Richard Turkington and Christopher Watson (eds.): Renewing Europe's housing: Policy Press, UK, 2015, 328 pp, £70.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-44731-012-9.

Renewing Europe’s Housing provides an extensive overview of contemporary housing renewal policies and practices in Europe during the last four decades. The subject is of high and still increasing importance. During the time covered by the book, housing and urban policies in most European countries shifted thoroughly. After half a century of unsurpassed mass housing construction and urban growth, new construction has steadily declined to at present well below 1 % annually of the existing stock, to be replaced by a growing emphasis on maintenance, renewal and adaptation of the fast ageing existing stocks. In the same time, the also ageing population and the changing housing market came with changing demands and increasing spatial segregation, culminating in less wanted stocks and neighbourhoods. This paradigm shift had—and still has—far reaching consequences on a wide scale of participants, professions and skills. In spite of this, the knowledge in the broad field of housing renewal was up to recently only slowly disclosed and the number of comprehensive publications—apart from an abundancy of single-issue papers and mostly local language written case studies—is remarkably limited. Renewing Europe’s Housing is up to date the first compendium covering the policy knowledge field of the existing housing stock and the way it is governed across Europe and that—as also emphasized by three renowned scholars on the backside blurb—accounts for its importance. The authors are known experts with a long list of papers on the issue, with as a consequence and due to the limited number of other references a rather high proportion of self-citations and earlier published content, albeit updated and reedited. The book is structured around a series of nine country chapters that make up the body of the book, preceded by an introductory chapter and followed by two concluding chapters. The country chapters cover a series of comparative accounts of housing renewal in various European countries. They follow a similar structure: an introductory overview describing the character and the development of the national stock and underlying housing policies