Housing and social theory: testing the Fordist models, or, Social theory and afFORDable housing

Abstract

Although the concept of Fordism has been used to help explain a wide range ofphenomena in Australian post-war political economy, there have been few attempts to assess its utility within the field of housing provision. This paper is a preliminanry attempt to 'test' the Fordist model. It distinguishes between two uses of the concept: a narrow 'productivist' approach which focuses on the 'backwardness'ofthe housing industry\ and a broader 'societal' approach which focuses on the interrelationship betw een dominant production techniques, patterns of mass consumption, and urban form. The first section examines the narrow> use of Fordism and argues that it has only limited practical and analytic value for explaining developments within the Australian housing industry. However, the second section of the paper suggests that the broader use of the concept—derived from the regulation school ofpolitical economy—is usefulfor explaining the coincidence between suburbanisation, mass consumption and mass production during the golden era ofFordism after the Second World War.