Search results

The measures enacted so far at European level to address the global financial crisis are likely to have limited effects as they are still market efficiency oriented. Accordingly, this study aims to explore how the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights may be useful to achieve a more human right dimension in EU regulatory law.

The work departs from the current commodification of housing worldwide and the limited capacity of EU to tackle new housing challenges. The work takes the link already established by the CJEU between EU consumer law and the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights one step further and addresses the potential implications concerning residential mortgage lending.

The main finding is the potential influence that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights may have on EU regulatory mortgage lending, as there are indicators of a bifurcation of mortgage law regimes at the EU level, separating home loans from other mortgages.

The influence of the Charter of Fundamental Rights on EU regulatory law, mainly consumer law treated in a human rights dimension, could be a first step to treat housing as a social good and not as a commodity in the EU. This could lead to a completely new approach concerning the traditional rules governing residential mortgage loans.

The potential constitutionalisation of consumer law and the impact of the CJEU cases on national procedural rules have already been addressed by scholarship. The present work goes one step further as it addresses the potential implications of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights on EU regulatory law in terms of the potential bifurcation of EU rules on mortgage lending.

The purpose of this paper is to outline and examine the growing corpus of housing rights and assess their relevance and applicability to complex contemporary housing systems across the world.

The paper sets out the principal instruments and commentaries on housing rights developed by the United Nations, regional and other bodies. It assesses their relevance in the context of contemporary analysis of housing systems, organized and directed by networks of legal and other professionals within particular domains.

Housing rights instruments are accepted by all States across the world at the level of international law, national constitutions and laws. The findings suggest that there are significant gaps in the international law conception and framework of housing rights, and indeed, human rights generally, which create major obstacles for the effective implementation of these rights. There is a preoccupation with one element of housing systems, that of subsidized or social housing. However, effective housing rights implementation requires application at meso‐, micro‐ and macro‐levels of modern, dynamic housing systems as a whole. Epistemic communities of professionals develop and shape housing law and policy within these domains. The housing rights paradigm must be further fashioned for effective translation into contemporary housing systems.

The development of housing rights precedents, both within international and national law, is leading to a wide and diffuse corpus of legislation and case law. More research is needed on specific examples of effective coupling between housing rights and elements of housing systems.

This paper offers housing policy makers and lawyers an avenue into the extensive jurisprudence and writings on housing rights, which will inevitably become part of the lexicon of housing law across the world. It also highlights the limitations of housing rights implementation, but offers some new perspectives on more effective application of these rights.

The paper will aim to examine the contemporary origins and development of the planning system and housing regulation in England and Ireland. One objective is to broadly explicate how the regulation of housing in England began, with reference to Ireland, and its relationship with the planning system. The other is to outline the swing in England from a hotchpotch decentralised system to a centralised, and back again sharply to decentralised approach to planning and the provision for housing, a swing unparalleled in Ireland.

The approach is to consider the main influences on the regulation of planning and housing, with reference to historical, social and legal regulatory developments, and to broadly assess the role of centralised and decentralised systems.

The regulation of housing was an incidental product of the regulation of public health. The use of town and country planning principles could have assisted such regulation, but were unpopular until the development of a centralised system of planning in the 20th century. This has led to problems in Ireland for the delivery of local services. The change in England under the Localism Act to decentralized system is unlikely to achieve an effective use of local resources. It is unlikely that unwieldy new systems of decision‐making and funding arrangements will improve the provision of housing for low incomes and the poor. A balance between the use of both systems is required.

This paper assesses the impact of social, historical, administrative and legal changes that have impacted on the progress of the relationship between planning and housing regulation in England and Ireland over the last two centuries until the present day.

This paper aims to analyse the development and application of the conceptual framework within which housing scholars can think, talk about and advocate for “home”.

It reflects on the theoretical progress that has been made in embedding a legal concept of home in the last decade, and identifies opportunities for this scholarship to support critical engagement with laws and policies that give content to home meanings.

A key goal for the concept of home is to help us to think about problems differently, by highlighting important issues flowing from the human relationship with home; with the ways in which the idea of home is present or absent in legal responses to home issues. A focus on home meanings enables us to examine questions which are not always deemed “relevant” to legal proceedings, for example, the human, social and personal costs of displacement and dispossession. The concept of home provides the vocabulary, and the theoretical framework, for articulating these human claims more coherently. It enables us to identify those problems in need of policy attention; to develop a narrative to express them; and to generate support for solving them.

Ten years after the publication of “The meaning of home”, this article reflects on the development of the legal concept of home, and the range of contemporary housing issues to which its applications are both relevant and significant.

This article aims to explore the concept of achieving the “right to the city” for marginalised communities. It uses human rights instruments and regeneration best practice to develop a toolkit of indicators for urban regeneration. The article contributes to the literature on realising economic, social and cultural rights encompassed in the “right to the city”.

The article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, involving human rights law, urban planning, housing studies, community development, housing law and social policy. It draws on primary qualitative (participative and observatory) research undertaken by the author while implementing a human rights based approach in an Irish inner‐city local authority estate from 2009 to 2013.

The human rights framework can be adapted to develop a set of measurable regeneration indicators. This article suggests that the application of this rights toolkit provides a greater potential for regeneration to meet human rights standards, and therefore, realise the “right to the city” in practice.

The application of the human rights based approach to urban regeneration would benefit from wider empirical testing on its suitability for implementation in other countries and global regions. It would benefit from critical engagement with human rights practitioners, community groups, and state agencies seeking to realise the “right to the city”.

This is the first known academic attempt to explore the pathway of a human rights based approach to urban regeneration in order to realise the “right to the city” in practice.

This paper aims to consider, from a legal perspective, the problem of housing discrimination which has become an issue of increasing importance in Spanish cities, as in other European cities, especially in the light of recent waves of immigration.

The paper analyzes the various types of housing discrimination and explains what legal reactions are available under European, Spanish and Catalan Law.

The Catalan Right to Housing Act 2007 represents one of the first and most complete European legal reactions against housing discrimination. It includes several articles defining direct and indirect discrimination, harassment (which is considered a form of discrimination) and positive action. This Act must be understood as a national and sectorial application of the European Union (EU) anti‐discrimination directives, specifically the Racial Equality Directive (2000/43/EC).

The paper shows how EU anti‐discrimination directives can be transposed into the domain of housing using a national example.

Because Catalan Law is one of the first and most complete national legislations using European techniques to fight against housing discrimination, it could be used as an inspiration for future new national legislations.

The purpose of this paper is to compare different apartment ownership systems and analyze how to enhance the regular maintenance and repair of owner‐occupied apartment buildings. The dwellings themselves are often in fairly good condition, but the common parts (e.g. walls, roofs, stairwells, and technical installations) are often poorly maintained.

Apartment ownership systems in ten European countries (Austria, England, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) are analyzed, along with Canada, China, Russia, and the USA, and some of the main findings from each country are presented. The material studied is primary legal sources together with the relevant literature.

It seems that there are severe obstacles in the legislation of many countries. Some of these obstacles are: the non‐existence of a proper decision‐making body (e.g. homeowners' association); the wide use of a qualified majority, or even the use of consensus, which makes it difficult to reach decisions; serious difficulties in getting loan financing for major repairs because of a lack of collateral and means to enforce the collection of payments; a lack of transparency and insufficient auditing procedures. Overall, it can be concluded that there are great variations between different countries. At the same time, many legal solutions are similar across certain groups of countries.

Weaknesses in the legislation is one of the main reasons for the continuous deterioration of an important part of the housing stock in many countries. If this deterioration continues, the quality of life of millions of occupants will gradually worsen.

The paper provides a theoretical well‐based analysis, combined with concrete suggestions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and reflect on the changing relations of class and power in rural England, with a particular focus on housing.

The paper reviews the evidence concerning the changing ownership of housing and land in English rural areas, and the problems relating to this.

The paper finds that, in spite of huge social changes over the course of the 20th century, relations of class and power in rural England have retained the same basic form, based on landownership. The countryside continues to be dominated by landowners, who now include large numbers of nouveaux riches, while the landless (and carless) find it increasingly difficult to access housing, employment and basic services and amenities in rural areas. Landowner dominance is maintained not only by the rule of private property and property markets, but also by a state planning system that is heavily biased towards landowning classes and against the poor.

The paper recognises that the situation varies from one rural area to another, so that solutions to the rural housing problem need, so far as possible, to be locally negotiated. However, for reasons of space, the paper does not go into detail on this issue, apart from a few references to the situation in Lincolnshire.

The paper is original in the way it shows how “old” and “new” gentry, in spite of their differences in terms of “productivism” and “post‐productivism”, have shared class interests and values based on landownership rights. It is also the first to argue that rural gentrification is a form of revanchism – a thesis that has previously been applied only to urban areas. Data that have been previously argued to show the superiority of rural areas, e.g. fewer homeless, higher incomes, etc. can now be explained as effects of revanchism.