I’m a University Assistant Professor in Planning and Housing in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, I held positions at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), the Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar (Germany), and TU Wien (Austria), where I initiated and led the Housing Research Group in the Department of Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy between 2017 and 2023. My research and teaching interests are in the areas of housing policy, urban geography, socio-spatial inequality, gentrification, financialisation, and the political economy of housing.  I’m Associate Editor of the International Journal of Housing Policy, was a member of the editorial collective of suburban. Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung (2016-2023), as well as Editor in Chief of the multi-disciplinary journal The Public Sector (2017-2023). I’m joint coordinator of the working group Homeownership and Globalization in the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR). At the University of Cambridge, I’m Director of Studies for Land Economy at Gonville & Caius College and Course Director of the MPhil Program Planning, Growth and Regeneration. I’m also a member of the Lab of Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis.

Most recent publication
Kadi, J., Banabak, S. & L. Plank (2025). Institutional investment in rental housing in the city of social housing. European Urban and Regional Studies.
While scholarly and public attention on institutional investors in rental housing is considerable, studies that quantify the relevance of such actors are still rare. This article measures institutional investor ownership in a European city with one of the highest shares of social housing: Vienna, Austria. We present a novel approach to measure institutional investor ownership that combines land registry data with the international company database ORBIS and Vienna’s local housing register. This provides unique ownership data for the entire housing market at the property level. We measure the role of institutional investors in different rental tenures and further distinguish between direct and indirect property owners, between national, EU, and non-EU investors, and conduct a geographical analysis of investment hotspots. We make three broader contributions: First, we widen the geography of research on institutional investment by considering a highly regulated housing market context. Second, we demonstrate that a large social housing stock does not per se prevent a significant presence of institutional investors. Third, we introduce a method that may be used in other cases and contexts. Read paper