In this Briefing Paper the focus is on the EU-SILC and on the questions: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the pan-European data set EU-SILC, which stands for ‘European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions’? How useful is this database when making international housing comparisons? The examples in this paper are based on my experience with the EU-SILC and explore a number of themes such as setting universal norms for all countries and differences in data requirements between housing and poverty research. My conclusion is that some of these topics transcend the database evaluation and are concerned with the definition of concepts. As long as there are no ‘better’ data alternatives, we need to make do with what we have, but should do so carefully and transparently.
The European Network for Housing Research organized a conference in Prague June 28-July 1. This meeting of experts focused on the role and “power” of housing and mortgage markets, which is rapidly changing, especially by increasing the influence these markets have on the wider economy and sustainable development of many societies. and Tomáš Kostelecký.
The durable structures of housing and housing institutions are often subject to long-term processes of incremental change. Nevertheless, housing studies have largely focused either on static snapshots of policies or, more recently, on the inertia of institutional path dependence, while processes of incremental change have been almost entirely neglected. Political scientists (Streeck/Thelen/Mahoney) have proposed a typology of patterns of incremental institutional change, and this paper explores the applicability of this typology to housing structures and housing institutions. We draw on empirical illustrations from the housing literature to show how five types of change – layering, conversion, displacement, drift, exhaustion – apply to housing structures and institutions. We conclude with some general observations on how the typology can be used in further studies of developments in national housing regimes.
Collective homes and housing collectivization are phenomena that are usually considered to be ideologically close to Marxism and anarchism. In the 19th century, however, socialization of domestic work was part of various ideological streams, from social democrats to the business establishment. At the beginning of the 20th century, various forms of collective housing garnered the attention of the Czech intellectual elite. Information about collective housing came either directly from the United States of America or from Germany and Scandinavia. Czech sociologists regarded it as a contribution to social solidarity; feminists, on the contrary, as an instrument for the reinforcement of the family. The concept of homes with central kitchens came to Bohemia not only as part of a political and economic discourse but also in utopian novels and as part of architectural debates. Czech architecture and literature were, however, reserved about collective housing. The first larger reflection on central kitchens did not appear in Czech architecture until the beginning of the 1920s, on the margins of debates about the garden city. Among feminists, in contrast, we can see an uninterrupted interest in the socialization of domestic work during the entire first four decades of the 20th century. And it was feminists who managed to give the theoretical deliberations a real, albeit very constrained architectural form., Hubert Guzik., and Obsahuje bibliografii
b1_The text deals with the efforts to save housework in relation to the process of women’s emancipation. Since the 19th century, using gas, electricity and modern devices in the household promised to eliminate physical exertion and to speed up work substantially. In the process women were to acquire time to participate in education and cultural life. In the 20th century we see a differentiation in women’s roles: educated professional women got rid of most domestic work by hiring other women to perform it. After the Second World War and in relation to the mobilization of women from homes to employment, the communist regime announced the project of the liberated household. A specialized enterprise was to provide full services to households: laundry, cleaning and mending of clothes, cleaning and others. Daily boarding was to be ensured by kitchens in preschool facilities, schools and factories. The displacement of a majority of housework from the household did not succeed, the services sector in real socialism permanently lagged behind the needs of households, and the weight of the second shift was born primarily by women. Since the 1970s the limited market offer and the limitations of public life resulted in various types of domestic activities flourishing further. The text also deals with the maximum rationalization of domestic operation as it has been implemented in the experiment of collective housing. The restriction on the kitchen space which was also reproduced in the housing cores of panel apartment buildings did not work operationally or socially. Food preparation and eating together remained important elements of family life, and today kitchens are the center of a functional home. Cooking has become a recognized activity in which men also participate., b2_Most chores performed in the 19th century by women are carried out today by machines or have been taken over by the industry and paid services. What remains is work related to childcare and nursing the sick and elderly. The recognition and valuation of these activities, performed primarily by women, remain unresolved., Květa Jechová., and Obsahuje bibliografii
Článek se zaměřuje na zhodnocení spokojenosti s bydlením a její vývoj v České republice v období po roce 2000. Cílem je identifikovat faktory ovlivňující rozdílnou úroveň spokojenosti s bydlením u jednotlivých skupin obyvatelstva, a přispět tak k lepšímu pochopení procesů na pozadí tohoto jevu. V komparativní perspektivě průřezových let 2001 a 2013 se autoři se věnují prezentaci hlavních zjištění vyplývajících ze dvou na sebe navazujících vln kvantitativního sociologického šetření. Článek čerpá z dat celonárodního sociologického šetření postojů k problematice bydlení, realizovaného v ČR ve dvou vlnách - Housing Attitudes 2001 a Housing Attitudes 2013. Analýza byla provedena ve dvou krocích. V prvním kroku byly pomocí pairwise correlation analysis identifikovány proměnné, které se významně váží k otázce o celkové spokojenosti respondentů s jejich stávajícím bydlením. Ve druhém kroku byla významnost těchto proměnných testována prostřednictvím multiple linear regression. Cílem bylo najít faktory, které nezávisle predikují respondentovu úroveň celkové spokojenosti s bydlením, a to i po očištění vlivu ostatních proměnných zařazených do regresního modelu., The article evaluates housing satisfaction and its development in the Czech Republic after 2000. Its goal is to help better understand the processes behind this phenomenon by identifying factors that influence how the level of housing satisfaction varies between population groups. In a comparative perspective on cross-sectional data from 2001 and 2013, the authors present the main findings of two waves of a quantitative sociological survey. The article draws on two comparable datasets stemming from a nationwide sociological survey of attitudes to housing issues implemented in the Czech Republic as „Housing Attitudes 2001“ and „Housing Attitudes 2013“. The analysis was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, pairwise correlation analysis was used to identify variables that are significantly associated with a measure of overall satisfaction with one’s current housing situation. In the second stage, multiple linear regression was used to test the significance of these variables. The goal was to find factors that independently predict the respondent’s overall housing satisfaction when controlling for other variables included in the regression model. Overall housing satisfaction among Czech citizens increased over the 2001-2013 time period. What remains is that the highest levels of satisfaction are exhibited by people in owner-occupied houses and the lowest by those living in rented flats (whether privately or from local authorities) in large-scale projects. In addition to tenure and type of dwelling, the key factors of overall satisfaction include perceived size of dwelling compared to number of cohabitants. Other factors include socioeconomic characteristics reflecting respondent´s status in the social structure - primarily household income and secondarily respondent´s economic status (unemployment). The category of people living in flats was examined separately. Whereas people living in large-panel system (LPS) buildings were less satisfied with their housing situation than those living in brick houses in 2001, the difference was no longer discernible in 2013. The increased attractiveness of LPS housing may be a result of remodelling and reconstruction over the time period of interest. There are also spatial differences in overall housing satisfaction. People from major cities are less satisfied with their housing situation than those living in smaller settlements. This variation is primarily caused by differences in the composition of the dwelling stock and overall characteristics of housing. A specific situation exists in the smallest municipalities with a population under 1000 where the lower levels of housing satisfaction are probably associated with lower access to and variety of local amenities. Finally, albeit overall housing satisfaction among Czechs grew on average over the time period studied, the social inequalities in overall housing satisfaction did not diminish. Especially people of lower social status and belonging to the „lower housing class“ are less satisfied than the rest of the population., Ladislav Kážmér, Irena Boumová., and Obsahuje bibliografii
This paper revisits and revises the over-used State - Market - Household triangle as a theoretical analytical tool, proposing its repositioning at the centre of Housing and Welfare Studies, and reopening the debate. The goal is to eventually elaborate a dynamic visualization of the State - Market - Family triangle’s spatial and temporal transformations and transitions in housing provision, considering the relations of the actors involved. Towards this goal two conceptual adaptations are proposed. Firstly, it is suggested to add the parameter of time when assessing the triangle’s transformations from one era to another, or when comparing systems with similarities but on different evolutionary phases. Secondly, it is necessary to introduce - by default - an understanding of the triangle as a dynamic configuration, due to inter- and intra-polar shifts. It is argued that, apart from remaining a useful theoretical research tool, such visualization offers the opportunity to communicate various studies’ findings to a wider, often non-specialist audience.
Both collective publications (Prefab houses 1: Fifty prefab housing schemes in the Czech Lands. A critical catalogue of the “Prefab house story” series of exhibitions and Prefab houses 2: History of housing schemes in the Czech Lands 1945–1989. A critical catalogue of the “Residence – prefab housing scheme: Planning, realization, housing 1945–1989” exhibition) are products of a broadly conceived interdisciplinary research project the deliverables of which included, inter alia, exhibitions in Prague and all regional capitals of the Czech Republic and which were awarded the prestigious Magnesia Litera prize in 2018 as an extraordinary feat in the fi eld of professional and educational literature. In the reviewer’s opinion, they bring the fi rstever systematic attempt to periodize the prefab-based building projects in the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia between the mid-1940s and the end of the 1980s, at the same time providing a multifaceted characterization based on a representative sample of fifty prefab housing schemes in Bohemia and Moravia. and Each of them was subjected to a thorough artistic-historical analysis outlining the development of the housing scheme’s concept, providing brief information about its authors, describes its urbanistic concept, prefab technology used, and artefacts and decorations. Added to the above is a set of interdepartmental studies analyzing different aspects of the historical development of prefab housing schemes. The compact collective of authoresses and authors has succeeded in presenting the prefab housing schemes, no matter how similar they may seem, as a varied and dynamically developing phenomenon, which fact is underlined by excellent work with archival photographs and the generally outstanding graphic layout of the publications. The only critical comment the reviewer has is that the authors were so absorbed by the architectural aspect of the matter that they tended to overlook substantial changes of the socialist urbanism in Czechoslovakia.
This paper questions the uncritical transfer of neoliberal concepts, such as financialisation and overreliance on conceptual dichotomies like formal/informal, as the lenses through which to understand practices of housing provision and consumption in the post-communist space. To this end, it introduces the newly-established ‘diverse economies’ framework, which has been used elsewhere to reveal existing and possible alternatives to advanced capitalism. Applied to the Romanian case, the lens of diverse economic practices helps shed light on the ways in which the current housing system was historically constituted, with implications for how housing consumption is now stratified across some related housing typologies. The paper invites debate on the theoretical usefulness of the diverse economies framework to study housing phenomena, particularly its implications for understanding patterns of inequality and poverty, its potential to devise useful analytical categories, and its effect of directing attention to acts of resistance to neoliberal capitalism.
This paper explores the effects of housing prices on income inequality in urban China. The authors use China's interprovincial panel data for the period between 1999 and 2011 and find that there is a significant positive association between housing prices and the Gini coefficient of the income of urban residents, and that there are remarkable regional disparities.