Processes of housing access: A dynamic approach to housing consumption

This paper outlines an analytic framework for the comparative study of housing access, based upon the concept of the ‘processes of housing access’. The aim is to devise a framework which is generalised enough to permit systematic cross-national comparison, but sufficiently grounded to take on board the wealth of empirical detail on a country by country basis. Defining the processes of housing access in any specific context involves the identification of: a) the sets of social relations that consumers enter into in gaining access to particular forms of housing; and b) the formal and informal conditions of negotiation surrounding access, defined in terms of the characteristics of both consumers and housing. The identification of the dynamic constituents of the negotiation of housing access (during which the underlying relations of power are concretised and reproduced in housing outcomes) involves an explicit focus on the interface of macro- and micro-level analyses. It is hoped that a more widely applicable model for the analysis of access may be developed from the attempt to model housing access in this way.