5 - The geography of housing

Summary

Since the mid-1970s the housing market has proved a principal focus of research in contemporary human geography. Most attention has been directed at managers of the built environment, especially so-called ‘gatekeepers’ who control access to different types of housing. Early managerialist studies merely recorded the decisions of the most approachable managers; building societies and local authorities proved more amenable to researchers than property developers or private landlords. Recent studies have also examined the ideology of management and its role in the ‘social formation’. Interpretations of the role of the state, as pluralist or instrumentalist for example, can be applied, albeit imperfectly, to the ‘local state’, to planners and to housing managers.

Little of this research is explicitly geographical, but a simple model of its relevance to urban social geography can be constructed. At any moment different types and tenures of housing will be found in distinctive areas, reflecting past planning and development decisions. Public and private, rented and owner-occupied housing each have distinctive geographical distributions. Furthermore, different types of household are associated with particular forms of housing, divided into ‘housing classes’ by both ability to pay and the selective or discriminatory policies of ‘gatekeepers’. Hence, the functioning of the housing system can ‘explain’ the social morphology of the city.

‘Housing class’ is not assumed to determine attitudes and behaviour as Rex and Moore suggested, and - in the light of discussion in Chapter 6 - ‘class’ may be too strong a word.