By Els Keunen
DASH members Zlata Vuksanović-Macura and Els Keunen will present a paper titled ‘Differing methods of estimating housing needs in European secondary cities’ at the RC21 conference in Vienna in July of this year. The paper is co-authored with Marco Allegra and developed in the framework of the DASH project.
The paper will be part of the panel ‘Political Lives of Policy Instruments in Land and Housing’. The focal point of this is to comprehend the methodologies employed by secondary cities in estimating their housing needs and how these estimates are translated into local policy. A comparison will be made between four secondary cities operating within distinct housing systems – DASH’s partner cities; Aalborg in Denmark, Tübingen in Germany, Braga in Portugal and Čačak in Serbia. The analysis focuses on two interrelated components. The focus of this study is twofold: firstly, an examination of the instruments, methods and data used for estimating housing needs; and secondly, an analysis of the manner in which these estimates inform municipal policy-making. Our investigation highlights the importance of path dependency (e.g. structural differences in local housing systems and the impact of contingent events) in shaping public action in the housing sector; and shows how municipalities carve out distinct approaches adapted to their specific local contexts, constraints, and policy priorities. The study adopts a comparative perspective with the aim of advancing understanding of how housing needs are conceptualised and measured in secondary cities, and how local authorities navigate national frameworks when developing housing policy responses.
For more information, see: https://rc21-vienna2026.org/.
