at how these discussions also influenced guidelines for the planning and designing of built environments, two policy guidelines might illustrate the complex layers of inclusive habitats, one at a neighbourhood scale, the other specifically focusing on housing. Melbourne's concept for a ‘20‐Minute Neighbourhood’ (Victoria State Government 2019) defines multilayered socio‐spatial criteria for ‘inclusive, vibrant and healthy neighbourhoods’ that might serve as a benchmark for what an inclusive urbanism should cater: it requires proximity and access to essential social conditions such as diverse and affordable housing options, abilities to age in place, local employment options, and life‐long learning opportunities. Means of mobility are as important – with safe and walkable streets and cycling networks, and local public transport options giving access to jobs and services within the region. It requires, next to places for consumption, nearby public facilities, such as schools, healthcare and service supply, and opportunities for recreation at playgrounds, parks, community gardens, and sports grounds.
Specifically set up as guideline for inclusive housing the 2018 Canadian National Housing Strategy (Government of Canada 2018) defines social inclusion with a list of 10 ‘social inclusion proximity score criteria’ similar to those to be catered for in Melbourne's ‘20‐minute neighbourhood’ plan. Policies and designs are meant to supply the resources and opportunities necessary for disadvantaged individuals and groups to actively participate in society, and to provide a physical environment that is designed to be ‘safe, enabling and home‐like’, with support services that maximize the independence, privacy, and dignity of residents. While affordable housing options and their accessibility are defined in general as important premises for social inclusion, the focus here is predominantly on vulnerable groups like women and children fleeing domestic violence, seniors, people with disabilities, racially discriminated citizens, refugees, LGBTQ people, young adults, and homeless people.
A literature study on inclusive housing (Harvey et al. 2019) deducts some common criteria that could contribute to a general understanding of an inclusive urbanism, beyond the provision of safe shelter. According to the authors, social inclusion in and through housing should be best understood in terms of the access, safety, sustainability, and the choices it provides for all ages and abilities. Inclusive housing should not be considered as isolated agenda but must be – spatially and socially – embedded within the broader settings of inclusive societies. Both affordability and accessibility are essential, inherently depending on each other. It should cater social and economic inclusion and empower to participate in society. Three main criteria are considered important: Either actively establishing or empowering ‘social mix’ is driven by principles of integrative diversity, social justice and equality. It unites different social and economic backgrounds and persons with and without disabilities and other vulnerabilities. ‘Social wellbeing’ depends on ensuring health, social participation, and quality of life. It necessitates opportunities to socialize and participate, and requires comfortable and manageable spaces and the provision of a sense of home and belonging to a community. ‘Community development’ aims to enable mutual dignity and support by empowering self‐help and capabilities to contribute to and participate in common resources. From a design perspective, adaptable, liveable housing projects that supply a physical and social infrastructure working for people of all ages and abilities are considered important. This includes the provision of access, safety, sustainability to accommodate changing needs, the offer of choices, and necessary services needed for supportive housing. Importantly, it should also involve dwellers in the planning, design, and operation of habitats. Therefore, inclusive built environments would have to be considered as settings with interrelated aspects, that would impact the hardware, orgware, and software of habitats and that beyond the mere provision of safety and affordability must also enable equal access to and participation in the social, economic, political, and social processes that cities entail.
Exclusion
But while such guidelines might rather describe an ideal planner and designer perspective, with the intent to design inclusively along certain sometimes normative formulas, the mechanisms of exclusion are more dynamic, leaving it increasingly uncertain who might be affected. An essential aspect to be considered regarding an inclusive urbanism is the expanding social inequality and unaffordability of urban habitats even for middle‐class families, leading to gentrification of entire urban neighbourhoods and exclusion from social and economic networks.
Inequality is rising dramatically – while in the OECD countries the bottom 40% hold only about 3% of the total wealth, the top 10% account for 40% (OECD 2019a). The costs for essential commodities like health, education, and also housing have risen well beyond inflation and income increases. Since the 1990s, austerity‐driven policies in countries like Great Britain or the Netherlands – historically nations with strong welfare systems – drastically privatized and reduced investments in public housing, limited rental subsidies, and thus dismantled rights and access to affordable housing (Rolnik 2019). Looking at the European Union, many countries have seen a shift from capital to revenue funding, from investing into building homes to housing allowances. Housing allowances are increasingly used to subsidize tenants in the expensive private rental market (Pittini 2019).
With the impact of deregulation in Germany and the sale of social housing stocks to the free market (to also ease budget strains), places like Berlin, once a paragon of social housing, have almost entirely lost their institutional capacity to actively pursue housing policy (Marquardt and Glaser 2020).
Due to such developments, on average one third of the disposable incomes of middle‐income households has to be spent on housing, with low‐income tenant households ‘facing even higher relative housing cost burdens in the majority of countries’ (OECD 2019b). In the USA, there is no state where a full‐time minimum wage suffices to rent or own even one‐bedroom dwellings, and almost half of all renting households spend an unsustainable part of their income on rent (Madden and Marcuse 2016).
Rolnik (2019) argues that these dynamics go way beyond just rising prices. She argues that with neoliberalism as a dominant political force since the 1990s and the simultaneous expansion of asset markets the provision of housing has essentially been taken over by the finance sector, leading to its commodification even though being a fundamental need of subsistence. While the world's total GDP has only increased five times between 1980 and 2010 financial assets have risen by a factor of 16 – a ‘wall of money’ (Rolnik 2019) seeking new opportunities for profitable investment. A ‘peculiar form of value storage (has thus emerged), as it directly related macroeconomics to the homes of individuals and families.’
These developments led to the situation that in places lacking affordable housing options even for middle‐class families many units lie empty most of the same time: like about 69,000 in Melbourne (Prosper Australia 2020) and 125,000 without permanent residents in London (Trust for London 2020) in 2019, or an estimated 99,000 condo units and homes in Toronto in 2016 (Better Dwelling 2017). Here, ‘these (factors) drive up housing prices and fundamentally alter the character of neighbourhoods’ (Leung and Williams 2017), pointing at displacement and dissolution of existing networks as a consequence. Also, neighbourhoods attractive to tourists are increasingly threatened by gentrification induced by short‐term rental platforms such as Airbnb (Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018), which tend to take affordable apartments off the market, flout existing housing regulations, and undermine policies protecting affordable housing supply. In Dublin, Airbnb became a dominant rental property market platform even for permanent residents, where at times more than twice as many apartments were offered on Airbnb as on the normal rental market with its regulations (Harris 2018).
The controversial statement made by the architect Patrik Schumacher at the World Architecture Festival 2016 (Frearson 2016) might unintentionally help to uncover some of the rationale behind such market‐driven mechanisms of exclusion and how they can directly affect individual housing biographies. Frearson (2016) summarizes Schumacher's argument that in order to ‘make the city's housing provision more efficient’ and to address its ‘affordability crisis’, proposes to abolish any land use prescriptions, milieu protection, housing standards, and all forms of social housing or rent control. He criticizes it as a ‘tragedy’ that social‐housing tenants have rights to