerbate social inequality and promote uneven development. Some researchers, informed by causal explanations even propose an agenda for change. This paper reviews their contribution since the 1970s, when widely read authors such as Castells and Harvey, directed our attention towards the relative power of human agency in structures influencing the production, consumption and exchange of housing, providing a critique of more benign policy orientated research. It reviews the influence of developments in locality studies, state theory, comparative historical analysis and urban sociology and the use of frameworks such as structures of housing provision (Ball) and regulation theory. Critical Realist ontology, implicit in structural accounts now explicitly inspires research on homelessness and the causality of property relations, circuits of savings and investment and different modes of consumption and their crises prone, cumulative role in shaping mode of housing provision. Castells and Harvey continue to inspire housing researchers, informing analysis of the US mortgage market crises, highlighting switching circuits of capital, redlining and racial inequality. This paper evaluates the contribution of this rich body of research and its important role in the development of explanatory theories and policy critique.