Housing and urban policy - Applying a sociological imagination.

The Candidate's registration form (PF1) approved by the Research Committee of Sheffield Hallam University in September 2000 included the following summary abstract of the portfolio of published work:Housing and wider urban policy constitute a complex, inter-connected and multidimensional field, marked in the last two decades by deep and pervasive change. Research here raises issues of economics and finance; law and welfare rights; architecture, design and construction; planning and management; and politics and governance. However, the candidate's particular perspective on urban processes and policy is sociological. Over a prolonged period he has drawn on sociological perspectives, concepts and methods of analysis to develop distinctive and critical analyses of housing and urban policy questions. In more recent years this general orientation has been expressed in a collection of refereed papers, a book and two major research reports that form an essentially coherent and evolving programme of study. This has involved an appraisal of the implications of the eclipse of traditional urban policies associated with post-1945 'welfarism' (especially council housing) and their supersession by new approaches that, at least formally, emphasise resident or 'community' participation in housing policy and urban 'regeneration'. Informed by various social scientific concepts and debates, therefore, this work has produced the following specific contributions to knowledge: a) a distinctive interpretation of the origins of British council housing and the consequences of this legacy for the subsequent rise and fall of social housing; b) a distinctive appraisal and interpretation of the merits and deficiencies of council housing; c) a balanced critique of social surveys in tenant involvement in housing policy, based on a critical examination of the concept of 'housing satisfaction'; d) a critical assessment of the merits of tenant training for participation, informed by an exploration of competing conceptions of 'citizenship'; e) critical assessments of the quest for 'community' involvement in urban policy (through two major research projects on tenant training and the local impact of the Church Urban Fund); f) a sociological critique of current definitions of urban 'regeneration'; and g) an assessment of the fortunes of the housing 'professional project' in a context of accelerating change.