Disasters, housing and actuarialism: on the securitisation of risk

Increasingly complex and severe disasters continue to occur, and housing remains a major part of the infrastructure impacted but is also central to recovery and resilience. This special issue of Housing Studies brings together papers that consider how disasters and disaster management are conceived in relation to housing. This introduction sets the scene by drawing upon the work of Beck and Foucault to show how the governance of risk society is constituted through particular ways of knowing and not-knowing, the enactment of safety, insecurity and the methods associated with actuarialism. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.