The political economy of tenancy contract law - towards holistic housing law.

Europe's aggravating housing crisis lies in the blind spots of law. While central in constructing housing both as a home and as an asset, law bears the task of mediating between housing's multiple - social, economic, and cultural - dimensions. However, inner-legal fragmentation and a legal imaginary of property, the nation state, and its welfare system have depoliticized, deflected and rendered inaccessible the 'housing question'. Turning to tenancy contract law in particular, this article argues that the 'social' orientation of this early example of a 'materialised' field of contract law is not only ill-suited to reflect the recent structural shifts in the housing market brought about through financialisation. Tenancy contract law has effectively taken a conservative drift by claiming to adequately administer the bilateral landlord-tenant relation while being insensitive to macro-level developments. Tenancy contract law reindividualises tenant responsibility in the eye of hardships whose roots lie outside the contractual sphere and thereby furthers, rather than curtails, neoliberal housing policies. As a reaction, the article proposes political economy as a conceptual vantage point from which to develop a 'holistic housing law'. Such a perspective combines a concern for democratic and collective agency with careful attention to law's tacit and technical role in shaping the flow of finance and the techniques of landlords' governmentality. Part of this is a 'transformative tenancy law', to be reformulated to protect not against landlord bargaining power in the first place but against a hegemonic and expansive market rationality that structurally corrupts the social and material meaning of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]