Stambena politika između znanosti i ideologije
Housing Policy between Science and Ideology

Summary/Abstract: Ideas represent a logical addition to the institutional and rational actor approach in public policy analysis. In the housing area, various measures like financial, legal, spatial, social and ecological constitute housing policy. The aim of this paper is to point out the ambivalence of knowledge upon which housing policy is based by using the ideational approach in the analysis of basic terms in the field of housing (house, housing, housing system and housing policies), particularly housing policy. Attention in this paper was focussed on linking the ideational approach with various theories on the social determination of knowledge, especially by pointing out the synergy of scientific and political interpretations which date from the 19th- and 20th-century ideological imagery. In accordance with the three proposed theses, the impossibility of unequivocal identification of knowledge in the housing policy area with either scientific or ideological systems was confirmed. Housing policy was identified as an area in which ideas represent a product of interdependence between scientific and ideological cognisances, which is evident from the interpretation of fundamental concepts. By using the example from the history of British housing policy, the inseparability of the ideological and the scientific in defining the terms was depicted as the cause of further discernments in the conceptualisation and implementation of housing policy measures. In the final discussion, the method of “social learning” and the “trial and error” principle were advocated as instruments for improving housing policy.

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