Housing studies has contributed significantly to recent understandings of the varied and interdependent nature of contemporary housing systems, outcomes, flows and challenges. Yet a global housing orientation can be stymied by: dichotomous thinking in terms of a global North/South or East/West; normative approaches which fail to take seriously the proliferation of new modes of inhabitation and the circulation of residents in "irregular" accommodation situations and spaces; and common abstractions which emphasize generalities and convergence to the neglect of contradictions, ambivalences and multiplicities. This has meant a relative lack of engagement between Anglophone housing scholarship on the one hand, and research from other parts of the globe on the other. Yet it has also resulted in ignoring potential solutions and new ways of "doing" housing.
The special issue - Towards a global housing studies - seeks to support and encourage a global housing orientation by bringing together a diversity of research from international scholars at different career stages. Edited by Ryan Powell and AbdouMaliq Simone, the collective includes researchers based in Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and Uruguay. The empirical focus further extends to Bangladesh, Greece, Mozambique and the USA. The issue includes 11 new articles which place housing and home at the centre of new theorizations on the contemporary drivers of urban and rural inequality, and which develop new lines of articulation beyond North/South that offer a more connected and open-minded disposition. It includes contributions from scholars from (and of) the Global South, as well as collaborations between scholars across North and South. In this sense, the special issue also contributes to the diversification of voices and perspectives within the Housing Studies journal itself. We hope that the special issue prompts further debate on the potential of a global housing orientation in capturing the shared realities and intensive interplay of settlement and unsettlement internationally, and in responding to environmental and social urgencies in the provision and "doing" of housing.