This book brings disability, ethnicity and gender into the centre of an analysis of housing policies and practices. At the same time it offers a distinctive way of looking at welfare arrangements in a complex society. We explore interactions between human agency and institutional power, and examine how ‘difference’ is responded to and regulated in the modern welfare state. Touching on issues ranging from minority ethnic housing needs to domestic violence, we locate specific housing concerns in relation to a larger backcloth of dominant ideas, social changes, and challenges from the grass roots. The book acknowledges the significance of diversity of experiences and of household strategies, but also highlights the persistent influence of longstanding ‘structural’ factors shaping housing choices for many disabled people, minority ethnic households and women. We also try to connect manageable theoretical preoccupations with daily practice and experience, drawing on the record available in UK housing.

Our focus on housing issues is primarily from a social policy standpoint, with comments generally being about social trends and issues rather than matters of building design, physical environment or economic analysis (cf Clapham, Kemp and Smith, 1990). Social policy is not easy to define precisely, because most kinds of public policies have social implications, and the study of social policies overlaps with other fields of enquiry. For practical reasons, our boundaries are generally drawn to exclude analyses of governmental economic management policies, industrial policies, environmental policies, and policies on political processes, although these come into the background of the study. Analysis from a social policy perspective has come to imply an awareness of institutional strategies, rules, values, histories, discourses and practices related explicitly to distributional and household welfare concerns, an acknowledgement of questions of social division, order, conflict and cohesion, and an understanding of policy issues across non-governmental as well as statutory agencies. In looking at questions raised in housing by disability, ethnicity and gender, we are working very much within this social policy tradition. Our discussion also concentrates centrally on housing access, management and consumption rather than production. Policies and practices in construction clearly affect consumers, employees, and wider communities, but we cannot tackle here the housing industry as such.