However, despite the similarities pointed out, the two books analyse greatly disparate historical realities that have led to clearly different housing systems that diverge in their efficacy: on the one hand, the fundamentally liberal path followed by the United States of America, and on the other, that of many European countries, of a social-democratic nature. Basing itself on the situation of the USA, In Defense of Housing criticises the capacities of the capitalist system to tackle the shortage or complete lack of housing. It leads the reader through a reasoning of distrust in the capacities of the system itself to establish mechanisms that guarantee the provision of housing for all. In contrast, Social Housing in Europe analyses, comparatively and in detail, the different models for intervention, identifying how the provision of social housing has been resolved in some European countries and what factors have influenced the resilience of the different systems in the wake of the economic crisis.
The book by Madden and Marcuse questions whether the capitalist system, today globalised and neoliberal to the extreme, has real possibilities of preserving and guaranteeing the right to housing. The authors underline the growing commodification of housing, which ignores its function as a home. This concern leads them to defend housing as a complex good with multiple meanings for people and families, beyond representing a transactional good in the market.
The chapters configure the global treatise but, at the same time, they make sense in isolation and each of them enables definition of the authors’ position. Firstly, they show themselves to be against the commodification of housing. Next, they point out the adverse effects of substandard housing on people. Following this, the authors associate the fight for housing to conflicts of power, resources, autonomy and agency, highlighting in turn numerous negative effects that this fight brings with it on an urban scale such as, for example, gentrification or segregation. They also criticise the conceptualisation of housing policy as an ideological artefact dominated, in their opinion, by the need to preserve the market. The book’s last chapter portrays the case of the movements and activisms in favour of the right to housing in New York.
The conclusion reached by Madden and Marcuse is probably one of the most substantial chapters in the book, since they reveal themselves to be in favour of the radical right to housing. The authors argue their defence of housing as a non-market good, a conviction that has a global reach and that is reflected also in the different scales in which housing participates: the neighbourhood and the community. The authors assert the necessary combination of actors participating in the housing system (from public policy to activism) for a fair and democratic design of the right to it.
As for Social Housing in Europe, it offers a set of comparative tables on social housing in 12 European countries, including Spain, which are very useful for readers avid for indicators and statistics. It offers relevant information on dimension, tenure, schemes for determining rentals and access requirements for each social housing system in these countries. The first part of the book uses the dimension of the social housing sector for structure: large sector (Netherlands, Scotland, Austria), medium sector (Denmark, Sweden, England and France) and small sector (Ireland, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Spain). National experts analyse aspects such as the history of the housing system and recent changes, assignment and provision mechanisms, funding, and future outlook. At the end of each contribution, there is a summary (the Country Box) that contains the same parameters for each country.