Centring Housing in Political Economy

Abstract

The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism.