As relative stability returns to many parts of Syria after ten years of armed conflict, several cities are beginning to restore urban life through planning interventions and reconstruction projects. However, unbalanced urban growth, partly due to the presence of internally displaced persons (IDPs), presents significant challenges for major cities. Yet, the odds of the returning decision are reduced due to several challenges such as lack of infrastructure, inadequate public services, housing shortage, and social barriers. This paper outlines how Syria can develop more liveable, economically viable, and environmentally sustainable places in the post-conflict phase. It projects four scenarios, each with varying numbers and characteristics of returning refugees and IDPs. Next, it compares the returnees' potential residential patterns and urban concentration to Zipf's Law, a normalised distribution of ‘ideal’ city sizes. The paper proposes polycentric development approach for the best chance at balancing development, sustainability, and mass returns in the recovery phase. It is concluded that the effectiveness of post-conflict administration of spatial development will affect the Syrian exiles' behaviour, both the number of those who decide to return and the spatial choice for those who actually return.

Many countries have seen a remarkable revival of private-rental housing markets in recent years. Academic literature so far has focused on theorizing the political-economic drivers of reinvestment in the tenure or on charting aggregate trends. This paper adds to these literatures in several ways based on a fine-grained analysis of housing market transformations in Groningen, a medium-sized university city in The Netherlands. First, we reveal the variegated trajectories through which private-rental growth materializes on the ground and untangle the role of different types of landlords. While small-scale private landlords remain dominant, we find a clear and important trend toward property concentration. Second, we highlight variations in spatial investment strategies across landlord types. Third, we reveal how contemporary dynamics of increased landlordism play out in a medium-sized city, embedded in a context of national private rental resurgence and local housing market pressures of a growing student city.

In the spring of 2019, the Syrian civil war has entered its eight year. Although the heaviest fighting has taken place elsewhere, Damascus is heavily affected by the ongoing conflict. First, large parts of the eastern and southern fringe of the city are heavily damaged or destroyed. Second, the inflow of internally displaced persons is large, which has resulted in a very tense housing market in the undamaged districts. Third, the war-time political economy has changed the role of public and private actors in spatial planning and housing provision. This paper shows how the geography- and political economy of warfare has impacted upon residential patterns and housing practices in Damascus during the civil war. The empirical results are based on satellite imagery, policy documents and a survey among spatial planning experts and students. The results indicate that the formal response to the housing crisis consists of a reinforcement of the existing authoritarian neo-liberal planning model. This model has resulted in the construction of unaffordable luxurious showcase projects at symbolic locations. The informal response to the housing crisis is more pronounced. Alternative housing strategies, such as to self-construction, family housing, squatting and sub-letting have increased in popularity, as the formal response does not deliver immediate relief for war-affected households. The use of alternative housing strategies is concentrated in the existing informal settlements. This suggests that the civil war exacerbates housing poverty, but as well contributes to rising levels of socio-economic segregation.

Drawing on 69 interviews and information from the World Values Surveys, we examine discursive understandings of social capital in Romania. We evidence two dominant explanatory metanarratives on the weakness of social capital ('communism' and 'ethnocentric individualism') and dilemmas regarding generational and urban/rural differences, which our mixed-methods approach helps decode. Contemporary processes of institutionalisation and commodification have further weakened practices of social capital but such processes are socially approved for their potential of breaking with lingering practices of corruption, bribery and favouritism, and of achieving institutional fairness. Convergence with mature democracies is unlikely not because of passive legacies or ill-adapted actors but because people have different aspirations, well suited to the context of post-communist transformation.

This paper focuses on the notion of home as a narrative of one’s lived experience that clashes with planners’ understanding of housing and housing policies, using as a case study Shahriar County, located on the western fringe of the metropolitan area of Tehran. Following Heidegger, the feeling of home is a fundamental aspect of human existence. From this perspective, housing policies and spatial planning impact the sense of home in a geographical context. The empirical analysis is based on an overview of institutional changes since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and interviews with inhabitants of Shahriar. The results indicate that Iran has developed a particular form of neoliberal, speculative model of urban development, in which urban segregation and seclusion and uneven regional development are noteworthy. Consequently, the sense of home is structurally undermined on the metropolitan fringe, generating a feeling of living on the edge of the world.

More and more cities develop urban food strategies (UFSs) to guide their efforts and practices towards more sustainable food systems. An emerging theme shaping these food policy endeavours, especially prominent in North and South America, concerns the enhancement of social justice within food systems. To operationalise this theme in a European urban food governance context we adopt Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice: economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. In this paper, we discuss the findings of an exploratory document analysis of the social justice-oriented ambitions, motivations, current practices and policy trajectories articulated in sixteen European UFSs. We reflect on the food-related resource allocations, value patterns and decision rules these cities propose to alter and the target groups they propose to support, empower or include. Overall, we find that UFSs make little explicit reference to social justice and justice-oriented food concepts, such as food security, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty. Nevertheless, the identified resources, services and target groups indicate that the three dimensions of Fraser are at the heart of many of the measures described. We argue that implicit, fragmentary and unspecified adoption of social justice in European UFSs is problematic, as it may hold back public consciousness, debate and collective action regarding food system inequalities and may be easily disregarded in policy budgeting, implementation and evaluation trajectories. As a path forward, we present our plans for the RE-ADJUSTool that would enable UFS stakeholders to reflect on how their UFS can incorporate social justice and who to involve in this pursuit.

The authors reflect on recent experiences at UN-Habitat and other international organizations to rethink the roles of planning towards larger development goals and to reform planning systems in places most in need of them. They consider the difficulties but ultimate necessity to learn from a variety of contexts and experiences to articulate general orientations for planning and planning reform which can partly transcend context. Within the variety of planning experiences, and the experiences of lack of planning, one can discern principles which can be applied in many contexts, yet those include principles of contextualization and learning. Comparative learning underpins the attempts at finding general principles, and the local application of those principles further triggers processes of learning, including comparative learning. Local and grassroots planning capacity building is vital to locally apply and contextualize international planning guidelines.

This paper examines the role of secondary property ownership (SPO) in Europe (EU). Focusing predominantly on residential properties used as rental-investments, it explores their role in the political economy of housing and welfare, contributing to respectively newer and older literatures about housing wealth and asset-based welfare and the 'really big trade-off' between outright homeownership and generous pensions. Both have hitherto largely been viewed as related to ownership of the primary residence. The empirical part of this paper is based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), carried out by the European Central Bank in 2014, and providing information about property ownership by samples of households in 20 member states of the EU. The results show that the total wealth held in the form of SPO is considerable while also varying considerably from country to country. SPO held as an investment in the form of landlordism is most prevalent in countries characterised as corporatist-conservative or liberal welfare regimes. In the corporatist-conservative countries, SPO can be seen as a since long established proactive asset-based welfare strategy that compensates for the limitations of their fragmented pension systems, especially for the self-employed. In liberal welfare states, the recent upswing of buy-to-let landlordism is a manifestation of the concentration of housing wealth and limited access to homeownership for starters, which makes SPO an ever more attractive investment.

Previous research consistently shows that homeowners accumulate more wealth compared with tenants. In this paper, we describe the size of this ‘tenure wealth gap’ for 10 European countries. Furthermore, we explain why the size of the tenure wealth gap differs between countries by including cross-level interactions between institutional variables and housing tenure in a series of country-fixed effects regression models. Cross-country differences arise as the costs of owning versus renting, as well as the profitability of homeownership versus other investments, differ along the lines of welfare policies and housing regime arrangements. We attempt to control for selection bias related to tenure status by using propensity score matching techniques, using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Our findings suggest that the tenure wealth gap is largest in familialistic welfare states, in which marginalised tenants are unable to save, whereas homeownership is a family resource that provides an in-kind retirement income (‘passive’ asset-based welfare). We find smaller tenure wealth gaps in countries with a financialised promotion of homeownership, where housing wealth functions as a privatised welfare arrangement (‘active’ asset-based welfare). The smallest tenure wealth gaps occur in countries with more affordable rental housing, allowing tenants to accumulate savings.

Previous research consistently shows that homeowners accumulate more wealth compared with tenants. In this paper, we describe the size of this 'tenure wealth gap' for 10 European countries. Furthermore, we explain why the size of the tenure wealth gap differs between countries by including cross-level interactions between institutional variables and housing tenure in a series of country-fixed effects regression models. Cross-country differences arise as the costs of owning versus renting, as well as the profitability of homeownership versus other investments, differ along the lines of welfare policies and housing regime arrangements. We attempt to control for selection bias related to tenure status by using propensity score matching techniques, using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Our findings suggest that the tenure wealth gap is largest in familialistic welfare states, in which marginalised tenants are unable to save, whereas homeownership is a family resource that provides an in-kind retirement income ('passive' asset-based welfare). We find smaller tenure wealth gaps in countries with a financialised promotion of homeownership, where housing wealth functions as a privatised welfare arrangement ('active' asset-based welfare). The smallest tenure wealth gaps occur in countries with more affordable rental housing, allowing tenants to accumulate savings.

The rise of the private rental sector in the Netherlands: a profitable problem During the last ten years, the private rental sector in the Netherlands has experienced a rapid growth. In the larger cities, this sector grew with 30 percent, mainly as a result of the large amount of private persons operating as small scale landlords (buy-to-let). This article reflects on the findings of a recent report on the nature of the buy-to-let sector in the Netherlands, carried out by Manuel Aalbers, Jelke Bosma, Rodrigo Fernandez and Cody Hochstenbach. This takes their findings as a starting point, and positions the Dutch private rental sector in an internationally comparative perspective. Furthermore, this article explains the rise of the buy-to-let sector not just from a housing market point of view, but from a welfare state perspective. In different European countries, the private rental sector plays a different role in the housing market, which impacts on the availability and affordability of housing in urban areas. Moreover, rental income for buy-to-let or small-scale private landlords can be seen as part of the provision of welfare. For some it is a pension arrangement, for others a speculative investment. This article reflects on the policy recommendations that Aalbers cum suis propose in their report. To what extent are their proposals able to increase the availability and affordability of housing, without undermining the livelihood of landlords for whom the rental incomes function as social security arrangement?

ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that divorce reduces the likelihood of home-ownership. Even in later life, ever-divorced men and women display lower home-ownership rates than their married counterparts. There is, however, a lack of knowledge about the consequences of divorce for a majority of divorcees: those who remain in home-ownership or move back into home-ownership after an episode in rental housing. This paper investigates the economic costs of divorce by focusing on the housing wealth of ever-divorced home-owners in later life (age 50 and over), against the background of changing welfare and housing regimes. The empirical analysis is based on data from ten European countries that participated in the third and fourth waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE 2007/8 and 2011/2). Our analyses support an association between divorce experience and lower housing wealth holdings for men and women who remain in home-ownership after a divorce, or re-enter home-ownership after a spell in rental housing. This means that a divorce has negative housing consequences for a broader range of individuals than thus far assumed. In countries with a dynamic housing market and a deregulated housing finance system, ever-divorced home-owners are worse off than their married counterparts. In these countries, more elderly individuals with a weaker financial situation are able to remain in or regain access to (mortgaged) home-ownership, but at the cost of lower housing equity. Further research should focus on the implications (e.g. for wellbeing, economic position) of such cross-country variations.

Housing wealth is the largest component of wealth for a majority of Swedish households. Whereas investments in housing are merely defined by income, the returns on this investment (capital gains) are dependent on local housing market dynamics. Since the 1990s, local housing market dynamics in Swedish cities have been altered by the upswing in levels of socio-spatial inequality. The simultaneous up- and downgrading of neighbourhoods is reflected in house price developments and exacerbates the magnitude of capital gains and losses. This article proposes that the selective redirection of housing pathways that causes an upswing in socio-spatial inequality translates into an uneven distribution of capital gains as well. A sequence analysis of the housing pathways of one Swedish birth cohort (1970-1975), based on population-wide register data (GeoSweden), is used to explain differences in capital gains between different social groups in the period 1995-2010. The results indicate higher capital gains for individuals with higher incomes and lower gains for migrants. When socio-spatial inequality increases, the more resourceful groups can use their economic and cultural capital to navigate through the housing market in a more profitable way.