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J. Kadi:
"Neoliberal Dutch housing policies? Analyzing market-oriented regulatory reforms in Amsterdam´s housing market";
Vortrag: Annual RC21 Conference 2011, Amsterdam, Niederlande; 07.07.2011 - 09.07.2011; in: "The struggle to belong. Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings", (2011).

Over the last years, neoliberalism has become a more frequently-used concept in public debate and scholarly discussions to describe and analyze regulatory reform projects since the 1970s. Quite often, in doing so, neoliberalism is equated with terms like deregulation and privatization, and thereby erroneously conceptualized as an erosion, decline or disappearance of the state and of political influence. Several authors have argued against such a notion and called for putting the state center stage in the analysis of neoliberal reform processes (e.g. Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002; Wacquant 2008; Brenner et al. 2010). Following this line of reasoning, neoliberalism is not about "less state" but about a qualitatively different kind of state (Peck & Tickell 2002). Rather than talking about a quantitative decline, neoliberalism can better be conceptualized as a qualitative shift from state intervention based on redistributive to one based on competitive logics.
Also for (urban) housing markets it holds that after decades of neoliberal reforms, governments remain of key importance in the structuring of these markets. However, governments have changed their strategies and instruments to intervene. This paper investigates the neoliberalization of housing markets in one particular context, in Amsterdam. Being located in the Dutch welfare state, Amsterdam´s housing market gained prominence in the past for its far-reaching government intervention that gave market logics little influence on the functioning of the market. It is shown how, over the last two decades, governments changed their strategies and ways to intervene in the market along the lines of neoliberal ideology and how these reforms affected the structure of Amsterdam´s housing market. The analysis reveals that the notion of neoliberalization as a qualitative shift in government intervention is analytically more suitable than the notion of quantitative decline.