18. HOUSING – NOW: From Housing as Commodity to Housing as Use-Value

From Garden Cities to Pruitt-Igoe, and from Tapiola to Arabianranta, housing has been a central arena through which societies have sought to materialise social values, collective responsibility, and visions of the good life. In post-war welfare states, mobilising economic surplus for social housing provision was a core task of urban planning and public policy. Securing an affordable home for all was a foundational element of the social contract.

Today, this foundation is eroding. In Finland, as in many Nordic and European countries, the institutional, financial, and regulatory frameworks that once enabled state-led and socially oriented housing provision are being dismantled. Housing has increasingly been redefined as a commodity and investment asset, embedded in local and international real estate markets. This transformation has deepened inequalities, reshaped everyday domestic life, and produced far-reaching consequences for urban form, environmental sustainability, and social wellbeing.

The contemporary housing crisis also extends beyond renters and social housing residents. In high-homeownership societies such as Finland and the United Kingdom, housing provision is increasingly shaped by financial and inflationary pressures that undermine affordability, security, and wellbeing among homeowners as well. Demand for housing is often framed as a technical shortage of supply, legitimising growth-oriented development strategies, despite limited evidence that increased supply alone improves affordability and with insufficient attention to social and environmental limits.

Against this background, the HOUSING – NOW session asks: How can housing be reclaimed as a social use-value rather than a financialised commodity, and what political, economic, and architectural transformations would this require?

The session brings together critical urban political economy and research-through-design to examine both how housing crises are produced through financialisation, welfare retrenchment, and growth-oriented policies, and how alternative forms of housing provision can be politically and materially realised. We seek to foster dialogue between theory and practice by explicitly linking analyses of housing systems, governance, and power relations to urban form, housing typologies, and architectural and spatial strategies.

We invite contributions both on the Nordic and international perspectives. Submissions may be conceptual, empirical, historical, or design-based, and may address (but are not limited to) the following interconnected themes:

Producing housing as a commodity

• Financialisation of housing and the restructuring of public and social housing systems
• Homeownership, investment logics, and housing inequalities in high-ownership societies
• Growth-led housing policies and the limits of supply-based affordability strategies
• Racialised, exclusionary, and unequal access to housing in financialised markets

Reclaiming housing as use-value

• Non-market and de-commodified housing models, including co-operatives, commons, limited-profit, municipal, and hybrid forms
• Resistance, social mobilisation, and experiments in post-capitalist housing organisation
• Welfare-era and contemporary housing models as sources of institutional, spatial, and policy learning

Materialising use-value through urban form and architecture

• Housing typologies and urban morphologies that support social life and care
• Adjustable, flexible, and needs-based housing systems across the life course
• Medium-density housing strategies for quality and sufficiency
• Research-through-design approaches and experimental housing projects linking policy, governance, and built form

The session prioritises contributions that explicitly connect political-economic analysis with housing forms, governance arrangements, or spatial configurations. Papers focusing solely on market dynamics or technical construction efficiency without a broader social and political framing are less suited to the session. Session’s language is English.

By foregrounding housing as a social use-value and examining how this principle can be translated into concrete institutional and spatial arrangements, the session aims to stimulate critical and constructive debate on socially minded housing futures beyond growth-dependent and financialised models of urban development. We believe this offers fresh views to the conference theme “city of hope”.