Housing and the Realignment of Urban Socio-Spatial Contracts

Abstract: This paper argues that narratives of the Big Society and Localism in England enacted through housing and planning policies, and housing welfare and benefit reforms across the entire United Kingdom, partly articulate, but primarily mask, a particular governmental response to the present structural crisis in housing and its sociological impacts. This response may be located within a wider political project aimed at realigning understandings of cities and the right for working class and younger populations to occupy urban space and access welfare as enacted through affordable and decent homes. The paper utilizes social contract theory to suggest that the promotion of localism in housing systems needs to be understood within wider struggles of naming the world and reframing the respective rights and responsibilities of the state and particular population groups. The paper concludes that Big Society rationales represent an implicit acknowledgement of a regressive reduction in the ambition of government to address the housing crisis as it affects low- and middle-income populations and its related social consequences.