Legal geography scholarship has repeatedly shown that normative visions of property are constructed through standards, policies and legislation promoting the single-family home as an ideal type. In turn, this privileging of the family home relies upon other forms of land use being defined as potentially injurious to those who live in single-family homes. One example here is accommodation occupied by students, a population assumed to share housing on a different basis than a ‘family’. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective emphasising the practices, mentalities and techniques by which subjects are governed, this paper argues the regulation of student accommodation constructs students as a population existing in opposition to the family norm. It does this by exploring the construction of student housing as a discrete category of land use in policy documents and appeal cases in England and Wales, exposing the moral assumptions about the lifestyles of students informing such discourses. Noting the recent emergence of housing developments catering for ‘post-students’ and young professionals that are functionally indistinct from student accommodation, yet regulated differently, the paper concludes that planners and policymakers continue to differentiate between student and non-student housing on moral grounds rather than making rational distinctions between different forms of land use.
Hubbard et al. (2026) studied this question.