The previous chapters have examined how events and processes in the housing career interact with those in other domains of life. In keeping with most life course scholarship, these chapters have focused primarily on the dynamics of lives and the ways these are shaped by a variety of contextual forces. While this micro-level approach is clearly essential for understanding residential behaviour, one limitation is that places are often conceptualised as external containers within which life course processes unfold. Yet geographical research has long shown that the ways people selectively stay in or leave places over the life course actively alters the population composition and social fabric of neighbourhoods and localities. There is thus a two-way relationship between the dynamics of life courses and places: when places change, lives change and when lives change, places change.This chapter begins by sketching how life course perspectives can be applied to understand local processes of population change. It shows how patterns of residential behaviour – specifically the ways people make decisions to stay in, leave, enter or avoid particular residential locations – mediate how changes in life courses have aggregate impacts on the demographic and socio-economic composition of neighbourhoods and localities. The chapter's remaining sections then unpack how the sorts of life course dynamics explored in previous chapters reshape local populations by altering (1) residential preferences and aspirations, (2) resources and restrictions, (3) life events and transitions, and (4) opportunities and constraints. Examples of each mechanism are explored in turn although in reality all four will always matter for local processes of population change.Understanding local population dynamicsDefining what neighbourhoods are is a vital but surprisingly difficult first step for any study of local population change. For Galster (2012, p 85), neighbourhoods are ‘the bundle of spatially based attributes associated with clusters of residences, sometimes in conjunction with other land uses’. This definition highlights that neighbourhoods are compact residential spaces which often have distinctive physical attributes (types of buildings, infrastructure, environmental attributes and so forth) and social characteristics that derive from their residents (for instance their demographic and socioeconomic mix). The fact that neighbourhood characteristics derive in part from the people living there implies that any changes within residents’ lives or in who lives in a particular place will alter the area's aggregate characteristics.

As the GFC illustrated, it is difficult to overstate just how integral housing is to 21st-century economies and to the global financial system. Yet to fully understand how housing matters for economic prosperity and inequalities, we must look behind the national statistics at the ways in which housing careers are bound up with the labour market position and financial well-being of individuals and families over the life span.

This chapter uses the life course perspective to take a fresh look at how the deep interactions between housing and labour market careers influence economic outcomes at both the micro- and macro-levels. It shows how the ways people engage with both the labour market and the housing system over the course of their lives play a crucial role in determining the social distribution of resources. The chapter begins by using Chapter 2's life course conceptual toolbox to review how employment influences housing behaviour and housing system dynamics. It then inverts the focus to consider the role housing resources, opportunities and constraints play in shaping employment careers and the broader operation of labour markets. Finally, the chapter examines how differential accumulation and use of housing wealth influences contemporary patterns of social and spatial inequality.

Labour markets and residential behaviour

In Why Families Move, Rossi (1955) argued that housing transitions are adjustments undertaken to satisfy the new residential demands which emerge as people pass through the family life cycle. However, scholars quickly recognised that Rossi's demographically driven model said too little about labour force participation and in particular how a desire to improve one’s economic position or social status can be a powerful motive for residential adjustments (De Jong and Fawcett, 1981). Moreover, the housing choice set available to people and thus their ability to act on their residential preferences is stratified by employment status, class and income (Kendig, 1984). Early housing career models often downplayed these factors by simplistically assuming that occupational careers generally progress upwards over the life span as age brings promotions, higher wages and accumulated savings.

Since the 1970s, economic restructuring across the Global North under what has been variously termed the transition to post-Fordism, advanced capitalism or post-industrialism have shattered this optimistic assumption of occupational progression over the life span.

How housing is thought to relate to health has long influenced urban policy and the COVID-19 pandemic provided a powerful reminder of just how important these connections still are in the 21st century. Recent research shows that housing conditions directly influenced health through the pandemic as patterns of physical vulnerability and viral transmission were influenced by household structures, dwelling characteristics and neighbourhood attributes such as population density (Tinson and Clair, 2020). COVID-19 lockdowns also threw into sharp relief the more indirect ways housing shapes well-being as having space to work or study at home, access to outdoor space and supportive relationships with neighbours, all became important psychological resources. The pandemic's wake thus seems a timely moment to take a fresh look at how housing and health are interwoven across contemporary life courses.

Housing, public health and the life course

Recognition that housing is a health issue in need of significant government attention can be traced back to the British state's first systematic public health interventions in the mid-1800s (Lund, 2017). In the early Victorian era, many social reformers and paternalistic industrialists sought to publicise and tackle the squalor and disease they saw in the unplanned areas of dense, poorly built housing that had sprung up in Britain's growing industrial cities. Often their concern for the health of the working-classes was not simply altruistic as many believed that poor living conditions undermined the nation's spiritual well-being and the population's fitness for hard work and imperial service. In response, a succession of parliamentary Acts were passed from the 1840s to gradually improve working-class housing conditions through municipal sanitation, regulation of dwelling standards and, later, through clearance programmes and public housing provision. Growing acceptance that housing is a health issue thus catalysed the development of housing policy and helped shape Britain's emerging welfare state and system of local governance (Lund, 2017).

Today, the relevance of housing to health is seen in a more nuanced light. Shaw (2004) argues this is partly because the links between these domains change as societies develop and progress through the epidemiological transition.

There is now a growing consensus that much of the Global North is in the grips of a housing crisis. Although the precise form this crisis takes varies from place to place, one common feature is that housing problems are always tightly bound up with wider issues of social inequality. Inequalities along multiple axes spanning many areas of life are both causes and outcomes of contemporary housing problems and so need to be placed centre-stage within housing-related research and debate.

This book sought to provide a fresh perspective on these issues by showing how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are. This focus on how housing is embedded into the dynamics of 21st-century life courses enriches research and debate in two ways. First, the book has shown that residential decisions and behaviours are deeply intertwined with events and processes across the other domains of people’s lives, as well as in the lives of their significant others. The way housing careers unfold also varies geographically with shifts in housing behaviour helping to drive changes in local populations and in the social fabric of places. Taken together, these insights remind us that housing is not a discrete field of enquiry which can be boxed off and either theorised about or analysed on its own. Instead, aggregate trends in housing careers must be related to broad processes occurring elsewhere in modern societies, for instance shifts in their demographic structures, education systems, labour markets, cultures and public policies. Housing careers are closely intertwined with processes in other areas of life and ultimately it is these interactions which structure the overarching course of people's lives in ways which reshape places and societies.

Second, the book's focus on residential careers helps enrich our understanding of how housing systems function. Figure 8.1 depicts how housing systems can be viewed as constructed from three pillars: housing provision (how housing is supplied, exchanged, financed, regulated and so forth), the residential careers examined throughout this book, and the social meanings housing has for individuals (Clapham, 2005). While the provision pillar normally attracts the lion's share of the research and policy attention, provision-centric approaches often view people simply as passive respondents to market or state forces rather than diverse agents with their own life experiences, aspirations and preferences, goals, and ties to others (Clapham, 2005).

Over the last twenty years, housing has risen up the policy agenda to become a priority issue for Global North governments. This transformation has been driven by a growing consensus that housing systems are in crisis. This crisis is thought to have many interrelated components – ranging from physical problems of supply and dwelling quality through to social issues of housing access, affordability and security – the precise blend of which varies from place to place. In Britain, much of the contemporary housing debate focuses on the origins of an affordability crisis and how to get more homes built.

Yet housing is clearly not in a state of crisis for everyone. Many people are satisfied with their homes, have enough space, have few problems paying for housing and are able to move to somewhere they want to live at a time broadly of their choosing. Some have also made a lot of money from the housing market over the years. As a result, there is a growing public awareness that inequalities between generations, between people living in different places and along axes such as class and ethnicity are defining features of contemporary housing crises.

Understanding and addressing these inequalities requires thoroughly grasping how housing is embedded into the multifaceted dynamics of people's lives. Yet as Clapham (2005) argued nearly twenty years ago, the housing field's tendency to focus on systemic issues (such as planning and supply, state policy, housing finance, market dynamics and so forth) means that much analysis views people simply as passively responding to contextual stimuli. While such approaches clearly have heuristic value for describing how contexts influence very general patterns of behaviour, they leave little room for the agency, aspirations, preferences, life events and interwoven social relationships that we all know from our own experiences have a major bearing on residential decisions and experiences.

This book's objective is to bring the dynamics of people's lives to the heart of how we think about housing and inequality in the 21st century. It aims to show how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are. In this context, ‘who we are’ refers both to the dynamic course of our individual lives and also to the characteristics of the collective social units we belong to, such as our families and local communities.

Take a moment to conjure up some of your earliest childhood memories. Now spend a little time running through the whole sweep of your life in your mind's eye. Finally, try visualising what sort of life you expect, or hope, to be living a few years hence.

The chances are that while doing this, your mind has touched on images relating to what this book refers to as your housing career: in essence the succession of households, dwellings and places that each of us lives in through time. You may even have thought about how aspects of your housing career have related to things going on elsewhere in your life, such as your work or your relationships with others. This simple and highly personal exercise thus reminds us that housing is integral to the course of our lives and so people need to be placed centre-stage in both research and debates about housing issues. Yet frequently this is not the case as markets and government policies tend to dominate much of the intellectual and public conversation about the housing problems that today afflict much of the Global North.

This book aims to bring the dynamics of people's lives to the heart of how we think, study and talk about housing. It does this by exploring how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are. The book develops a modern life course framework to explore how residential decisions are made, how housing shapes lives, and how these processes interact with changes in local populations and in the broader structure of societies. A core argument is that housing in the 21st century both reflects and helps amplify inequalities, not only of wealth and prosperity, but also across health, employment, education and in family life.

The catalyst for writing this book was my growing dissatisfaction with existing work on housing and the life course. These frustrations are neither about the quantity of research (there is an awful lot of it!) nor its quality. Rather, my main concern – exposed time and again while teaching – is that work in this area is far too fragmented. In one sense this is understandable. Not only is housing an interdisciplinary topic, but the competitive institutional pressures of today's universities strongly incentivise the rapid-fire production of short research papers.

This chapter lays the book's conceptual foundations. After sketching three of the most influential disciplinary perspectives on residential behaviour, the chapter then reviews the specific conceptual approaches scholars have developed to understand how people move through housing systems as they pass through life. It contends that none of these approaches can fully describe or explain how housing is embedded into 21st-century lives. The chapter then moves on to outline a more modern life course framework which can provide new insights about contemporary residential processes and inequalities. The latter portion of the chapter develops this framework by revisiting five core principles of the life course perspective and using them to derive twelve conceptual tools which can be applied to better understand residential behaviours (Elder et al, 2003). These flexible tools are then used throughout the subsequent chapters to integrate and synthesise what we know about contemporary housing and life course dynamics.

Contrasting traditions

Three disciplinary traditions have most strongly shaped our understandings of residential behaviour. Of these, the economic tradition has been the most influential. Economic research has drawn heavily on neoclassical thought and its central assumption that people are rational actors who make utility optimising decisions after calculating the costs and benefits of different options. This rational choice framework has been applied to understand many demand-side housing processes, including:

• • households matching themselves to suitable dwelling vacancies (Wheaton, 1990);

• • residential adjustments around life events such as childbirth or unemployment (Rabe and Taylor, 2010);

• • how variations in housing market conditions impact on household formation and residential mobility (Ermisch, 1999; Ferreira et al, 2010);

• • the effects of income, house prices, housing supply and macroeconomic conditions on tenure and locational decisions (Andrew, 2012; Ermisch and Washbrook, 2012).

The hegemony of neoclassical models is now waning under the challenge of behavioural economics. Behavioural approaches use psychological evidence to explain why people systematically deviate from the predictions of neoclassical theory (Gibb, 2012). Although the psychological explanations for these deviations are complex, perhaps the most important are that people are loss averse (more sensitive to losses than identical gains) and tend to use a range of heuristics – defined as simplified cognitive tools – when making demanding decisions (Morrison and Clark, 2016).

Introduction

If these vacant retail spaces are ruins, what kind of ruins are they? What kind of haunting is taking place? There now exist several excellent reviews of the literature on ruins that help inform this study (see, among others, DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013; Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014; Dobraszczyk, 2017; Emery, 2018). Rather than rehashing this work, this chapter plucks from it and holds together different images to suggest resemblances and potential overlaps that help us consider what these spaces are. In introducing the study of ruins, this chapter also engages with archaeology as a way of grounding the meta-theories that are also called upon, namely, theories around the spectacle and retail capital. Treating the spectacle as a socio-spatial formation that falls into ruin like any other, an ‘archaeological imagination’ (Hill, 2015) helps reveal the multiple hauntings that constitute it. This crash course in ruins engages with Walter Benjamin's (1999) The Arcades Project as an early study of retail ruins, specifically the arcades of Paris that helped define the 19th century but were falling out of favour by Benjamin's time. The arcades, of course, did not just vanish without a trace. Instead, their logic morphed into other spatial forms throughout the 20th century in Western cities, culminating in a new postmodern landscape by the 21st century. Today, it is that landscape that is noticeably deteriorating in front of our eyes. One way of building on Benjamin's work is with hauntology, a methodology that sees these ruinous spaces not only as negative, but also as potentially productive for what comes next. Benjamin's thinking, in fact, works with a similar ethos. In other words, the negative has its own force; an absence has its own presence, after all (see, among others, Frers, 2013). The end of the chapter details the methodology of the field study presented in Chapter Two and interjects a question of context, insofar as a hauntological approach implies a particular way of conceptualizing context and what it means for research.

What are ruins?