Contemporary housing issues in a changing world

Citation

Kenna, P. (2013), "Contemporary housing issues in a changing world", International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijlbe.2013.41105baa.001

Contemporary housing issues in a changing world

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, Volume 5, Issue 2

Introduction

This special issue features a range of topics and approaches arising from the conference “Contemporary housing issues in a changing Europe” held at National University of Ireland Galway in 2011. This conference, which attracted more than 30 participants from Europe, the USA and Israel, provided an opportunity for the authors to debate the issues in this book and attempt to explain the critical role that housing and built environment play in the current world wide financial and sovereign debt crisis.

Dramatic changes in the built environment have taken place as a result of globalisation, a term, itself, with varied, diverse and hotly contested meanings (Robertson, 1992; Twinning, 2000). The term is used to describe a range of economic, industrial, social, military and cultural changes, which have created high levels of interdependence, interaction and integration between different parts of the world, between people and between producers and consumers. Globalisation has been variously conceived as action at a distance; time-space compression; accelerating interdependence; and among other concepts, global integration, the re-ordering of interregional power relations, consciousness of the global conditions and the intensification of interregional connectedness. The local becomes embedded within more expansive sets of interregional relations and networks of power – the global village (Held and McGrew, 2000). Primarily, globalisation involves the intensification of worldwide social relations (Giddens, 1990).

The downgrading of financial and banking regulation in the 1980s unleashed a international flow of housing finance which has inundated housing systems across the world, integrating housing finance with global finance. There have been major implications for land use and planning, funding and regeneration of social housing, access to housing for people in areas of high market demand and a general upsurge in owner occupation. Of course, in the aftermath of the financial collapse, significant imbalances and deficiencies in land use and housing policies have been exposed.

Clearly, housing and built environment are greatly influenced by the current global crisis (both social and economic) with governments struggling to reconcile and regulate the forces of international finance on the one hand, and manage, plan and provide a good quality built environment and housing on the other. Indeed, the root of the current financial crisis is often traced to inadequate development and fortification of the law of the built environment and housing, against the movements of global finance. Alongside the development of globalised financial institutions, there has been an ideological shift in public policy and economics towards a neo-liberal approach, more redolent of nineteenth century ideals than contemporary expectations (Kenna, 2008). Key legal issues related to the built environment arise, including: globalised property investment corporations; property registration systems; globalized housing finance markets and investment in housing; the reordering of cities and creation of slums; new roles for the state and the globalized movement of migrants and refugees (Kenna, 2008). Of course, globalisation from below includes popular participation at local levels, the building of civil societies, global citizenship and the enhancement of non-governmental organisations as part of the strengthening over time of the institutional forms and activities associated with global civil society (De Sousa Santos and Garavito, 2005). In many ways the article by Hearne (below) illustrates this approach, with excluded communities using the “right to the city” and global human rights norms to challenge state expenditure priorities arising from an IMF/ECB imposed austerity programme – a result of state exposure to changing global capital movements.

Law is a participant-oriented discipline largely concerned with the details of immediate, practical and local problems. According to Twinning, enthusiastic responses to globalisation can lead to legal scholarship and education becoming detached from its local or traditional roots. Legal scholars need to be aware of the changing environment and make difficult judgments about balancing the local and particular with broader concerns and contexts (Twinning, 2000).

The approach of this special issue resonates with the editorial policy of the journal, as set out by Chynoweth (2010) (Vol. 2, No. 1, 5), that:

[…] there are approaches that can also help us to gain a more holistic understanding of the nature and operation of the law, and of its place – and potential for reform within society.

Of course, the journal is defined by the built environment context within which all categories of substantive law are applied, and the nature of legal interaction with the built environment is becoming more complex.

In this context, the article by Peter Sommerville challenges many established global perspectives on the differences between rural and urban housing. He questions the global discourse based on assumptions that problems of housing access are largely an urban phenomenon, with housing poverty a feature of urbanised societies. In fact, Sommerville illustrates that traditional views of rural societies offering a domain of housing wealth, compared to an urban domain of housing poverty, are false for Britain today, with growing gentrification of the countryside creating a major barrier to housing for all. The result is that housing poverty is a feature of rural communities in Britain, due to the control of land, with landless (and carless) rural dwellers excluded from the housing market. Grossly unequal relations of class and power have persisted in the English countryside, and even the state planning system has colluded in this large landowner dominance. Property and planning law has played a key role, historically in perpetuating unequal access to the resources of the environment, inhibiting the development of the built environment in an equitable manner.

Francine Baker reiterates the need for a workable planning system for efficient and sustainable communities and nations. Examining the evolution of planning law and policy on the UK, and later England and Ireland, she demonstrates that early urbanisation required regulation of the built environment on public health grounds, primarily. Effective sanitary control required that planning operate in tandem with social housing provision. Yet, the problems of ensuring affordable, satisfactory and sanitary housing for the poor, where land values were high, required and large-scale state responses. This was facilitated in planning legislation after 1945 in England and Wales, but Ireland adopted a different trajectory. Indeed, the comparative examination of the centralized and decentralized planning systems of the two countries provides valuable insights into this politically charged area of law. While the English system now promotes “localism” in planning for housing, this, too has some inherent weaknesses. Baker advocates a halfway house between centralized and decentralized planning and land use controls.

One of the most significant changes to the built environment occurs through major global shifts in industrialisation and manufacturing industry. Large sites of former industrial and manufacturing centres are vacated as part of globalization impacts in states and areas. Planners have grappled with the challenges of turning these “brownfield sites” into new uses. Laitos and Helms examine and critique contemporary developments in bringing into use the former industrial sites – known as “brownfield” sites (often contaminated and adversely affected by prior use) into mixed use development in the UK and the USA. They consider the challenges in effective regulation, financing and physically developing these sites, with a detailed evaluation of a number of cases in these two jurisdictions. A preoccupation with transforming such sites into mixed use development may not represent the optimal approach to planning and development and the authors argue that “greyfield” (moribund or deserted shopping centres and parking lots), “redfield” (financially distressed properties) and “greenfield” (open countryside) sites may offer greater potential, albeit requiring potentially complex financing schemes.

Lorna Fox, the author of the iconic text Conceptualising Home (2006), reflects on recent developments of the concept of home in legal scholarship, and the law itself, in recent years. This approach, which transcends traditional property based treatment of housing, ascribes the relationship between a person and the place they live as a new and widely accepted definition of home. However, this experiential, intangible and un-proveable phenomenon continues to elude courts, lawmakers and legal scholars in many cases, although Fox shows here that this notion of home is becoming significant is some areas of legal discourse. Indeed, the global financial crisis, resulting in dispossession and displacement through mortgage evictions and other developments have renewed legal scholarship in this area. The person-centred concept of home is advancing in key areas, and its constituent elements of home as territory, as identity, as a social and cultural signifier, is being adopted as an organizing framework to interrogate specific legal doctrines and decisions.

Rory Hearne examines how changing approaches to the built environment through the globalised ideas of the “right to the city” and international human rights are being used to advance standards in the built environment. In a case study of a regeneration project, it is clear that these actions were necessary as a result of state inaction within an European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund imposed austerity policy, as a result of a crisis in sovereign credit availability. The global concept of the “right to the city” and international human rights are here linked to standards in the built environment, social exclusion and substandard housing, area based urban renewal/regeneration. Hearne argues that applying a human rights standards framework to assess urban regeneration is a potential mechanism for achieving the right to the city in practice.

I wish to record my appreciation for the assistance of Dee Halloran in the preparation of this special issue.

Padraic Kenna