The data archive is a collection of transcripts of semi-structured interviews with a range of organisations involved involved in the production and regulation of housing in London and the UK. They relate to two fields of analysis: (i) interviews with those responsible for the regulation and planning of housing development at multiple scales - including policy-makers, planners, negotiators, specialist regulators (including financial), and consultants; and interviews with private sector investors, developers, house-builders, project managers, and consultants.This proposal draws on a precise comparative, inter-disciplinary methodology to examine the inter-relationships between contemporary investment flows into the housing markets of major cities and the governance arrangements and public policy instruments that are designed to regulate them. Our case studies are three of Europe's leading urban centres: the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area; Greater London; and Grand Paris. The proposal is timely as major cities have been faced with unprecedented development pressures. Their populations and economies have expanded and their envrionments have become highly attractive locations for global and national financial investment. These pressures have been particularly acute in the production and consumption of housing, where the impacts of investments on markets, citizens, and places are generating a widely perceived 'crisis' and set of new challenges for policy-makers and planners. There is a growing urgency to produce affordable housing for a variety of groups in order for cities to maintain their growth and to meet the needs of their citizens. A failure to tackle housing problems will both limit future growth potential and act as a source of social conflict and discontent. The proposal draws on two streams of analysis. First we examine investment landscapes and the effectiveness of regulations and policy instruments that are designed to control them. We do this systematically and comparatively. Second we analyse the types of investment that are shaping housing markets and their impacts on people and places. We explore its sources, objectives, and designed outcomes. The research meets an increasingly urgent need to develop better understandings of the complex relationships between markets, planning controls, and the quality of life of citizens in a context of escalating political tensions between different socio-economic groups and major global economic and social changes.

The data collection draws on semi-structured interviews with with a range of actors involved in the regulation and delivery of new residential housing in London. A snowball sampling method was adopted beginning with clear categories of interviewee types, based on organisational affiliations. We set out a series of Work Packages that examined landscapes of regulation and landscapes of investment and identified, systematically the agencies involved in each. The first part of the research was to undertake some institutional mapping to identify which organisations to approach and interview. For the regulators we identified those working at the following scales: city/national level; London-metropolitan; borough-level. For the investment landscapes we focused on: investment institutions; property developers; house-builders; social housing providers; lobbying organisations; trade associations; and financiers.