This short paper revisits and revises the over-used State-Market-Household triangle as a theoretical analytical tool, proposing its repositioning at the centre of Housing and Welfare Studies, and reopening the debate. It is shown that this tool does not remain useful for researchers alone but also as a means to a more effective communication of results to a wider non-specialist audience. Towards this goal two conceptual adaptations are proposed. Firstly, the addition of the time parameter in assessing the triangle’s transformations from one era to another, or comparing systems with similarities but on different evolutionary phases. Secondly, the – by default – understanding of the triangle as a dynamic configuration, due to inter and intra-polar shifts.

This paper studies the roles of the new-style PRH (public rental housing) programme in Shanghai’s socio-spatial dynamics. It shows that the development of PRH in Shanghai is mainly a result of a deliberate urban development policy in line with other strategies such as city marketing and gentrification. The analysis is augmented with data from a questionnaire survey of PRH tenants in Shanghai. Finally, this paper identifies challenges for the future development of the public rental housing sector in China.

The aim of the paper is to discuss selected methodological problems of quantitative comparative housing research. The analysis is based on EU-SILC data and the concept of overcrowding is considered. We used two alternative definitions of overcrowding rate, both based on normative assumptions and each giving slightly different results. We tried to answer the question, which definition is better. The basic idea was that the closer the ‘objective’ rate of overcrowding is to its ‘subjective’ assessment, the better the selected method (definition) is. Moreover, it was shown that while in more advanced countries the share of households that consider dwelling space to be a problem is significantly higher than the share of households living in overcrowded dwellings based on ‘objective’ criteria, in post-socialist countries the opposite is true.