Richard joined the University of Birmingham in September 2013, and contributes to research activities in the Centre for Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM) and Housing and Communities Research Group.
Richard's research interests have circulated around the impact of housing and housing systems. This is a diverse and multi-disciplinary field and he has found himself at one time or another working in geography, demography, urban studies, planning, architecture, anthropology, gender and cultural studies. He now finds himself at home in social policy and urban studies, which are subject areas that allow for considerable conceptual and methodological diversity. Housing as an empirical focus has enjoyed growing attention in recent years, particularly in light of its growing centrality in the globalisation of financial networks in the 1990s and 2000s and its subsequent impact on social and economic destabilisation since the Credit Crisis and beyond. Housing now lies at the heart of debates, not just on the built environment, but also on macro-economic stability, social justice and inequality, and intergenerational divides. His research seeks to get to the heart of these issues and the many ways that housing is embedded in the social transformations that appear to dominate the current epoch.
Recent Projects
With his colleagues in Amsterdam, he has recently completed a report for the Dutch government on the position of starters on the Amsterdam housing market (Duurzame toegankelijkheid van de Amsterdamse woningmarkt voor starters)
Richard is also running a large, five-year project funded by the EU, looking at housing markets and family property wealth and their relationship to welfare state transformations and regime shifts.