This critical commentary confronts and explores the – so far under-recognised and under-researched – emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision. This crisis results from the fact that housing-related household expenses are rising faster than salary and wage increases in many urban centres around the world; a situation triggered by at least three global post-Global Financial Crisis megatrends of accelerated (re)urbanisation of capital and people, the provision of cheap credit and the rise of intra-society inequality. Reflecting on the recent findings of extensive comparative ethnographic research across Western countries, and analytically approaching housing affordability and affordable housing issues from a broadly understood intersection of political and economic spheres (e.g. issues of state and market, governance and regulation, policy and investment), the paper pursues four key objectives: raising awareness of the crisis, showing its extent and context-specificity but also the severe social as well as problematic spatial implications, linking current developments to key academic debates in housing studies and urban studies, and importantly, developing a research agenda that can help to redress the currently detectable ‘policy–outcome’ gap in policy making by asking fresh and urgent questions from empirical, theoretical and political viewpoints. This intervention ultimately calls for more dedicated and politicised knowledge production towards achieving affordable urban futures for all.

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co-constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local-global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city-specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super-City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as 'story-telling', benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time-and place-specific institutional mediation in shaping context-dependent discursive material governance alignments.

This paper explores the utility of investigating regional economic policy (REP) as constituted through the interplay of imaginaries, political projects, and institutional arrangements. It frames REP in process terms öas continually`in-the-making' and emerging out of the intersecting trajectories of ideas, policy, individuals, and other resources. The empirical focus is economic governance in Auckland, New Zealand, in the years following the widely publicised neoliberal reforms and profound economic restructuring of the 1980s and early 1990s. The analysis draws on the authors' particular positionality of being involved in knowledge production, both in academic and in policy arenas, and benefits from the development of a range of poststructural political economy methodologies by Auckland-based researchers. The concept of`political project' is argued to be a useful analytical tool for linking circulating academic imaginaries, political initiatives, and particular policy rationales. By means of juxtaposing key aspects of particular economic imaginaries with political/ policy initiatives and developments, it is shown that knowledge production for subnational economic governance is coconstitutive, contradictory, occurs on multiple geographical scales, and is mediated and remediated by place-specific and time-specific institutional actors. The methodological strategy of highlighting associations with the potential for interaction, rather than seeking causal processes, not only reveals the politicised nature of contextual facets of contemporary interventions, but promises to make a richer base for exploring possibilities for acting differently in urban and regional policy worlds.

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Neoliberalisation in New Zealand has been driven further as a political project than in most other countries. After two decades of neoliberal economic policy, it is possible to examine how political-economic actors in subnational spaces have responded to vastly new conditions. I provide an account on how regional economic-development policy and planning has reappeared in Auckland in the postrestructuring period. By deploying relational^institutional and poststructural perspectives in the examination of key policy initiatives that coconstituted an emerging regional economic intervention trajectory, I discuss how economic governance has been assembled, assess its structural coherence and directionality, and analyse the role of the state. I argue that regional governance processes are characterised by contingencies, patterns of institutional experimentation, and, increasingly, the work of central state actors. What is not known to date, however, is whether new regulatory structures are having any major material effects on the course of New Zealand's largest regional economy.