Although I am a little late with this I still want to briefly reflect about my last academic year. Clearly 2017 has been hectic, not least due to a job change and a subsequent move from Weimar, Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar to Vienna, Vienna University of Technology.

2017 started with a publication of a book chapter on housing policy and spatial inequality in Vienna and Amsterdam (published in an edited volume on welfare state transformations here, with Gerlinde Gutheil Knopp Kirchwald). I also continued my work on housing policies in Vienna with a short piece on the rental law and gentrification in Vienna in the journal derive.

In Weimar, we published our edited volume about the housing question in Germany (Wohnraum fuer alle?! Perspektiven auf Planung, Politik und Architektur) with transcript. This has been a longer project, with Barbara Schönig and Sebastian Schipper, coming out of a conference we held in 2016. The edited volume brings together scholars from Germany and beyond to reflect about the mounting housing problems of low-income households in cities in the current context.

Related to my earlier post-doc job in Amsterdam (in 2015) on welfare state transformations and housing markets, I published a paper “The revival of private landlords in Britain’s post-homeownership society” with Richard Ronald from the University of Amsterdam in the journal New Political Economy.

In terms of publications, finally, I started work on Airbnb in Vienna, with Roman Seidl and Leonhard Plank (both TU Wien). We wrote a report on Airbnb in Vienna, focusing in particular on the impacts on the local housing market (the interactive website with the results is available here). Our research generated a lot of media attention with more than 100 newspaper articles nationally and internationally. We have published a number of small pieces on this project already and will continue our work in the coming months.

I’ve been very honored to join the editorial team of the International Journal of Housing Policy last April and the work for the journal has so far been very inspiring. I’ve also continued with joy as a member of the editorial collective of the German journal sub\urban Zeitschrift fuer Stadtforschung, this year particularly through co-editing a special issue on the politics of planning, with Nina Gribat, Yuca Meubrink, Jonas Müller and Jan Lange.

I’ve given a number of talks, in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, mostly related to my work on housing policies in Vienna. Thanks to all those who invited me! I tried not to attend too many conferences (and instead focus on writing), but went to the German Geography Conference in Tübingen, the RC21 conference in Leeds, as well as an inspiring Airbnb workshop in Salzburg.

Towards the end of the year, I’ve blogged more regularly to urbanizm.net, related, not least, to Austria’s new coalition government and their housing policy reform plans. The most read post last year has been on the influence of the real estate lobby on the governmental reform proposals.

I look forward to the year 2018!