Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

Colloquium

 The Housing Crisis: Experience, Analysis and Response

Friday 18th November    9.30 a.m. – 5.30 p.m.
Room 101, 30 Russell Square, Birkbeck, London

Refreshments are available in the morning and afternoon breaks.
Please bring your own lunch to eat over the lunchtime film.

The colloquium will provide an analysis of the social, economic and political nature of the current housing crisis as it is being lived out within the homes, streets and estates of the UK. This crisis illustrates the contradictory nature of housing within capitalist relations of production, contradictions which have been dramatically illustrated by the US sub-prime mortgage market meltdown and its UK and Irish equivalents; in each country, housing finance has been centrally implicated in the wider turmoil. In the UK, the social after-shocks of such crises are currently being felt by the unwitting victims of the Coalition Government’s radical policy changes in relation to Housing Benefit and social housing as part of its ‘Big Society’ vision. The colloquium examines the nature of the UK housing crisis including how the growing problems of housing unaffordability and insecurity are being lived out with, for example, five million people on council housing waiting lists in England. The colloquium also highlights various responses to the housing crisis and the Coalition Government’s policies that have emerged from civil society and local government.

Speakers

• Duncan Bowie (Senior Lecturer in Spatial Planning, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster) is the author of Politics, Planning and Homes in a World City (Routledge, 2010) and he convenes the Highbury Group on Housing and the Credit Crunch.

• Sarah Glynn (independent researcher) is the editor of Where the Other Half lives: Lower-income Housing in a Neoliberal World (Pluto Press, 2009).

• Graham Turner (GFC Economics) is the author of The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis (Pluto Press, 2008) and most recently No Way to Run an Economy: Why the System Failed and How to Put It Right (Pluto Press, 2009). He is the founder of GFC Economics, an independent economic consultancy established in 1999.