LISER and the UGoverN network are delighted to invite you to this half-day event bridging the Luxembourg and Amsterdam context around the topic of housing commodification and spatial governance landscapes. This event is part of the UGoveRN Roundtable Series and organised with the support of the Center for Urban Studies (CUS), University of Amsterdam.
Across European cities, housing systems are undergoing significant transformation, characterised by increasingly hybrid forms of use and producing more fluid and interconnected housing practices. The discussion is situated within a spatial governance landscape perspective, focusing on how public and private actors interact through a variety of instruments, including regulatory instruments, understood as part of a broader configuration of governance practices that shape housing markets. To understand how governance systems engage with forms of use that are mobile, hybrid, and difficult to categorise within existing regulatory frameworks, we approach new housing forms as products of fragmented governance landscapes and argue that so-called unregulatable housing practices are actively produced through gaps, frictions, and misalignments within governance arrangements themselves.
The Amsterdam and Luxembourg cases provide two contrasting governance contexts through which to explore these dynamics. While Amsterdam represents a context of intensive regulatory intervention, Luxembourg reflects a context with fewer formalised instruments targeting hybrid housing practices. Together, these cases allow us to examine how different governance configurations engage with similar dynamics, in terms of how governance is structured, coordinated, and adapted.
This event will consist of a session introducing each context, followed by a roundtable addressing the overarching question: How do spatial governance systems respond to increasingly hybrid and mobile forms of housing use, and under what conditions do regulatory interventions lose coherence, effectiveness, or legitimacy? The roundtable hence positions current developments within broader questions of institutional coordination across policy domains, the relationship between regulation and market adaptation, the role of platforms and data infrastructures in shaping governance capacity, and the limits of governing through predefined categories and instruments. In doing so, it frames housing as a testing ground for the adaptive capacity of spatial governance systems.
Provisional programme
13:30 – 15:00 – Introduction to the topic and contextualisation
15:00 – 15:30 – Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00 – Roundtable with panellists from research and practice in Luxembourg and Amsterdam
