皇家华人

The book aims to put people and inequality at the heart of how we think, discuss and make policy about housing in the 21^st聽century. It draws together over a decade of Rory鈥檚 work in this field to explore how who we are matters for our housing and how housing helps make us into who we are.

Rory explains that his teaching in UCL Geography provided the impetus for writing the book. 鈥淲hile the general idea had been at the back of my mind for some time,鈥� he says, 鈥渢eaching across a range of modules like Economic Geography, Urban Geography and Urban Policy - as well as supervising many student dissertations about housing in recent years 鈥� really laid bare how fragmented and surprisingly patchy our knowledge of housing鈥檚 role in the life course actually is. Students kept asking me where they could read up on these topics and all I could point them towards were books written over ten years ago鈥�.

Rory says that he wanted to change this 鈥渂y providing an accessible synthesis of how housing interacts with family lives, educational careers, employment, household finances, health and the social dynamics of places in varied and often unequal ways in 21^st-century Global North societies.鈥�

Writing the book was itself an eventful process for Rory. 鈥淚n the time it took to get the book from proposal to publication I鈥檝e had two children, moved house twice and made it through several lockdown spells of working from home so yes, you could describe writing it as a dynamic life course process with lots of housing events鈥� he jokes.

Rory now plans to develop several new research ideas relating to residential mobility and housing transitions that emerged while he was writing Housing and Life Course Dynamics.

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