Housing and Life Course Dynamics

Abstract

This book argues that housing plays a crucial but surprisingly poorly understood role within the ongoing restructuring of 21st-century lives. To address this lacuna, the first two chapters of the book develop a new life course framework which is designed to equip researchers, policymakers and practitioners with the conceptual tools to understand how housing processes interact with the dynamics of other areas of people’s lives. This life course conceptual toolbox is then applied in the subsequent chapters to explore how changes in people’s housing careers are interwoven with contemporary trends in four other life course domains: (1) household structures and family lives, (2) education and training, (3) employment and economic prosperity, and (4) health, well-being and care. Throughout the book, particular attention is paid to the ways that housing and life course dynamics interact to reshape patterns of social and spatial inequality in Global North societies. The role that housing and life course dynamics play in helping to drive local patterns of population change is also examined in detail.