Editorial: Modeling housing choices

Abstract

This special issue comprises a selection of the papers presented at the Dutch-French seminar on "Residential Mobility and Housing Choice" that took place in Utrecht on 15 and 16 February 1996. It was jointly organized by the R6seau Socio-Economie de l 'Habitat , an extensive network of French housing researchers, and the Netherlands Graduate School of Housing and Urban Research (NETHUR), an officially accredited national research school in which the universities of Amsterdam, Delft, Eindhoven, and Utrecht participate. The seminar was organized under the auspices of the Working Group on "Migration, Residential Mobility and Housing Policy" of the European Network of Housing Research (ENHR). This was the first in what is expected to develop into a series of seminars on this theme. Its aim is to create a platform for Dutch and French researchers to present their recent work and try to further the understanding of housing choice and housing needs. The second seminar will be held in Paris in April 1997. The study of residential mobility, housing choice, and modeling housing market processes in general forms a recurrent theme in the research program of NETHUR. Research on these topics has a long tradition at all four universities participating in NETHUR as is evident in the contributions to this special issue. For NETHUR and the Netherlands Journal of Housing and the Built Environment (HBE), this is the third special issue in what is now a series of three. The first was devoted to "Housing Models" (HBE, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1992), while the second was focused on "Choice Modelling in Housing Market Simulations" (HBE, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994).