International Karl Polanyi Society

Care and housing are foundational for human well-being. Both deal with organising and
sustaining livelihoods: while care as a human activity reacts to the ever-given contingency
of life, housing arranges a place for undertaking everyday need-satisfying activities. In both
fields, crises have exacerbated over the last decades, manifesting in care gaps, labour
and care migration, and precarious working conditions of care workers, respectively in
overburdening costs due to the transformation of homes into assets, leading to
gentrification and segregation. Despite being seldomly investigated together, care and
housing as well as their related crises are co-constitutive.
From the 1990s onwards, two simultaneous tendencies can be observed in European care
regimes and housing systems. On the one hand, neoliberal reforms have aimed at
privatisation, commodification, marketisation, and financialisaton. This has rearranged
welfare states, promoting variegated forms of capitalism. Allegedly singular events like the
global financial crisis, subsequent austerity measures, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the
current cost of living crisis have furthermore deepened structural problems of access and
affordability. This has led to increasing socioeconomic and spatial polarisations as well as
social inequalities in the relations of gender, race, and class. On the other hand, these
developments have transformed the provision of care and housing into a contested terrain
leading to labour disputes and struggles, such as care protests, or initiatives for
expropriating institutional investors. The wide range of community-based or infrastructural
projects has to be seen against the backdrop of the increasing search for alternative care
and housing provision. On top of that, rapid technological developments and climate
change further accelerate the reorganisation of care and housing arrangements and
practices built up by all parties involved in both contested fields.

Given these multiple transformations, the conference “Transformative Change in the Contested Fields of Care and Housing in Europe” seeks to analyse the contemporary developments in care regimes and housing systems and respective configurations of care
and housing.