Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

On reading over my recent posts I have realized that it is important to develop my account of what housing systems actually are. Although my understanding in explicit terms of them as complex systems dates from the 1990s I always worked on them with an implicit understanding of their complex nature. They are essentially interwoven social, cultural and economic in their nature and are in turn interwoven with all other relevant systems as expressed in primarily urban contexts in our urban world.

First, let me return to the necessity for grasping how housing systems are expressed over the whole of a locality as embedded with a city region. City regions are real entities in our world. They have malleable boundaries, generally through a process of extension and by absorbing other adjacent areas which were rural or peripheral industrial. So the City Region which constitutes the administrative area of the North East Combined authority has extended administratively by absorbing the rural and coalfield industrial peripheries of Northumberland and County Durham. This is not just a matter of administration. It is also a matter of lived experience. There was always a sense in the modern era in which this operated. The couple in  the 19^th Century music hall song “Wor nanny’s a mazer” were going from the Derwent Valley coalfield to shop in Newcastle. Now they would be going to work, most likely in an office park in the conurbation periphery and to shop  in the Metro Centre also in the periphery.  Journey work data helps us to understand lived experience.

It is impossible to understand the character of a neighbourhood without understanding how it relates to the whole urban system within which it is located. Housing forms and tenures are important determinants of the nature of those relationships. These are not static entities but rather subsystems in the whole urban system which have developed over the history of the urban system as a whole. And that development can have a non-linear trajectory. So the introduction of right to buy and the effective cessation of large scale social housing construction during the Thatcher and subsequent UK governments has profoundly and non-linearly transformed the nature of the large industrial city region housing systems of the UK’s city regions. This is not the first such transformation. The simultaneous development in varying stages of social housing provision, particularly for general needs in the twenty five years after World War II, alongside the subsidizing and encouragement of owner occupation to create a property owning democracy, had a similar impact on urban systems where the predominant tenure had been renting from a private landlord. One aspect of the new housing systems is of course the revival of private landlordism as an important tenure.

Housing has of course an economic form in the sense of forms of ownership, financing and provision. It has a cultural form because where you live and the kind of dwelling you live in has enormous implications for status and social relations. It has a general social form, not least in terms of its significance for ontological security, now mostly obtained through home ownership but in the recent past also possible on the basis of secure and protected tenancy. Its economic implications include the enormous importance of net imputed rents as a component of the real incomes of owner occupiers.

To grasp the nature of any housing system in any locality / city region it is necessary to deploy both the use of time series of data and, more importantly, to use documentary sources to trace the development of systems and policies. I did this when working in the Belfast City Region in the 1970s just as I had previously done on Tyneside. I worked out how the private landlordism system had developed before the First World War – much as it had on Tyneside as both places had a very similar social and economic history. I explored the development of owner occupation. The one great difference was the role of sectarianism in locating working and even lower middle class people in particular locales. This had been weakening in the 1960s before the new troubles but was re-established as vital after they began. There was one significant middle class housing area, Anderstown at the top of the Falls Road, but in general middle class areas were not differentiated on sectarian grounds and the wealthier the area the less importance sectarianism had. So in South Belfast the Catholic Church  on the Malone Road was upgraded from a chapel for servants to a edifice suitable for the middle and upper class catholics now living there. It will be interesting to look at how sectarianism is expressed in relation to housing in Belfast now.

One thing which is new and does matter is generation. The way in which former industrial city regions have become in their cores zones of education and health with massive growth in higher education and consequent student populations and of an increasing part of the workforce employed in giant hospitals and universities has had enormous implications for housing systems. So residence is not just a matter of class, ethnicity or religion. It is now also a matter of age.

This has been an interlude but when I talk about my time in Dublin I will come back to this issue.