We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for presentation at our session at the Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG), July 24-28, 2018, Cologne (Germany):

Urban Housing Challenges and Responses from a Global Perspective

Housing is back on the agenda of policy makers, advocates and researchers around the world. While urban housing markets and systems have been undergoing longer term-transformations in the neoliberal age, intersecting macro-processes around financialisation, urbanisation and austerity-framed re-regulation in the Post-GFC years have triggered the rise of serious challenges around the affordable, adequate and accessible supply of housing for urban populations in many places. In some contexts, commentators even speak of full-blown urban housing crises. But why are particular cities more affected than others? How can we get a more accurate multi-contextual and multi-facetted picture on the origins, processes, effects and responses in regards to housing-related transformations? And what empirical, conceptual, theoretical and methodological insights can help us to meaningfully engage with this topic?

We believe economic geography, in particular if practiced with the globalizing economic and institutional context in mind, should be well-placed and well-endowed to shed new light on these questions, set agendas and inform political and policy responses. Its rich disciplinary heritage, mid-level analytical gaze and productive openness to other disciplines should be key advantages that ought to be utilised to intellectually tackle pressing urban housing challenges and responses from a global perspective.

Examples of topics:

•    Rationale behind the emergence of housing challenges and crisis conditions
•    Describing, mapping and explaining the socio-spatial implications of urban housing challenges
•    Policy makers key responses, including the re-regulation of foreign investment, taxation and land-use as well as creating/encouraging new supply of affordable and social housing
•    Political mobilisation, grass-roots movements and ongoing contestation of housing-related urban political questions
•    (New) political economy of urban housing, including financialised housing, speculative urban land markets, neoliberalised state-regulatory apparatuses etc.
•    Processes of de-coupling urban housing markets and labour markets
•    Comparative urban housing studies (north/north; north/south; south/south)

Please submit your abstract through the conference website before 15 March 2018: https://www.gceg2018.com/nc/call-for-sessions-and-papers/submit-an-abstract.html

For further inquiry feel free to contact Sebastian Schipper ([log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]) or Steffen Wetzstein ([log in to unmask])" title="E-Mail verfassen an [log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask])

Sebastian Schipper (FU Berlin, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and Steffen Wetzstein (University of Erfurt; University of Western Australia)