In the introduction to this special issue on Latin American housing policies, we address the common elements evident in this collection of papers with the aim of enabling a better knowledge exchange between the 'global North' and the 'global South' on potentially common issues. These include the changing relationship between state and capital, with special emphasis on the new role adopted by the State as a facilitator for financial private capital in an increasingly privatised housing sector; the need to address precarious housing conditions among vast sectors of the population, including international migrants; and the various innovative roles played by civil society in housing provision. Notwithstanding these similarities between world regions, our editorial introduction highlights a number of particularities in housing research in the Latin American region, underscoring the need to reflect critically on the applicability of concepts and models created in different geographical contexts with different historical, social and political realities. Within this editorial, we also introduce the main themes discussed in the specific articles and attempt to place them within the more general scope of earlier research on housing policies in the region. We conclude by acknowledging that a solution to long lasting housing inequality in Latin America remains an unfulfilled promise.

Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities,this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake ofcontemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housingestates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement(through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and privatehousing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse’s notion of‘displacement pressure’ which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties,uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due tosignificant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actualrent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will begiven – examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric ofurban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in therenovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potentialdisplacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which isprofit-driven but justified by invoking the ‘technical necessity’ of renovation) undermines the ‘rightto dwell’ and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one’s basic living conditions, withall the physical and mental benefits that entails – regardless of whether displacement fearsmaterialize in actual displacement or not.

This article analyses the political and ideological transformations underlying the gradual privatisation and deregulation of the mid-twentieth-century Keynesian model of housing provision in Sweden. We identify a series of three political and ideological shifts in housing policy and urban form since the 1930s: regulating Folkhem housing, deregulating Folkhem housing, and back to business in housing. We argue that even though the Folkhem parole of ‘housing for all’ differs extensively from the current situation where the market is ‘housing the privileged’, segregation trends have, from the Folkhem to the postwelfare period, been shaped by both state interventions and market forces. Second, we argue that there is a continuing trend through which newly constructed housing has metamorphosed from a basic human right for the working class into an expression of individual distinction and ‘style’ for the upper middle and middle classes. While privileged classes, more than ever before in modern Swedish housing history, have the possibility to choose new forms of housing, the most impoverished groups live in residual and often stigmatised peripheral housing areas. One main conclusion is that recent forms of housing for privileged groups signal a cultural and ideological shift towards new, more elitist conceptions of housing and privilege.

This article analyses the political and ideological transformations underlying the gradual privatisation and deregulation of the mid-twentieth-century Keynesian model of housing provision in Sweden. We identify a series of three political and ideological shifts in housing policy and urban form since the 1930s: regulating Folkhem housing, deregulating Folkhem housing, and back to business in housing. We argue that even though the Folkhem parole of ‘housing for all’ differs extensively from the current situation where the market is ‘housing the privileged’, segregation trends have, from the Folkhem to the post-welfare period, been shaped by both state interventions and market forces. Second, we argue that there is a continuing trend through which newly constructed housing has metamorphosed from a basic human right for the working class into an expression of individual distinction and ‘style’ for the upper middle and middle classes. While privileged classes, more than ever before in modern Swedish housing history, have the possibility to choose new forms of housing, the most impoverished groups live in residual and often stigmatised peripheral housing areas. One main conclusion is that recent forms of housing for privileged groups signal a cultural and ideological shift towards new, more elitist conceptions of housing and privilege.