ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Another brick in the wall. Building logics and regulation practices within the fragmented housing market of Flanders.

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 15 | PROPERTY MARKET ACTORS

Speaker

Mr Joren Sansen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Description

Flanders is considered as a highly sprawled region, consisting of a fragmented and mostly privately owned land market. A diverse and large amount of small to medium scale, often locally oriented private developers dominate the housing market. Research has claimed that relative to e.g. the Netherlands, the Flanders’ housing market can be considered as ‘non-financialized’, with an abundance of ‘patient’ capital (Van Loon, 2016). This would result in a housing market that is generally static, following economic fluctuations and housing demand, and is considered as ‘preferable’ opposed to highly erratic finance-driven housing markets. This exploratory research, based on an in-depth analyses of housing developments and interviews with institutional and private actors in three municipalities, aims to nuance this view of the Flanders private housing market. Findings indicate that the housing market is, both in terms of supply and demand, strongly regionalized. Path dependency of capital, financial logics, institutions and housing practices has created a spatial differentiation that is locally expressed in a playing field that is as fragmented as the landscape. However, although path dependent, the professionalisation and upscaling of developers is increasing in a search for profit maximization. This poses challenges to the transition into the new spatial logic of the ‘bouwshift’, a densification strategy that aims to limit land consumption by concentrating housing within existing built up areas, as local governments, frequently understaffed and lacking sufficient expertise, must adopt a leading role in this spatial shift. Through exploratory, case driven research, this research aims to deconstruct the financial logic of private developers and steering capacity of local governments to create a more nuanced understanding of the differentiation of housing markets in Flanders, and its impact on housing developments in terms of location, amount, typology and affordability.

References

Van Loon, J. (2016). Patient versus impatient capital: the (non-) financialization of real estate developers in the Low Countries. Socio-Economic Review, 14(4), 709-728.