While a couple of decades ago homeownership used to be a privilege of the few, nowadays most households in developed countries are living in their own four walls. One of the reasons behind this shift are government policies aimed at promoting homeownership and making it more financially feasible. Among these policies, there is a wide range of instruments reducing the costs of mortgage loan interest. Recently, the promotion of homeownership has also become an important issue in some of the former socialist countries. An example of that is a policy of the Polish government called “Family’s own home”. The aim of this policy was to provide financial support for young households who are particularly vulnerable to the difficult housing situation in Poland. Due to huge price increases between 2006 and 2008, and in connection with a short supply of rental housing, many households have been unable to find an affordable dwelling in recent years. The “Family’s own home” policy, initiated in 2007, was the government’s response to this problem. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the outcomes of this policy, which was terminated at the end of 2012 because of a public finance crisis. Three research questions are addressed: (1) what was the relationship between government support and residential construction, housing prices, and mortgage loan interest rate, (2) what was the spatial distribution of government support, and (3) how was it related to the spatial distribution of housing prices, incomes, and housing affordability?

Ever since the earthquake of April 6, 2009 hit the city of L’Aquila, Italy, the city has been facing major challenges in terms of social, physical, and economic reconstruction. The system of public urban mobility, the bus network, is no exception with its old bus fleet, non-user-friendly information, and poor scheduling. This paper argues that the public transportation system of L’Aquila could be improved towards smart mobility models without large infrastructure investment by leveraging the “infostructure” approach, digital technologies, open data, and open source software. This work presents the digitization and geo-referencing procedure, software architecture, and the web and mobile apps that have been developed to improve the information flow available to citizens and to increase the user-friendliness of the transportation system. Future research will seek to make use of the data and develop applications to perform a public transport accessibility analysis of major points of interest throughout the city

In light of ongoing shrinkage processes affecting a number of cities and regions in Europe and around the world, the planning literature has suggested a need for new planning concepts and strategies, or even a new planning paradigm. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the adaptation of the process of urban regeneration to shrinkage. Urban regeneration is a common policy in cities facing population and economic decline. However, particularly for inner-city neighbourhoods, it has not been sufficiently documented how urban regeneration responds to challenges related to shrinkage. Looking first at the evolving national policy framework and then at two local case studies, this paper identifies conditions leading to the emergence of new practices of urban regeneration in inner-city neighbourhoods in Eastern Germany. These practices are characterized by the moderate usage of public subsidies combined with ‘soft’ measures like cooperation with individual property owners and potential investors as well as place marketing.