I’m Assistant Professor in Planning and Housing at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. Trained in urban studies, housing studies and urban planning, I research transformations in housing systems and how they are reshaping social and spatial inequalities. I’ve previously worked at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar, Germany, as well as Vienna University of Technology, Austria, where I was Head of Housing Research at the Department of Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy. 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 also joint coordinator of the working group Homeownership and Globalization in the European Network for Housing Research. My research has been featured in more than 150 media reports in, among others, The New York Times, The New Statesman, Arte TV, Der Spiegel, EFE and ORF.

Most recent publication
Kadi, J. & J. Lilius (2022) The remarkable stability of social housing in Vienna and Helsinki: A multi-dimensional analysis. Housing Studies.
The supply of social housing has been marked by erosion and decline in most Western Europe countries since the 1990s, albeit with considerable variation in timing, speed and degree. Recently, it has been suggested that the sector has kept a more prominent position at the local level, at least in some cities. This paper scrutinizes this claim by comparing the development of social housing in two cities in two distinct national housing systems that have traditionally had a strong commitment to social housing: Vienna and Helsinki. To do so, we build a multi-dimensional framework that encompasses sector size, stock privatization, new housing production, and residualization. We empirically demonstrate a remarkable stability along these dimensions in both cases, albeit with some differences in degree. A number of factors need to be considered to explain this stability. They relate to aspects of institutional design of the social housing systems, as well as to continuity in policies at national and local levels. Read paper