I
Social Theory and Housing
J Dodson , Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
© 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Critical realism A philosophical viewpoint which
holds that real relations exist between individuals,
groups, and objects but that these are often
complex multidimensional and intersubjective
phenomena.
Discourse An approach to social enquiry based on
comprehending social practices as shaped by
language and thought which also mediate
power relations between social and economic
subjects.
Ecological theory A theoretical perspective on urban
change and social differentiation based on competition
of residential space between different groups.
Introduction
Housing has been an object of analytical interest to social
science for nearly two centuries. This interest has seen
both empirical assessments of housing and considerable
intellectual effort dedicated to comprehending housing
questions from a broade r and deeper theoretical stand-
point. An array of social theoretical perspectives have
been developed and adapted to understand housing pro-
blems. This article has two objectives regarding housing
and social theory. It offers a brief outline of the uneven
relationship between housing studies and wider social
theory and presents a history of the major implicit and
explicit theoretical engageme nts in housing studies focus-
ing on the late twentieth century and concluding with an
assessment of some mounting challenges for housing stu-
dies in the twenty-first century.
Housing as a Sociological Problem
Housing problems and housing questions have posed
theoretical challenges since early social scientists began
investigating empirical housing issues in the mid-
nineteenth century. Housing theories are intimately tied
to, if unevenly addressed by, mainstream social science.
Housing has persisted as a social 'question' since the
emergence of urban industrialisation even if the character
of t he problem has shifted from one of simple adequacy
of shelter and the purchasing capacity of its inhabitants
to wider questions of social distribution, market and
APPROACHES (Overview)
Empiricism The view that scientific knowledge should
be developed on the basis of experience of the world,
typically through valid methodologies.
Materialism The view that empirical scientific
knowledge should derive from the observable physical
aspects of objects and subjects.
Marxism In urban theory holds that urban change can be
understood as an effect of the struggle between capital
and labour within the capitalist mode of production.
Social constructionism A theoretical viewpoint in
which observation of the material world is mediated by
social processes and the relationships between social
actors and which condition the production of
knowledge.
financial functioning, urban structure, and increasingly
environmental consumption and degradation.
Housing possesses a particular set of characteristics
that give it a u nique and complex status as a social
scientific object. First, housing has a functional use in
providing adequate shelter as th e basis for settled human
life. Second, however, housing is an important durable
commodity that can operate as a long-term store of
wealth and as an important sector of economic activity.
Third, housing is usually a complex and expensive good
to procure and is often the largest item that most house-
holds will consume. Fourth, housing is a physical object
with dimensions that lend easily to empirical observation
such as dwelling counts or floor area. Fifth, housing has
considerable symb olic significance in social and cultural
differentiation, including distribution, exchange, and
design. Sixth, housing is normally located in absolute
physical space and is generally immobile, factors which
in combination with the above characteristics contribute
to urban spatial differe ntiation.
The study of housing has never established itself as a
dedicated disciplinary formation within broader social
scientific endeavour, although it often appears as an object-
oriented study area in the division of social scientific effort.
Housing is not usually the sole subject of specific social
scientific theoretical and methodological attention, rather
it is an avenue to understanding wider social questions.
Most social theoretical consideration of housing has drawn
on broader disciplinary thinking and concepts of housing
rather than developing theory specific to or founded in
housing. Theories in housing economics typically draw on
506

concepts developed in wider urban economic, market, or
institutional analyses rather than positioning housing as the
primary point of departure- political economic theories of
land rent are just one example. Sociological analyses of
housing usually begin from questions about wider processes
of social differentiation rather than situating housing as the
primary object of analysis. Spatial scientists have often inves-
tigated housing questions using broader urban spatial
methods, such as locational analysis. While theories devel-
oped in wider social science are frequendy applied to
housing questions it is less common for theoretical concepts
developed by housing thinkers to influence wider socio-
logical or economic theories.
The purpose and role of theory in housing studies has
also been intensely debated, as the remainder of this
anicle demonstrates. Nonetheless the majority of housing
research applies only modest social theoretical analysis
to answer housing questions. The physical character
of housing invites softly theorised empiricism often
premised on the enumeration and measurement of obser-
vable housing attributes such as size, location, or price and
the characteristics of housing occupants, like income or
age. In combination with these physical characteristics the
fundamental contribution of housing to human welfare
often encourages researchers to emphasise the empiri-
cally observable dimensions of housing problems that
can be used to support policy or political programmes to
change housing conditions. The need for policy advocacy
to be oriented to practical measures often attenuates the
overt theoretical scope of housing inquiry although most
government housing policies contain an implicit if
unrecognised theoretical standpoint. Keynes' observation
that practical policy-makers can often be the slaves of
defunct economics could be readily app lied to housing
policy. Overall, however, the modest theoretical content
of h ousing scholarship in general is perhaps the most
historically consistent feature of housing inquiry as a
sub-branch of social science.
Early Housing Theories
Housing initially drew the attention of social investigators
and scientists in the latter half of the nineteenth centu ry
among the urban conditions th at emerged from the
industrial revolution. Industrialisation had spurred
rapid urbanisation as new modes of town-based factory
production drew in large numbers of previously rural
populations, many of whom had been impoverished by
changes to agrarian land ownership and possessed few
assets other than their own labour power. This new work-
ing class was politically weak and exposed to intense
levels of physical exploitation by employers and
landlords. The resulting social risk of poor-quality over-
crowded housing in nineteenth-century industrial and
Social Theory and Housing 507
colonial cities spurred an intense interest in housing by
civic actors, ranging from concerned individuals to social
commentators, government officials, and politicians.
The problems of poor urban housing in nineteenth-
century industrial cities were manifold and were revealed
in vivid detail to civic and official comprehension by an
array of deeply concerned investigators and advocates.
Friedrich Engels' essays on The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1844) and The Housing Qy:estion (1 972)
were signal treatises linking housing conditions to wider
social theory. A quote from the first text illustrates the
stark conditions of the 'housing problem':
[W]e must admit that 350,000 working-people of
Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in
wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which
surround them are usually in the most miserable and
filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference
to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured
by the contractor. In a word, we must confess that in the
working-men's dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness,
no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family
life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically
degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded,
reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel
comfortable and at home. (p. 63)
Engels viewed the causes of these problems from a theo-
retical perspective based on emerging Marxist political
economy such that "the cause of the miserable condition
of the working-class is to be sought, not in these minor
grievances, but in the Capitalistic System itself''.
Housing and Social Reform
While Engels' revelation of housing conditions was
widely renowned, his revolutionary linking of housing
problems to the capitalist economic order was less well
received by the dominant social orders. Most housing
reformers of the late nineteenth century adopted theore-
tical standpoints that saw the problems of housing poverty
as arising from a combination of the inadequate incomes
of the poor, the lack of regulation of building design, and
the wicked and exploitative actions of landlords. Some
reformers perceived moral failings of t he poor like lazi-
ness or licentiousness as factors contributing to housing
problems. The health and sanitary failings of nineteenth-
century urban housing were also linked to contemporary
medical theories in which sunlight was a basic determi-
nant of human vitality and disease was transmitted
by v aporous miasmas accumu lating in poorly ventilated
dwellings. Sunlight and miasmatic disease theory moti-
vated many subsequent attempts to improve the sanitary,
natural lighting, and air circulation standards of housing
508 Social Theory and Housing
design in nineteenth-century cities, especially in Europe,
the United States, and Australasia.
Housing and Urban Planning
The housing quality and affordability problems of the
industrial city persisted into the early twentieth century
but increasing civic and official effort was dedicated to
housing 'solutions'. Housing problems would be resolved
through early attempts at town planning. Perhaps
the most famous model is that set out in Ebenezer
Howard's (1898) Tomorr!YW: A Peaceful Way to Real Reform,
which proposed a utopian mix of spatial planning and
design paired with new theoretical models ofland tenure
to resolve housing problems. Howard's 'garden city'
model of modern housing and urban layout provided
the conceptual template for much subsequent twentieth-
century planning and housing design, including what
we now describe as suburbia. Howard's schemes, reflect-
ing the fertile and sometimes progressive intellectual
climate of that period, also sought to wrest the right to
profits in land from private hands and use such rents for
public purposes through new community and corporate
institutions.
A further set of housing programmes in the early
twentieth century recognised that housing systems in
which shelter was treated as a commodity supplied by
laissez-faire markets were incap able of meeting the
socially acceptable housing needs for l arge numbers of
households. Governments introduced a range of urban
housing programmes to moderate th e commodity aspect
of housing by subsidising housing prices or in many
jurisdictions by placing housing outside market processes.
Such efforts congealed in an array of early modern social
housing programmes, especially in European jurisdictions
and via municipal 'council housing' in the United
Kingdom, but also notably in the United States thanks
to the efforts of tireless activists such as Catherine Bauer.
Many of these early housing schemes were informed by
garde n city theories of physic al planning but were
subsequently influenced by newer modernist cellular
architectural theories propounded by theorists such as
Le Corbusier. Although Le Corbusier had advocated
that workers should live in garden cities, the wider mod-
ernist architectural conception of high-rise housing as
machines for modern living inspired many post-Second
World War social housing programmes, particularly in
the United Kingd om, the United States, and Australia.
The Urban Ecology of Housing
Despite Engels' initial efforts to found the understanding
of housing problems within political economy most
early-twentieth-century housing theory was dedicated
to practical objectives of providing more housing of
higher quality at a lower cost for poor households and
tied to wider programmes of urban improvement - a
tendency that continues to motivate much contemporary
housing thought. Wider theoretical and empirical ques-
tions about housing problems and urban change began to
attract greater systematic scholarly attention through the
1920s via the evolution-inspired ecological theories of
Chicago sociologists such as Robert Park and Ernest
Burgess. They and their colleagues undertook large-
scale statistical and mapping exercises to differentiate
residential zones within the city and theorise economic
processes of changes and transitions in housing and urban
social conditions based around dynamic spatial competi-
tion for spaces and places among urban residents. Their
concentric model of urban change in which an ageing
urban core was encircled by successive rings of suburban
development was immensely influential on housing and
urban thought from the 1920s onwards, especially in the
United States. The ecological model provided important
early theoretical insights into housing differentiation,
housing filtering, and urban structure with considerable
influence on subsequent scholars.
Spatial Housing Models
T he innovations of the C hicago sociologists were paral-
leled and followed by developments in economics that
sought to comprehend the economic basis for the spatial
location of urban activities. Housing was one of the key
activities to be included within this new analysis. Robert
H aig, for example, in 1926 outlined an economic th eory
of housing location in which house prices reflected a
range of costs, including spatial land costs and transport
accessibility aligned around a single u rb an core. Haig
argued for a commodity view of housing that "in choosing
a residence purely as a consumption proposition, one
buys accessibility precisely as one buys clothes or food"
(p. 423). Such a model of urban housing markets was
developed further afi:er the Second World War by leading
economic geographers such as Richard Muth, Edwin
Mills, and William Alonso who developed quantitative
neoclassical or bid-rent theories of housing market struc-
ture. Locational analysts yielded a number of important
theoretical insights into housing marke t processes that
we re accompanied by the rapid methodological develop-
ment of quantitative housing analysis including factorial
ecological models of spatial housing markets, market
segmentation, residential differentiation, housing filter-
ing, and hedonic pricing. T h ese theoretical innovations
remain widely used in the contemporary analysis of spa-
tial h ousing processes even if they have been augmented
by more socially attuned theorisation.

The Marxist Revolution
Many of the theoretical and methodological advances of
the 1950s and 1960s were made by quantitative geogra-
phers and reflected the increasing use of mathematical
models in urban analysis. From the early 1970s, however,
quantitative social scientific methods based on spatial
market models came under sustained critique. Much of
this critique argued that while the neoclassical quantita-
tive techniques were good at describing housing market
patterns they were much weaker at explaining their basis
in wider social dynamics. A raft of critical social scientific
developments emerged in response to the neoclassical
theoretical models of housing and urban change. Many
of these innovations were made by scholars who adopted
an expressly critical theoretical perspective. David
Harvey's Social Justice and the City ( 1973), for example,
was a landmark text which set out a spatially attuned
political economic perspective on urban and housing
issues that deliberately criticised neoclassical quantitative
geography. Harvey used Marxist theory to conceive of
housing and urban change as an effect of the struggle over
the means, mode, and surplus of production in capitalist
societies. In a similar urban vein Manuel Castells' The
Urban 0:festion: A Marxist Approach ( 1972) was also influ-
ential in presenting a thorou gh critique of the ideological
foundations of urban problems under capitalism.
Institutionalism
These innovations in urban theory and their implicit
political purpose lent inspiration to Pete r Saunders,
whose Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation ( 1979)
adopted a wider sociological perspective on urban issues
and housing questions. Saunders sou ght to understand the
importance of housing tenure to urban political processes
using the insights fro m Weberian and Marxist an alyses of
housing differentiation. W eberian social theory posited
that social struggle was the result of competition and
conflict be tween socially differentiated classes loosely
arranged around resource distribution and access to con-
sumption of social products, mediated by social
institutions. W eberian social class theory was first applied
to housing questions in a 1967 study oflocal-level immi-
grant h ousing experiences in the United Kingdom b y
John Rex and Robert Moore. Rex and Moore argued
that "class struggle was apt to eme rge wherever p eople
in a market situation enj oyed differential access to prop-
erty, and that such class struggles may t herefore arise not
merely around the use of the means of industrial pro-
duction [as in Marxist theory], but around the control
of domestic property''. Saunders argued that housing
te nure should be understood as a sociopolitical category
Social Theory and Housing 509
that confounds both Weberian consumption-based and
Marxist production-based political analyses because it
structures a coarser set of overarching class interests
formed around the major divisions between renters and
owner-occupiers.
Tenure, Ideology, and Method
Saunders' theoretical work on housing tenure primarily
focused on the political effects of tenure at the local scale.
The articulation of tenure questions into housing
debates generated wider interest in the significance of
tenure at national scales of analysis, particularly among
Anglophone scholars. Important theoretical work on the
political economy of housing tenure was produced in the
late 1970s and early 1980s by Michael Ball in his book
Housing and Economic Power and by Jim Kemeny in works
such as The Myth of Home Ownership and The Great
Australian Nightmare. Kemeny's work was immensely
influential on housing thought in Australia, although less
so on Australian housing policy. Ball's work advanced
beyond simple tenure politics to examine the wider eco-
nomic and political arrangements that tenure structures
presuppose. Ball proposed that housing systems should be
viewed as "the product of particular, historically deter-
mined social relations associated with the physical
processes of land development, building production, the
transfer of the completed dwelling to its final user and its
subseque nt use". Su ch systems, Ball argued, are organised
through observable political economic structures of hous-
ing provision formed out of the relations between these
sectors. The structures of housing provision thesis reflect
the structure and circuits of relations between fractions of
capital identified in D avid Harvey's theorisation of
broade r urban processes under capitalism. The structures
of housing provision approach to unde rstanding housing
was theoretically productive because it recognised that
housing policy based on support for a single tenu re could
be complicated by the divergent but interrelated inte rests
of various fractions of capital, in combination with
prevailing technological and organisational conditions.
These mate rial conditions could thus be observed and
analysed empirically via the Marxist problematic of his-
torical mate rialism. This materialist approach also
su ggested that it is possible to characterise national hous-
ing systems based on their structure of provision and
presents a partial basis for comparative housing research.
By focusing on the political economic interests of v arious
fractions of capital in the housing system this view gave
less emphasis to the considerable ideological dimensions
of capitalist housing syste ms.
In contrast to the limited ideological basis for th e struc-
tures of housing provision approach, Jim Kemen y used
empirical international companson to argue that
51 0 Social Theory and Housing
homeownership served as an ideological factor stabilising
capitalist societies. Underpinning Kemeny's analysis was
the observation that the economic organisation of housing
and the influence of political actions upon housing tenures
must be seen as refracted through the social structure of
housing and its wider context. Kemeny argued that owner-
occupation comprised an ideology that captured state pol-
icy support and produced socially disadvantageous
outcomes for those excluded from homeownership.
Kemeny theorised that owner-occupation was tied to ideo-
logical preferences for privatism in urban life in contrast to
social forms of tenure that fostered greater civic sociability
including public transport and public facilities, a view that
was founded in his empirical comparisons of Australian and
Swedish housing systems.
While their views were not initially deliberately
opposed, the different theoretical emphases in Ball's and
Kemeny's work led to ongoing, and sometimes polarised,
debates between these thinkers and their supporters in the
context of a subsequent widening of the social theoretical
basis for housing studies.
Social Constructionism
The 1980s and 1990s saw considerable diversification of
theoretical approaches to investigating and understanding
housing questions. This diversification reflected wider
changes occurring in critical social science and social
theory that went beyond conventional Marxist methodol-
ogies. A number of new social scientific perspectives
based on dimensions beyond social class, such as gender
or ethnicity, achieved prominence. This shift, sometimes
described in social science as a postmodern or post-
structural 'turn', reflects increasing suspicion that fixed
structural models of social processes, especially those
ascribing set and rigid relationships between capital,
classes, and the state were insufficiently nuanced and
flexible to cop e with the task of compre hending the
increasingly fluid and diverse societies emerging in post-
industrial Western societies. There was continuing doubt
that positivist, typically quantitative, models could cap-
ture the complexity of social processes and concern with
material conditions softened in favour of greater interest
in the representation of social conditions and social
groups and the socio-cultural production of identity and
self Social science is a diverse endeavour and it is
rare that a new methodological advance completely trans-
forms the totality of theoretical thinking in a discipline,
entirely erases previous concepts, or supplants one set of
questions for another. Thus while the poststructural the-
ory of the past three decades has had increasing influence
on social science it has not always displaced previous
theorising. Instead there has been an appreciation of an
increasing diversity of social scientific questions and the
need to respond with appropriate concepts and methods
to address them.
In housing studies this shifi: was expressed most vividly in
the debate between scholars who promoted the structure of
housing provision thesis and those, like Kemeny, who were
exploring the developments in the constructionist or post-
structural frame. Some argued that Kemeny had focused on
tenure as an ideological problem rather than appreciating
the underlying drivers of tenure differentiation within the
wider structures and processes of capital accumulation
Kemeny in turn drew on the influential social construction-
ist theories of sociologists Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar
who had demonstrated that scientific inquiry was condi-
tioned and structured by explicit and implicit social rules
that shaped researcher behaviour, research practice, and the
knowledge these produced. Kemeny argued that similar
processes operated in housing inquiry and that the produc-
tion of housing knowledge by researchers was heavily
conditioned by the prevailing power of particular colleges
within the field and the ideological and theoretical hege-
mony of particular research groupings. These groupings
included neoclassicism, Marxism, institutional reformism,
and 'sofi:' qualitative methods.
The debate over the relative theoretical, methodolo-
gical, and empirical importance of structures of housing
provision in housing studies had b een initially productive
but soon became arcane and particular. Nonetheless, it
had a partial unsettling effect on the various theoretical
streams of housing inquiry and stimulated a considerable
diversification in housing research from the late 1980s
onwards. This diversification might have happened any-
way, given the contemporary innovations transforming
social science more broadly. But the theoretical frisson
generated by the stru ctures of provision debate certainly
provided fertile ground for diverse new inquiry.
The constructionist approach to housing questions
emerged invigorated from the structures of provision
debate in housing studies to become more widely deployed
as a research methodology. This was furthered by
Kemeny's book Housing and Social Theory which subjected
housing concepts and methods to fundamental examina-
tion, evaluation, and critique. Kemeny argued that housing
studies have relied overly on basic concepts which are
treated as established facts that comprise the basic truth
of inquiry. Examples of such basic concepts suggested by
Kemeny are household or dwelling. These are typically
treated as unproblematic objects but upon greater scrutiny
can be seen as much less clear and consistent. Thus
attempts to define an analytically consistent notion of a
household are confronted by the diverse array of human
living arrangements that can defy aggregation into a uni-
tary category. Such problems can be amplified when
further categories are joined in definition. For example, a
definition of 'household' based on a prescriptive descrip-
tion as a set of individuals sharing a dwelling raises

questions as to what precisely constitutes a dwelling and
what the nature of their sharing might be. In an increas-
ingly liquid social world a social science formed around the
application of fixed categories is at risk of missing many
dimensions of social practice. Kemeny argued that housing
analysis or policy that is insensitive to these definitional
questions can lead to dominant notions of particular con-
cepts being applied uncritically and inaccurately depicting
the objects or subjects of inquiry and the social relations in
which they are implicated. This problem of concept con-
struction becomes acute in the definition of what comprises
a housing 'problem' and in turn reflects wider social scien-
tific querying of the role of problem identification and the
representation of individuals and groups in social analysis-
such concerns are a feature of the poststructural theoretical
turn. This issue extends, as Kemeny suggests, to macro
concepts such as the state, which is frequently deployed
as a category in housing inquiry.
The Discursive Turn
Social constructionist theorisation of housing questions
and problems reflected shifts in wider social scientific
debates about the role of language and representation in
social processes. During the 1990s particular social scien-
tific effort was dedicated to comprehending the role of
'discourse' in mediating social power. Discourse theory
itself has a diverse intellectual lineage which can be
traced to three strands of earlier French poststructural
thinking. The first major strand draws on Marxist theories
of the role of ideology in supporting and maintaining
capitalist social relations, exemplified by the work of
Louis Althusser. A second stream of discourse derives
from philosopher Jacques Derrida's studies of the social
production of 'texts', informed by semiotic theorists such
as Mikhail Bakhtin or Ferdinand Saussure. A further
stream of discursive analysis draws on the work of philo-
sopher Michel Foucault who argued that discourse
provides the basis for the social articulation of formal or
official observations and description of social objects and
subjects - knowledge - but that social power relations
are also deeply implicated in knowledge production.
Combined in various forms these influences encouraged
sociological inquiry in which the experience of social
agents is constituted by and constitutive of their relations
with others. Social facts are thus not obtained by simple
objective empirical observation but are produced by
observers under contingent conditions which condition
and shape the intent and content of their observation and
which are also suffused with power relations between
social actors. Keith Jacobs and Tony Manzi have been
exploring these theoretical issues since the mid -1990s
culminating in their book Social Constructionism in
Housing Research.
Social Theory and Housing 511
Back to Critical Reality
The theoretical debates of the 1980s and early 1990s
produced a degree of polarisation in housing studies,
between a relatively modest grouping of constructionists
and the generally larger group of post-Marxist, political-
economist, and institutionalist scholars. This polarity was
not all-encompassing, however; perhaps an even greater
proportion of housing scholarship over recent decades has
been undertaken under an intellectual framework espous-
ing no decisive theoretical perspective or which has
combined a mix of frameworks. In the late 1990s and
early 2000s a further theoretical viewpoint emerged and
developed that linked this theorising with wider develop-
ments in social scientific thought and their applicability to
housing questions. Critical realism was originally articu-
lated by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar and refined by
sociologist Andrew Sayer. The critical realist approach
adopted an explicitly philosophical standpoint- founded
in concerns about ontology or the condition of reality -
that sought to affirm the value of traditional rationalist
scientific inquiry while articulating this methodological
premise with an appreciation of the complexity, contin-
gency, and diversity of social relations that had been
demonstrated by recent 'postmodern' philosophy. Thus
critical realism agrees that real relations exist between
individuals, groups, and objects but that these are often
complex multidimensional and intersubjective phenom-
ena. Inquiry thus must take such social phenomena
seriously as empirical objects whose relations can be
described but must also be attuned to the necessity of
critical engagement with their social character and the
potential for improvement of social conditions via the
emancipatory hope of social science. Nor is critical rea-
lism explicitly tied to any particular methodological
approach; critical realist research can comfortably address
research problems with qualitative techniques or with
quantitative methods depending on their suitability for
responding to the particular research question posed. In
this sense critical realism might be viewed as a compro-
mise between realist and materialist accounts of social
relations and the critical and constructionist accounts,
including a nuanced understanding of empiricism.
The critical realist approach has proven well suited to
housing inquiry which typically demands the capacity to
comprehend both the empirical and objective configura-
tions of housing structures, forms, and conditions in
definite physical space with the social relations through
which they are produced and provided within specific
societies. These latter phenomena encompass not only
social relations but also economic exchange, cultural pre-
ferences, and political constructions all often constituted
in contingent ways and in specific spaces, places, or jur-
isdictions. Lawson's (2006) work examining housing
512 Social Theory and Housing
'solutions' in Australia and the Netherlands provides per-
haps the most systematic articulation of the critical realist
perspective in housing. Critical realism in social scientific
housing research confronts a considerable risk, however,
such that its willingness to encompass a wide array of
theoretical problems and methodological approaches
weakens the significance of the theoretical ontology that
it espouses. There is a danger that this broadening con-
versely reduces critical realism to a simple aphorism
about reality and critique which recalls the conundrum
posed of planning by Aaron Wildavsky over two decades
ago: "if critical realism is everything, maybe it's nothing".
Theory, Society, and Housing
One of the scholarly consequences of the development of
social constructionist and allied theoretical thinking in
housing was the 1999 appearance of the journal Housing
Theory and Society, renamed from a previous regional hous-
ing and planning series. Afi:er a decade the journal has
largely satisfied its aspirations and has proven to be a
successful, albeit modest, site for housing research exploring
social theoretical questions. This theoretical haven faces
considerable competition from numerous less explicitly
theoretically themed journals in the housing and urban
field that have assimilated many of the theoretical and
methodological challenges presented by critical social
science and have widened the embrace of their social scien-
tific scope. Nor has the presence of a journal dedicated to
housing and social theory guaranteed the resolution of some
fundamental and persistent theoretical and methodological
doubts afflicting housing inquiry and its status as a social
scientific sub-branch. In 2009 Chris Allen argued that hous-
ing studies as a social scientific practice is philosophically
and e piste mologically untenable because it requires the
monopolisation and capturing of processes of production
of housing knowledge that deny or ignore the significance
of lived experience while constituting housing scholars as
powerful experts who determine policy truths and shape
policies directed towards the less powerful. Allen's argu-
ments are partly based on legitimate concerns about the
ethical problems surrounding the imposition of empirical
data collection on vulnerable research subjects but his resort
to the high philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty, and Gadamer, as justification for his implicitly anti-
elitist antihousing studies contention, rather than the views
and attitudes of the subjects of housing knowledge whose
concerns he triumphs, weakens his case.
Further Theoretical Challenges
Housing studies is perhaps notable for some theoretical
approaches that have not been pursued as intensively as
perhaps their significance ought to indicate. Feminist and
gender theory has been immensely influential over recent
decades in some of the disciplines from which housing
researchers draw theoretical inspiration, such as geo-
graphy, sociology, and anthropology, yet has barely
registered in housing studies. Gender is implicated in
many aspects of social inequality including housing
experiences. Much of the limited feminist work that has
been undertaken has tended to focus at the domestic or
'home' scale rather than the systemic or structural level.
Conversely much housing research incorporating a
gender dimension has contained minimal explicitly
feminist theoretical content. Sophie Watson's 1988 book
Accommodating Inequality was an early deliberate explora-
tion of the gender dimensions of housing systems
although this work was theoretically modest in ambition.
In the late 2000s, however, there have been some indica-
tions of a revival of interest in housing and gender
questions although this remains an undeservedly under-
developed area of housing inquiry.
A perhaps more visible theoretical concern that housing
studies will be expected to address in the years following the
2008-09 global financial crisis is the increasingly financial
character of housing and housing systems. A feature of the
2008-09 financial collapse was the treatment ofhousing as a
financial object, through securitised mortgage instruments
but often oblivious to the embeddedness of housing in
complex multiscalar social, economic, and cultural systems.
In Australia, where housing assets comprise the greater
sectoral proportion of national wealth and the majority of
households aspire to owner-occupation through a long-term
mortgage, the nation's Reserve Bank has begun to conceive
housing and finance as an interrelated housing finance sys-
tem, with all the complexities that housing implies, rather
than treating housing merely as an isolated asset class. While
housing finance and the role of housing in macroeconomic
processes have long been the subject of extensive research
there will be a need for much theoretical innovation, tested
against a robust empirical evidentiary base, to account for
the role of housing in global financial failures, if only to
prevent a recurrence of such catastrophes.
Further theoretical questions confront housing studies
when conceived beyond the borders of the affluent Western
nations towards which most housing research is focused and
addressed. The transition of the global population from
predominantly rural to majority urban raises considerable
questions for housing studies and of which the theoretical
contours have not yet been decisively charted or elaborated.
The spectre of Engels unavoidably haunts Mike Davis'
2006 book Planet of Slums chronicling this new urban era
in which the rates and scales of anticipated global urbanisa-
tion, focused in the megacities of developing nations, are
likely to be greater than any previously seen in human
history. While this will be a profoundly empirical phenom-
enon, measured in millions of new urban dwellers each

year, it will also pose theoretical challenges in terms of
comprehending the housing conditions these new residents
will experience as well as the economic, social, cultural,
environmental, and policy systems within which new urban
housing forms are articulated. While many millions of these
new urban dwellers will reside in slums and other informal
settlement configurations, a considerable proportion will
experience residential transitions into new forms of materi-
ally higher-quality housing supplied through a diverse mix
of state-led mega planning programmes and dynamic mar-
ket delivery. This global urban shifi: will require housing
studies to become much better articulated with intercul-
tural perspectives on economic and governmental systems
while inevitably infused with some of the theoretical con-
cerns of post- and neocolonial inquiry. Chris Allen's local
critique of housing studies could prove immensely power-
ful, although ultimately not indisputable, if applied at the
global scale. Housing is not alone in confronting these
global theoretical challenges. Urban planners and geogra-
phers have already begun to contemplate the emergence of
global urban 'planning cultures'. Vanessa Watson has
argued convincingly in favour of a productive exchange
between technorational and marketised urban management
and the informal and often marginal conditions occupied by
large proportions of humanity. If housing studies is to
achieve the social scientific objective of reflecting the
housing experiences of all of people's housing, researchers
will need to seek and advance theoretical perspectives that
can account for the new and emerging global 'housing
cultures' and their economic, social, cultural, and political
complexities and dynamics. And this is before housing
studies, wit h urb an social science generally, confronts the
implications of such potential biophysical threats as climate
change, resource insecu rity, water scarcity, food secu rity,
and p andemic disease outbreaks facing an urban globe.
Housing theories concerned solely with debating the soci al
construction of critical reality could poten tially struggle to
retain intellectual and practical relevance in the face of th e
urgent and immediate m aterial concerns expressed by th e
residents of a stressed and warming urban plane t.
Conclusions
D espite the aspiration of some h ousing sch olars towards
greater levels of th eoretical exposition, the history of
housing sch olarship de monstrates tha t most housing
sch olarship reflects the aggregate level of wider theore-
tical developme nt in social scie nce. While reformist,
ecological, institutional, neoclassical, M arxist, feminist,
social constru ctionist, and poststru ctu ral theories have
all cont ributed to a r icher understan ding of housing
Social Theory and Housing 513
issues, the intensity and precision of their application
to housing problems are often uneven and transient -
there have been all too few explicitly feminist exposi-
tions of housing qu estions, for example. Sometimes
theoretical debates ha ve contributed to important
enhancements of the social scientific power of housing
inquiry. On other occasions debates over the theoretical
content of housing analyses have threatened to divide
housing studies as an already minority social scientific
sub-branch. Theoretical debates in housing studies have
intensified since the 1970s as the c ritical purpose of
social science has achieved greater appreciation in the
wider disciplines and have fomented further intellectual
contests over the objectives and means of social refor-
mation. While housing studies remains a highly
empirical social science -perhaps because a significant
minority of the global population still suffers housing
problems like those reported by Engels- the enduring
importance of housing as a social, economic, cultural,
and political obj ect has ensured that social theoretical
considerations are rarely forgotten, even if not always
clearly articulated, in the elucidation of housing
questions.
References
Davis M (2006) Planet of Slums . London; New York: Verso.
Engels F (1844) The Condition of the Work1ng Class in England.
New York: John W. Lovell and Co.
Harvey D (1973) Soc1al Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.
Howard E (1898) Tomorrow: A Peaceful Way to Real Reform. London:
Swan Sonnenschein.
Lawson J (2006) Critical Realism and Housing Research . London;
New York: Routledge .
Saunders P (1979) Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation. London:
Hutchin son.
Watson S (1988) Accommodating Inequality: Gender and Housing .
Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Further Reading
Alonso W (1964) Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of
Land Rent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ball M (1983) Hous1ng and Economic Power: The Political Economy of
Owner Occupation . London; N ew York: M ethuen.
Jacobs K, Kemeny J, and Manzi T (2004) Social Constructionism in
Housing Research . Aldershot , UK: Ashgate Pub lishing Ltd.
Kemeny J (1981) The Myth of Home Ownership: Private versus
Public Choices in Housing Tenure . London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Kemeny J (1992) Hous1ng and Social Theory. London; New York:
Routledge.
Park R and Burgess E (1925) The City: Suggestions for Investigation of
Human Behavior 1n the Urban Environment . Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press .
Watson V (2009) Seeing from the south: Refocusing urban planning on
the globe's central urban issues. Urban Studies 46(11 ): 2259-2275.