In the wealthy and orderly city of Geneva, Switzerland, accommodation centres built in haste between the 1950s and the 1980s to house seasonal guestworkers from southern Europe are still standing and still inhabited. Today's residents are precarious workers, undocumented or with temporary permits as well as asylum seekers. While the seasonal status disappeared in the early 2000s, the demand for low-skilled, flexible labour did not. Analysing the historical trajectories of specific buildings helps us to answer the question of who replaced the seasonal workers, not only in the labour and the housing markets, but also in the symbolic spectrum of legitimacy. This article introduces the notion of 'Subaltern Housing Policies' to account for the public action that leads to the production and subsequent use of forms of housing characterised by standards of comfort and security far below those of the rental and social housing stock, but considered 'good enough' for their occupants. We argue that 'subaltern' relates not only to housing conditions, but also to the policies themselves, and last but not least to the people who are subjected to them. This notion allows us to trace a link between the production of substandard forms of housing and the production of categories of people who are kept on the margins of full citizenship.

The capacity of the state to develop and implement policy at the complex nexus of energy infrastructure, social inequality and housing is indicative of the political priorities of governing structures and, by extension, the nature of statecraft more generally. We compare and contrast the energy poverty amelioration policies of two former Yugoslav and two post-Soviet states located outside the European Union, but seeking to join its regulatory sphere - Serbia, Montenegro, Ukraine and Georgia - against the background of deep and persistent patterns of domestic energy hardship. We are particularly interested in uncovering the time horizons, socio-technical systems and target constituencies of different policy measures, as well as energy sector-specific responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that most states in the region have done little to address some of the more substantive challenges around improving housing quality, energy efficiency and gender inequality. However, energy poverty is present in the policy lexicon of all case study countries, and Ukraine, in particular, has advanced a number of more sophisticated approaches and programmes.

Light - whether natural or artificial - plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people's ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki - Greece's second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

Energy poverty can be understood as the inability of a household to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home. While the condition is widespread across Europe, its spatial and social distribution is highly uneven. In this paper, the existence of a geographical energy poverty divide in the European Union (EU) provides a starting point for conceptualizing and exploring the relationship between energy transitions - commonly described as wide-ranging processes of socio-technical change - and existing patterns of regional economic inequality. We have undertaken a comprehensive analysis of spatial and temporal trends in the national-scale patterns of energy poverty, as well as gas and electricity prices. The results of our work indicate that the classic economic development distinction between the core and periphery also holds true in the case of energy poverty, as the incidence of this phenomenon is significantly higher in Southern and Eastern European EU Member States. The paper thus aims to provide the building blocks for a novel theoretical integration of questions of path-dependency, uneven development and material deprivation in existing interpretations of energy transitions.

"This article considers four aspects of IRM [international retirement migration]. The first considers the limited literature on this... topic and identifies the distinctiveness of both its international and European features. The second reviews the existing statistical data for north-south IRM in Europe, particularly from the UK to Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain; it establishes both the scale and the geography of these migrations. In the third section we investigate some of the major influences on both the volume and the spatial pattern of IRM. Finally, in the fourth section, a brief review is presented of the economic, social and cultural implications of IRM for both the emigrants and their host communities."

The relationship between economic restructuring in Europe and various aspects of demographic change, such as demographic aging and fertility decline, is examined. The focus is on changes in the labor market. "Changing employment conditions--the growth of the secondary labour market, the flexibilization of labour demand and increasingly also of supply, growing female labour force participation rates, generally high ethnic minority unemployment--reflect different aspects of the transition from the Fordist to the postFordist regime as well as changing demographic and life-style influences. Together they have deeply transformed the European landscape of employment and unemployment. The specific role of international migration is also analysed and it is seen to have fundamentally altered between the Fordist and postFordist eras. Less clear to interpret are changing internal migration patterns: has counterurbanization stopped in response to restructuring and integration and is a new postFordist population map unfolding? The paper concludes by evaluating the nature of the relationship between economic restructuring and population trends and identifying pointers for future research."