About the cooperation "Housing and the city
IRPUD and the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology (SOZ) at the Technical University of Dortmund have been cooperating with NRW.BANK since 2007 with the aim of strengthening the links between research, practice and teaching in the field of housing market and housing policy. The cooperation "Housing & City" is intended to ensure an exchange on current research and its results.
Occasion and topics
The cooperation reacts flexibly to current problems at the interface of housing policy and urban development, takes them up and contributes to a critical discussion. While the demographic development and its effects were the main reason for the founding of the cooperation, for some time now the focus has been on the dynamic (price) developments on German housing markets and the search for strategies for an appropriate housing supply and neighborhood development:
2007
"Demographic developments are bringing about fundamental changes in the housing markets and in the field of urban development, which are already visible in many places. Population shortfalls, housing vacancies and the closure of kindergartens are issues in more and more municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is foreseeable that demographic developments will have an impact on almost all areas of development and structural policy in the future."
2018
"Rising rents and the resulting tenant protests have put the housing issue and housing policy back on the political agenda. This is not surprising, since housing is a basic human need. In this context, housing lies in an area of tension between social and economic goods and is embedded in processes of urban development."
Activities
In recent years, a number of cooperation modules have been developed and institutionalized in order to interlink research, practice and teaching in the field of housing market and housing policy more closely:
In order to promote professional exchange between academia, municipalities and the housing industry, the Dortmund Housing Policy Colloquium has been held annually since 2008. The symposium addresses current topics from research and practice and cooperates with central actors (e.g. Mieterverein Dortmund und Umgebung e.V., Wohnen im Revier).
Since 2009, the NRW.BANK.Study Award "Housing and the City" has been conferred on outstanding theses in the field of "Housing and the City" that are particularly distinguished by a scientific achievement, outline feasible recommendations for action or contribute to the further development of promotion and structural policy concepts in NRW.
In addition to the institutionalized cooperation modules, a number of other subject-related forms of cooperation have been developed in the past to make the topic of "housing" accessible to young academics at the Department of Spatial Planning in teaching and research. For example, a cross-university teaching research seminar was conducted together with the Institute of Geography, WWU Münster, a summer school on the topic of "Housing in the Ruhr Area" was offered, and a doctoral and several German scholarships were awarded.