Housing and Urban Studies

Overview 

The group consolidates an exceptional but currently dispersed concentration of housing and urban research within the School for Policy Studies (SPS). Its SPS members are drawn from three research centres:

• Governance and Public Policy;
• Inequalities and Social Welfare;
• Health, Social Care and Disability.

They are also members of the new University-wide Planetary Urban Science Lab. The group acts as the School’s housing and urban anchor within that Lab, fostering genuinely cross-centre and interdisciplinary working across social policy, sociology and geography. 

Our group’s goals 

The group brings together colleagues and PGRs within SPS who draw on diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks to explore the central debates in contemporary housing and urban studies.

Our research

As a group, our research covers the UK and draws on comparative work internationally, including across Japan, East Asia, Europe and Mexico, and members hold editorial roles at leading journals in the field as well as research-council- and NIHR-funded project leadership.

The group also offers early-career researchers and PhD students a supportive intellectual home and a route into wider collaboration and funding networks.

Group research themes 

• The financialisation of housing and asset-based class formation 
• Algorithmic and digital infrastructures of the housing market 
• Generational housing inequalities and the housing outcomes of young urban adults 
• Collaborative and cohousing models for later life 
• The regulation and enforcement of the private rented sector 
• The historical sociology of urban research 

Group members (SPS)

• Roger Burrows
• Amber Howard
• Jim Hudson
• Misa Izuhara
• Alex Marsh
• Julian Molina
• Karen West