Mortgage-related issues in a crisis economy: Evidence from rural households in Ireland

Murphy, Enda; Scott, Mark

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.003

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Ireland is currently recovering from of the worst property crashes not only in the history of the state, but also one of the worst in the history of capitalism. Property values plunged by more than 50% (Murphy and Scott, 2013) and the state has only recently emerged from an EU/IMF restructuring programme (i.e. bailout).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptions of the common good in planning

Murphy

Fox-Rogers

2015

Cities

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Publication informationCities, 42 (Part B): 231-241Publisher Elsevier Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6518 Publisher's statementThis is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Cities. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Cities (VOL 42, ISSUE Part B, (2014) Abstract. There has been plenty of debate in the academic literature about the nature of the common good or public interest in planning. There is a recognition that the idea is one that is extremely difficult to isolate in practical terms; nevertheless, scholars insist that the idea '…remains the pivot around which debates about the nature of planning and its purposes turn ' (Campbell and Marshall, 2002, 181). At the point of first principles, these debates have broached political theories of the state and even philosophies of science that inform critiques of rationality, social justice and power. In the planning arena specifically, much of the scholarship has tended to focus on theorising the move from a rational comprehensive planning system in the 1960s and 1970s, to one that is now dominated by deliberative democracy in the form of collaborative planning. In theoretical terms, this debate has been framed by a movement from what are perceived as objective and elitist notions of planning practice and decision-making to ones that are considered (by some) to be 'inter-subjective' and non-elitist. Yet despite significant conceptual debate, only a small number of empirical studies have tackled the issue by investigating notions of the common good from the perspective of planning practitioners. What do practitioners understand by the idea of the common good in planning? Do they actively consider it when making planning decisions? Do governance/institutional barriers exist to pursuing the common good in planning? In this paper, these sorts of questions are addressed using the case of Ireland. The methodology consists of a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 urban planners working across four planning authorities within the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland. The findings show that the most frequently cited definition of the common good is balancing different competing interests and avoiding/minimising the negative effects of development. The results show that practitioner views of the common good are far removed from the lofty ideals of planning theory and reflect the ideological shift of planners within an institution that has been heavily neo-liberalised since the 1970s.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptions of the common good in planning

Murphy

Fox-Rogers

2015

Cities

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“…Thus, individual homeowners were encouraged to feel a sense of personal responsibility for having bought into the property bubble, therefore contributing to the crisis: "we" were all guilty of 'enjoying the market too much', "we all partied". It was precisely because the crisis in Ireland was bound up in a property bubble driven by personal indebtedness (Murphy & Scott, 2013;Norris & Brooke, 2011), and because the icon of the crash, the 'ghost estate', was a symbol of ordinary life, that the narrative of excess was internalised rather than collectivised.…”

Section: 'Ghost Estates' In the Irish Print Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-politics, crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

O’Callaghan

Boyle

Kitchin

2014

Political Geography

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a b s t r a c tThis paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's 'ghost estates' e residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash e and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the 'ghost estate' functioned as an 'empty signifier' through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by 'ghost estates': firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of 'excess'. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.

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“…In this paper, we seek to extend this analysis by examining an under-researched spatial context including the causes and consequences of the financial crisis beyond the city hierarchy to understand how financial networks and rural places and households have become intermeshed with global financial processes and the associated negative outcomes for rural housing markets (see Murphy and Scott, 2013). This intermeshing of rural places, households and international financial networks echoes the assertion of Woods (2007) that we have entered an era of the 'global countryside', whereby rural localities are characterised by complex entanglements in the global economy.…”

Section: Financialisation and Household Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Household vulnerability in rural areas: Results of an index applied during a housing crash, economic crisis and under austerity conditions

Murphy

Scott

2014

Geoforum

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Publication informationGeoforum, 51 : 75-86 Publisher ElsevierItem record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/5026 Publisher's statement þÿ T h i s i s t h e a u t h o r s v e r s i o n o f a w o r k t h a t w a s a c c e p t e d f o r p u b l i c a t i o n i n G e o f o r u m .Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum (Volume 51, þÿ J a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 , P a g e s 7 Abstract. The emergence of the economic crisis in 2007/08 has increasingly exposed rural localities to exogenous shocks and ruptures within the globalised economy. Rather than focusing on economic growth alone, many commentators have begun examining how regions and localities can cope with economic crises by enhancing place resilience and reducing the vulnerability of places to global economic uncertainty. However, scant attention has been given to assessing economic vulnerability at the household scale. This paper attempts to marry and relate the global processes at work in both the literature on financialisation and vulnerability to facilitate understanding of and provide a framework for financialisation research at the household scale. In this context, we develop and apply a Household Vulnerability Index (HVI) to rural areas. Drawing on survey data, the index utilises both objective indicators (e.g. household income) and subjective indicators (e.g. household perceptions of future job insecurity) to provide a nuanced account of living conditions and life satisfaction among rural households in Ireland following a housing crash, economic recession and the widespread adoption of austerity measures across public policy. By adopting a vulnerability approach (rather than providing a 'snapshot'), the HVI enables an assessment of not only current conditions for households, but also the probability of continued declining living standards and the exposure of households to further exogenous shocks. This provides a useful tool in assessing the potential impact of a range of public policies at the household level. In the case of Ireland, a link emerged between increased household vulnerability and rural localities that experienced an oversupply of houses during the recent speculative housing bubble, suggesting that the failure to effectively regulate development and finance has increased household exposure to financial risk.

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Mortgage-related issues in a crisis economy: Evidence from rural households in Ireland

Cited by 23 publications

References 53 publications

Perceptions of the common good in planning

Perceptions of the common good in planning

Post-politics, crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

Household vulnerability in rural areas: Results of an index applied during a housing crash, economic crisis and under austerity conditions

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