We are delighted to welcome Dr. David Ley as our next colloquium speaker on Tuesday 10th October.
Dr. David Ley is Professor Emeriti in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. David is an urban geographer, or perhaps better a human geographer interested in urban society and landscapes (treated in A Social Geography of the City, 1983). His PhD research was a participant observation study in North Philadelphia (The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost,
1974). Since appointment at UBC he has examined various research themes in the Canadian city, usually in a comparative perspective. Principal emphasis has been on gentrification (The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, 1996), neighbourhood activism (Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare State, 1994, with Shlomo Hasson), immigration and especially wealth migration (Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life-Lines, 2010) and the globalization of housing markets and its consequences (Housing Bubbles in Gateway Cities, 2023).
Residential harmony, residential alienation: housing booms in gateway cities
In the past 30 years the long-established relation between labour markets and housing markets has increasingly decoupled in many large cities. Booming house prices, and to some degree rents, leading to pervasive affordability crises, can no longer be limited to such conventional factors as local incomes or population growth. This rupture has been associated with the rise of ‘surplus demand’, the increasing role of housing as a growth asset for local and global investors in a low interest-rate environment. Housing as asset is now a major source of wealth accumulation and socio-economic polarisation. How stable is such a housing-based asset society? The contrasting cases of Singapore and Hong Kong are compared, showing 1) the unlikely outcome of apparent residential harmony and social unity in asset-based societies, and 2) the more likely outcome of residential alienation and social division. A broader objective of the presentation is to urge the unacknowledged centrality of housing in contemporary human geographies. 
This event will take place in-person and on Zoom, on Tuesday 26th Sepember from 12:00 pm – 1:45 pm Pacific.
No registration is necessary for in-person attendance, in Geography Room 229.
Please register to receive Zoom meeting details.
