Housing Insecurity and the Urban Middle-Class in Poland - Consultation Visit

The planned activity - a consultation trip - is aimed at preparing a research project, the primary objective of which will be to answer the question of how housing insecurity is experienced by the urban middle class in Poland. The project will also enable an analysis of how housing insecurity transforms the system of values attributed to urban space and residential location by representatives of this class. The primary research method will be a biographical interview, planned to be conducted in selected Polish cities with representatives of the middle class aged 25 to 40. The adequacy of the adopted method will be verified during the consultation trip.

The research activity encompasses a three-week stay at two California universities: the University of California, Berkeley (two weeks) and the University of California, Los Angeles (one week). Both UC Berkeley and UCLA house specialized centers for housing research (such as the Terner Center for Housing Innovation and the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies). These universities host prominent specialists in the field of spatial and social inequality. The trip will serve, firstly, for specialized consultation and verification of the assumptions made, both methodologically and theoretically. Secondly, it will involve a library query and literature review. This review of studies on California cities, which have grappled with a housing crisis for decades, will provide preliminary, albeit within the North American context, knowledge of middle-class strategies in the face of housing insecurity.