Introduction

This chapter explores whether and how low-and middle-income residents in European city-regions employ an active commissioning role in the contested governance of the dominant players of the market, the public sector and the established providers of housing. The position of residents in European city-regions varies vastly in terms of tenure, access and affordability.

From a global perspective, housing in North-Western Europe occupies a unique position because of the historic trajectories of housing regimes through the welfare state. While capitalism is established as a general economic order, it is mitigated and differentiated under the influence of social movements and professionalising policy regimes of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kemeny, 1995). Throughout the 20th century, low-and middle-income residents have been able to exert power through social organisation and political representation. As a result, most North-Western European states – with strong regional variation – are characterised by social housing sectors, which peaked particularly in the immediate post-war period, offering affordable and secure housing to large numbers of residents on below average incomes. Since the end of the 1980s, the size of the organised social sector has been reduced and its working areas have become more selective after almost half a century of universal growth. In this process of social residualisation (Harloe, 1995), the social housing sector also mirrors the differentiation of social and political regimes throughout Europe. Lower-and middle-income groups have conventionally depended on collectively arranged varieties of social or private rent.

The first part of this chapter will give an overview of the most significant characteristics of housing for low-and middle-income groups with regards to tenures, differences of accessibility and recent tendencies. The different parts of Europe go through their own processes of transformation. As a result of recent liberalisation, homeownership is increasingly an alternative tenure throughout Europe. However, this remains only limitedly accessible for lowerincome segments on the housing market. There are vast differences across European regions. In some North-Western European states, such as the Netherlands, Sweden or France, social housing constitutes an important component of a universalist housing approach. In other countries, such as the UK and Western Germany, social housing has increasingly exclusively catered to low-income groups. Eastern European housing figures diverge from North-Western European patterns because of their socialist legacies.