Comparative housing, urban crisis and political economy: an ethnographically based ‘long view’ from Auckland, Singapore and Berlin

Abstract

This paper follows a call for a ‘long view’ perspective on contemporary housing problems and policy. It applies this longitudinal lens to a multi-city comparative ethnographical study that investigates and relates place-specific and common trajectories and policies in regard to contemporary urban housing. By comparing Auckland, Singapore and Berlin from a heterodox political economy perspective, it demonstrates how contemporary challenges and proposed solutions over housing have deep-seated historical and geographical roots that are usually overlooked. It suggests that comprehending current housing issues as cumulative effects of developments and policy (non)-action taken in the past, and relating and evaluating those constitutive trajectories and transformations across (disparate) cities, current academic and policy debates can be enriched and deepened. One lesson is that ‘learning from the past’ may be a more promising crisis response than nowadays’ politically fetishised learning via global best practice and spatially mobilised policy.

Keywords:

• Comparative housing
• urban political economy
• ethnography
• historical sensitivity

Notes

1. Auckland represents an Anglophone homeownership society – with a particular focus on owner-occupation for almost all groups in society, until recently a smaller private rental sector and increasingly residual public rental.

2. German-speaking renter societies are characterised by a relative high proportion of private renters (especially in cities), predominantly private sector-delivered social housing and a comparatively small homeownership sector.

3. Singapore’s unique public–private housing system consists of predominantly highly subsidised, owner-occupied leasehold housing (duration of 99 years). It exists alongside a much smaller private homeownership sector, with only marginal public rental being offered.

4. The introduction of the ‘rental price brake’ in Berlin in 2015 meant that landlords were not allowed to increase rents by more than 10 per cent above the local average. However, asymmetrical power relationships and unbalanced information access between landlords and renters in Berlin’s buoyant housing market led to ineffective policy implementation.

5. The responsibilities for conducting interviews, transcription, analyses and interpretation lie solely with the bilingual author. Research activities included the translation of the fieldwork notes from German into English. The original interview transcripts can be accessed from the author.

6. In the decades following World War II, New Zealand was considered one of the richest countries in the world based on agricultural and meat exports, while Germany’s economy, by comparison, had suffered badly from the impact of World War II and the post-war reparation payments. New Zealand’s wealth at the time underwrote the operation of an expensive welfare system.

7. The so-called baby boomers in New Zealand, representing the population cohort born in the ‘high-fertility’ decades between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s, stand out internationally as particularly pronounced demographic group. It has exercised strong and sustained political power during the neoliberal decades and has thus shaped increasingly unequal societal outcomes including social and spatial housing patterns.

8. New Zealand experienced various immigration waves in its history. While in the earlier colonisation period the traditional source countries of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and Ireland dominated immigration, after World War II labour-market-related migration from the Pacific Islands, and from the 1980s Asian migration streams from countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, India and China added significantly to the cosmopolitan nature of the country and particularly Auckland.

9. The politically highly important racial mix in Singapore consists of three major groups: Chinese, Malays and Indians.

10. Drastic and unprecedented monetary inflation in the 1920s (resulting from attempts to pay back debt accrued during, and as outcome of, World War I) led to comprehensive currency reform in 1923. Other currency reforms followed in 1948 and 1990. These reforms caused partly significant loss of cash-based investments compared to property-based wealth.