Originally published in 1995, this innovative collection provides a multidisciplinary and cross-national perspective on the links between housing, personal wealth and the family in contemporary society. Reasserting the role of the family and informal networks in housing provision, it counteracts a tendency to view housing issues in the narrow terms of market and state provision.

The contributions include analyses from the USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Greece, France, Sweden and Hungary, and this highly international perspective allows the book to address important policy questions and offer new theoretical insights into the way housing is embedded in the wider social structure. By moving away from the more usual, highly ethnocentric discussion of today's housing issues, the book aims to provide a more sociological account of the relationship between housing and wealth, and the social structures within which that relationship is founded. Today it can be read in its historical context.

Autorentext

Ray Forrest was head of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol from 2001 to 2005 and Head of the Department of Public Policy at City University Hong Kong from 2012 to 2017. He was Research Professor in Cities and Social Change in the Department of Sociology and Social Change at Lingnan University from 2017 until his death in 2020. He was Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at Bristol University, Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor at the Open University of Hong Kong. His work appeared widely in journals including Urban Studies; Journal of Social Policy; The Sociological Review ; Housing Studies; International Social Science Journal. His books include Home Ownership: Differentiation and Fragmentation (with A. Murie & P. Williams), 2021; Selling the Welfare State: The Privatisation of Urban Housing (with A. Murie), 2014.

Alan Murie is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has been involved in a wide range of research on urban and housing issues for more than 50 years: initially at the then University of Ulster and later at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Birmingham University, the School for Advanced Urban Studies, Bristol University, the Department of Planning and Housing, Herriot-Watt University, Edinburgh and again at Birmingham University where he was Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies and then head of the School of Public Policy.