Call for Abstracts – ISA RC 21 – Antwerp – Session 8
Call for Abstracts – ISA RC 21 – Antwerp – Session 8
The 2020 annual conference of the International Sociological AssociationResearch Committee 21 on Urban and Regional Development will take place in Antwerp from 6 to 8 July 2020. The general theme of the conference is ‘Sensing and Shaping the City’, focusing on how citizens experience the fragmentary, unequal and contradictory realities of global urbanity.
With the research groups P.PUL (KU Leuven – Jana Verstraete), Interface Demography (VUB – Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe) and Expeditions (Marjan Moris), we organize a panel on discrimination and exclusion on the housing market.
We invite everybody to submit abstracts for this panel through the official website of the conference: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/rc21-sensing-the-city/call-for-papers/submit-your-abstract/
Title session 8: Discrimination and exclusion on the housing market: patterns, mechanisms and counter-strategies
In many European cities, housing markets are under pressure. The demand for decent and affordable housing exceeds the housing stock, leading to high competition among various groups. This imbalance creates unequal power relations between home seekers and providers, which enables the latter to impose strict requirements on (future) residents and to be selective in who to accept in their property.
Vulnerable home-seekers are hence confronted with a number of exclusionary and discriminatory mechanisms. To find accommodation, they are often forced to accept housing of substandard quality and/or face very high housing costs. Moreover, the degree of exclusion might differ between neighborhoods and their sensory characteristics. In addition, exclusion and discrimination might also (re)produce residential segregation. Finally, home-seekers do not passively undergo their disadvantaged position but actively engage in countering exclusion and discrimination, and invent strategies to deal with slumlordism. The sensory elements of segregation patterns in exclusion might even be used to tackle exclusion and discrimination on a more political and collective level.
This session seeks to bring together work concerned with how vulnerable social groups do (not) find access to the primary and secondary housing markets in urban areas. We wish to shed light on the role of housing providers in shaping the city. In regulating access to housing they contribute to the spatial distribution of different social groups. Further, we wish to discuss the exclusionary and discriminatory experiences of unprivileged groups on the housing market (such as migrants, households in poverty, single parents, people with disabilities, …). Finally, we encourage contributions on how multi-sensory and embodied accounts of the city can help to make tangible precarious housing situations and their consequences.
We welcome papers that might include (but are not limited to) theoretical, empirical and methodological engagements with
- Exclusionary mechanisms on the housing market and their residential patterns
- Experiences of discrimination and non-selection and their residential patterns
- Strategies to combat housing exclusion and discrimination
- Strategies to fuel public debates on housing exclusion, discrimination and substandard quality housing
- Policies to enhance housing accessibility
- Policies to trace and tackle housing discrimination
- Inventive ways to make housing deprivation tangible to a wider audience
- Consequences of living in substandard quality housing
For more information, please contact the session organizers:
Jana Verstraete
Research Group P.PUL (Dep. of Architecture, KU Leuven) & CRESC (University of Antwerp)
Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe
Interface Demography (Dep. of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium)
Marjan Moris
Expeditions, Research in Applied Anthropology, Belgium