The Housing Crisis: Experience, Analysis and Response - 18th November

Event description

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 during 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.

Organising Committee:
• Dr. Paul Watt
Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies
Birkbeck, University of London

• Dr. Isabelle Fremeaux
Department of Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London

• Glyn Robbins
Department of Social Policy and Education,
Birkbeck, University of London

• Dr. Stuart Hodkinson 
Department of Geography
University of Leeds