Abstract

This article presents an intersectional reading of debates in Welfare/Housing Studies stemming from Esping-Andersen’s seminal framework for the comparison among Western (social-democratic, corporatist and liberal) welfare regimes. His initial conceptual formulation attached importance to the class issue, suggesting that different coalitions of social classes formed in distinct national contexts were at the base of divergence among welfare regimes based on peculiar principles of social stratification. Feminist scholars, however, problematized the little attention paid by the author to gender; they put a spotlight on the effects of de-familiarisation policies on women’s condition, which has later also favored the identification of a fourth «familistic» welfare regime type in Southern Europe. Housing scholars have furthermore exposed structural correlations not only of each welfare regime with its distinctive housing system arrangement, but also of the principle of social stratification specific to each welfare regime with a distinctive pattern of spatial inequality, providing the conceptual instruments to study how socio-ethnic segregation unfolds in cities. The intersectional perspective deriving from these advancements allows explaining how the way in which a given welfare regime mediates social stratification dynamics shapes the multiple dimensions of class, gender, and race embodied in urban inequality.