Recently, IHS hosted a PhD colloquium with Issa Tafridj, who presented her ongoing research titled, Middle-Class Housing Pathways in Jakarta Metropolitan Area: Between Financial Pragmatism and Cultural Aspirations.
In the middle
Jakarta Metropolitan Area, one of the most expensive urban areas in the world, is home to millions of middle-class households struggling to access adequate and affordable housing. Many fall into a difficult gap: they earn too much to qualify for government housing subsidy programmes, yet not enough to afford housing on the commercial market. In her PhD research, Issa explores how Indonesia’s urban middle class navigates these housing challenges and how different economic and socio-cultural factors shape their housing decisions over time.
What shapes a housing pathway?
Using the housing biography interview method, Issa looks at how people’s housing situations develop over time. By tracing where people have lived, why they moved and how different life events influenced these decisions, the method helps reveal the wider factors shaping their housing pathways. She combines this approach with Ideal-Type Analysis to identify and cluster different types of housing pathways. Through this, she examines how economic and socio-cultural capital interact in the housing decisions of middle-class households throughout their life course.
In the pilot stage, Issa interviewed 9 participants and 39 in the data collection stage, representing various socio-economic backgrounds. So far, the data shows a high degree of variation between participants, with different forms of capital playing a role at different stages of their housing pathways. As a result, the saturation point has not yet been reached, and the next stage of the research will explore whether clear pathway clusters begin to emerge.
