What do we know and what should we do about?
housing
- Rowland Atkinson
- Keith Jacobs
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- New Delhi
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Rowland Atkinson and Keith Jacobs 2020
First published 2020
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956624
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ISBN 978-1-5264-6656-3
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titles in the series
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Immigration?
Jonathan Portes
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Inequality?
Mike Brewer
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work?
Melanie Simms
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Internet Privacy?
Paul Bernal
Forthcoming:
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Terrorism?
Brooke Rogers
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Sustainable Living?
Kate Burningham and Tim Jackson
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Fake News?
Nick Anstead
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Slavery?
Julia OConnell-Davidson
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social Mobility?
Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin
about the series
Every news bulletin carries stories which relate in some way to the social sciences most obviously politics, economics and sociology but also, often, anthropology, business studies, security studies, criminology, geography and many others.
Yet despite the existence of large numbers of academics who research these subjects, relatively little of their work is known to the general public. There are many reasons for that but one, arguably, is that the kinds of formats that social scientists publish in, and the way in which they write, are simply not accessible to the general public.
The guiding theme of this series is to provide a format and a way of writing which addresses this problem. Each book in the series is concerned with a topic of widespread public interest, and each is written in a way which is readily understandable to the general reader with no particular background knowledge.
The authors are academics with an established reputation and a track record of research in the relevant subject. They provide an overview of the research knowledge about the subject, whether this be long-established or reporting the most recent findings; widely accepted or still controversial. Often in public debate there is a demand for greater clarity about the facts, and that is one of the things the books in this series provide.
However, in social sciences, facts are often disputed and subject to different interpretations. They do not always, or even often, speak for themselves. The authors therefore strive to show the different interpretations or the key controversies about their topics, but without getting bogged down in arcane academic arguments.
Not only can there be disputes about facts but also there are almost invariably different views on what should follow from these facts. And, in any case, public debate requires more of academics than just to report facts; it is also necessary to make suggestions and recommendations about the implications of these facts.
Thus each volume also contains ideas about what we should do within each topic area. These are based upon the authors knowledge of the field but also, inevitably, upon their own views, values and preferences. Readers may not agree with them, but the intention is to provoke thought and well-informed debate.
Chris Grey, Series Editor
Professor of Organization Studies
Royal Holloway, University of London
about the authors
Rowland Atkinsonis Research Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on housing and city life, with a particular emphasis on inequalities and social divisions. His most recent publications include:
Alpha City (Verso 2020),
Urban Criminology (with Gareth Millington, Routledge 2018),
Domestic Fortress (with Sarah Blandy, Manchester University Press 2016) and
House, Home and Society (with Keith Jacobs, Palgrave 2016).
Keith Jacobsis Professor of Sociology at the University of Tasmania. His most recent publications include: an edited collection with Jeff Malpas,
Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield 2019),
Neoliberal Housing Policy: An International Perspective (Routledge 2019) and
House, Home and Society (co-authored with Rowland Atkinson, Palgrave 2016).
acknowledgements
For their enormous help in critiquing and honing the arguments presented here we want to thank our editor, Chris Grey; and colleagues, Tony Manzi, Ryan Powell and Paul Watt.
We have always been aware that academic scholarship is a collective endeavour and that ideas are derived from different sources, but we wish to highlight the influence on us of a book published some 44 years ago by Peter Ambrose and Bob Colenutt, namely the really excellent,
