Verrier, C. (2022, August). Land use and local housing regimes: What place for affordability? In ENHR Conference 2022, Barcelona, Spain.

Over the last few years, the transformation of European housing systems The apparent convergence of European housing regimes towards a Neoliberal model (Clapham, 2019) along with the ongoing rescaling of both state action and market forces since the 1980’s (Brenner, 1999; Kazepov, 2010), calls for a rethink on the relevance of the national perspective to conduct comparative research on housing policies (Matznetter, 2020). This situation apparently leaves a gap between nationally understood housing policies and the actual practices of actors at the local level.

This paper, part of a broader research investigating the role of local institutional systems and actors in shaping varied housing outcomes within mid-sized urban development projects, looks into the specific practices of land development, and hypothesizes that current housing systems could be better understood by investigating the strategic adaptation of local actors to their institutional constraints. Seeing housing production as an intimately local process, the concept of local housing regime (Hoekstra, 2020) may represent a useful theoretical lens to understand the enabling and disabling factors shaping the decisions found on the ground. This does not mean that we need to subsume it only to context but rather that a systematic understanding of the forces at hand can steer policies capable of producing better housing affordability in the future. In order to further the reflection, the current article aims to review the literature on the topic, as well as conduct explorative interviews in the Netherlands and France.