Can international housing rights based on public international law really impact on contemporary housing systems?

Abstract

The concept of home advances a new basis for evaluating housing rights, emphasising their human and personal benefits. Housing rights address, at a national, regional and global level, displacement and dispossession, as well as access to home for all. These rights are forging a new discourse and jurisprudence across the world, largely based on public international law instruments. However, the legal liberalist approach and framework of such housing rights discourse needs to engage with housing systems at the macro, meso and micro levels. There is a particular and urgent challenge in addressing the structural and institutional elements of housing systems, such as housing finance, infrastructure, ownership and exchange of housing and regulation of housing systems and sub-systems. Ultimately, this could ensure that the contemporary revival of global housing finance regulation can incorporate a housing rights perspective.