The Potential of Small, Low-carbon, Zero-energy Housing: A Multidimensional Approach

This thesis examines the potential of small, low-carbon, (near) zero-energy dwellings as a solution that would both address sustainability challenges and answer to the growing housing shortage in North-West Europe. It adopts a multidimensional outlook that encompasses institutional, social and technical aspects surrounding the dwellings. The...

Public Rental Housing Governance in Urban China: Essence, Mechanisms and Measurement

Recently, Chinese Public Rental Housing (PRH) provision has witnessed a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’: policy making shifted from government steering to mixed forms involving government, market and civic actors to pursue effective and fair policies. In the meantime, this new-era PRH governance is credited with mixed results. However,...

West European home ownership sectors and the Global Financial Crisis

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) had a severe impact on West and South European economies and in 2009, GDP declines ranged from -5.6% in Germany to -3.6% in Spain. Against the background of strong GDP declines it is quite remarkable that European housing market indicators showed strong international variability. Whereas transaction levels in...

Urban Renewal Decision-Making in China: Stakeholders, Process, and System Improvement

To meet the growing rigid demand of urban housing, urban renewal has played a significant role, which significantly promotes the urban prosperity in China. However, at the same time, many problems occurred through large-scale urban renewal projects. To avoid unintended consequences that occurred in urban renewal and, how these decisions were...

Affordable Condominium Housing: A comparative analysis of low-income homeownership in Colombia and Ecuador

As cities grow and more dense communities are built, the meaning of homeownership changes. In a highly urbanized future, it will be critical to know how to make high density housing in condominium ownership sustainable and resilient. A sector of social housing policies in Latin America subsidizes the provision of affordable housing for low and...

Young People’s Housing Opportunity in Post-reform China

The inquiry that has culminated in this thesis was inspired by the challenges that many young Chinese people were facing when trying to gain access to affordable housing at the time of study, the early 2010s. By then, more than thirty years of housing reforms had completely changed how housing was being provided in China. The resulting structure...

Better public housing management in Ghana: An approach to improve maintenance and housing quality

In Ghana, public housing which is provided mainly for government employees plays an important role in socio-economic development. For instance, civil servants are more likely to accept transfers to areas where their services are most needed. Unfortunately, attention to public housing in Ghana has diminished over the years largely due to shift in...

Diffusion and Risks of House Prices in the Netherlands

The rate of home-ownership has increased significantly in many countries over the past decades. One motivating factor for this increase has been the creation of wealth through the accumulation of housing equity, which also forms the basic tenet of the asset-based welfare system. In generating the home equity, house price developments play an...

Networks and Fault Lines: Understanding the role of housing associations in neighbourhood regeneration: a network governance perspective

Housing associations have an important role to play in supporting vulnerable neighbourhoods. This is one of the findings from Gerard van Bortel’s research entitled Networks and Fault Lines, which examines the role of housing associations in the decision-making processes of neighbourhood strategy. Van Bortel studied decision-making processes and...

Housing wealth in retirement strategies: Towards understanding and new hypotheses

What is the current role of housing wealth in household retirement strategies across the European Union member states? And could this role be extended? This question is often raised by researchers and policymakers, since governments search for ways to cut pensions expenditure in response to ageing populations and the global financial crisis....