Corporate Domesticity and Idealised Masculinity: Royal Naval Officers and their Shipboard Homes, 1918–39

This article explores the interrelationship of masculine identity and corporate domesticity through the example of Royal Naval officers and the quarters they occupied on board ship during the 1920s and 1930s. Through a case study of a surviving warship, it establishes the linkages of this environment to a wider upper‐middle‐class world of public school common rooms, gentlemen's clubs and family homes. It analyses the role of this shipboard domesticity in defining the idealised and class‐specific persona of the naval officer: constructed through foregrounding approved qualities (such as dutifulness, restraint and self‐discipline), and suppressing characteristics considered problematic (for instance, introspection, individualism and intellectualism). The article also evaluates the tensions generated by these impersonal and unreachable standards, and the simultaneous ability of the naval home to support corporate and individual behaviours at odds with the officer ideal. The final section explores the gendered nature of these spaces. It argues that while the shipboard home was essentially a male one, the dynamic it engineered between rival ‘male’ and ‘female’ domesticities was invariably relational. Officers’ communal quarters were routinely used to support and intensify oppositional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Nonetheless, attempts to dispute these boundaries and to internalise feminised qualities of sentiment, attachment and dependency can be detected in the privatised domesticity of the cabin.     

Artificial Scarcity in Housebuilding and the Impact on Affordability: The Return of Absolute Rent

The slow response of volume housebuilders to changes in demand has been cited as a contributing cause of a global crisis of housing affordability and allegations of land banking have persistently dogged the industry. This article reviews the supply responsiveness of speculative housebuilders in the United Kingdom and Australia through the neglected Marxian analytic category of absolute rent. Absolute rent directs attention to the relationship between the value of land and the cost of housing and models a market in which landowners may withdraw land from supply to inflate prices. Through the lens of absolute rent, the real estate practices of the housebuilding industry can be understood as a strategy of artificial scarcity straddling land and housing markets. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the insights to be gained by a return to absolute rent that valuably expand the current debate on the supply and cost of housing.     

A Multi-objective Optimization Approach for Disaggregating Employment Data

In many countries, including South Africa, data on employment is rarely available on a downscaled level, such as building level, and is only available on less detailed levels, such as municipal level. The aim of this research was to develop a methodology to disaggregate the employment data that is available at an aggregate level to a disaggregate, detailed building level. To achieve this, the methodology consisted of two parts. First, a method was established that could be used to prepare a base data set to be used for disaggregating the employment data. Second, a multiobjective optimization approach was used to allocate the number of employment opportunities within a municipality to building level. The algorithm was developed using an Evolutionary Algorithm framework and applied to a case study in a metropolitan municipality in South Africa. The results showed favorable use of multiobjective optimization to disaggregate employment data to building level. By enhancing the detail of employment data, planners, policy makers, modelers and other users of such data can benefit from understanding employment patterns at a much more detailed level and making improved decisions based on disaggregated data and models.