Author
Name: Marja Elsinga Organisation: Delft University of Technology, Netherlands Position: professor |
A Transdisciplinary Approach to Housing: Applying Three Types of Knowledge
Transdisciplinarity has become an increasingly prominent concept in addressing today’s complex societal challenges and is often invoked as a buzzword in grant proposals. But how can a transdisciplinary approach to housing be implemented? This contribution presents a systematisation of our experiences in an EU-funded project, which could serve as a starting point for similar processes. Key to the use of such an approach is creating an understanding of societal challenges by bringing together insights from different disciplines and fields of knowledge in academia and practice. Our main conclusion was that preconditions are just as important as the design of the transdisciplinary process, and these preconditions include gaining an understanding of the needs and specificities of the stakeholders. Furthermore, a “three types of knowledge model” for organising knowledge exchange processes, adopted from the Swiss school of transdisciplinarity, enabled the redefinition of challenges and the identification of new perspectives and strategies for change in practice.
The Janus Face of Homeownership-Based Welfare
This paper reflects on the different faces of asset-based welfare from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. It shows that asset-based welfare can be perceived as a lever for welfare state restructuring but also as an instrument for poverty eradication. In most countries, asset-based welfare policies focus on stimulating home-ownership. The general idea is that by becoming a homeowner, households build up equity that can be released for care and pension purposes in old age. However, there are signs that such policies increase inequality between homeowners (depending on the location of the dwelling and/or the period in which it was bought), but particularly so between homeowners and tenants. We therefore contend that home-ownership based welfare policies need a clear and fundamental specification of the role of the government: how to deal with housing market risks and how to prevent politically unacceptable levels of inequality and exclusion?
