Policy schizophrenia and the question of housing

Torgersons (1987) famous lecture on housing and the welfare state outlined the tensions and the problematic relationship between the two and the lack of a unified policy field of housing nor stable institutionalization around it. Torgerson argued that this is so due to the particular type of commodity which housing constitute and because housing relates to other types of demands and services than traditional welfare policyfields (Togersen 1987:118). However he never outlined how we should pursue more sustained analysis of the complex relationship between housing and the many different functions of the state nor of how the institutionalization of different housing policy regimes matter? Here we utilize Bourdieu’s concept of bureaucratic field and a unique dataset of all central state employees (in the case of Denmark) to analyze how spatial policies and housing, the state and its institutions are intermeshed and how changes over time are the result of struggle within the bureaucratic field. We claim that to comprehend the formation of spatial policies, we need to consider the structure of the specific policy-field and the bureaucratic field, and how this in its own right generates principles of policy making (Wacquant 2005b; Bourdieu 2005; Dubois 2014; Schultz Larsen 2014). Analyzing the policy field of housing within the bureaucratic field from 1993-2019 it becomes possible to explain the current state of policy schizophrenia – where the state is divided upon itself being a primary producer of established-outsiders relations through territorial stigmatization – as a particular form of statecraft aimed at producing alternate futures by removing the pillars under the remnants of the welfare state