2017 UAA Annual Conference

This panel aims to continue a conversation that started at the UAA 2016 colloquy, Theorizing Housing: What is the State of the Art? The intent is to elevate and expand theoretical scholarship in our quest to study and improve housing conditions. We believe this is especially important and relevant now given the dominance of policy research, which as van Vliet (2003) found is primarily funded by government with policy makers as the intended audience. While grounded in a literature, there is limited reflection on the underlying assumptions or in evaluation research speak “the theory of change” promulgated by contemporary policies such as mixed-income housing.

The goal of this session is to theorize contemporary housing policy problems, to develop insight more so than to simply critique, in order to find new ways of conceiving and responding to them. This includes gentrification, housing affordability, the privatization of social housing, and public housing transformation. Further, we aim to contribute to the different ways of theorizing housing including engaging with and bringing social theory into the housing field as well as making theory about housing as a unique phenomenon. Both approaches provide different opportunities for theorizing housing.

Within the Market or Without? Theorizing Social Housing as Social Property
Sarah Cooper, University of Illinois-Chicago

The Making of the Precarious City
James Fraser, Vanderbilt Unversity

The Geography of (Actually Existing) Opportunity: Housing Choice as Capital?
Andrew Greenlee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign