The role of strategic planning in ensuring sustainable housing markets in a neo-liberal planning context

The article illuminates how local government uses strategic planning in a context characterized as neo-liberalist-oriented housing market, to frame the broad varieties of planning and policy-instruments they possess to reach the goal of more inclusive housing markets. In line with other studies showing how European cities take passive, active, reactive and protective roles in their housing policies, our study of four Norwegian front-runner cities shows that their roles vary. Two of the cities, Tromsø and Oslo, have taken the most explicitly stated proactive role – by having a clear redistributional goal of ‘affordable housing’ and have established operational units in their organization (or by public-private companies) to implement it. All the cities have worked systematically with a more comprehensive housing policy, which have increased their ability to integrate their policy areas and use their different policy tools in a coordinated effort for more inclusive housing markets.