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Chapter 1
Thinking on housing
This book seeks to provide a spotlight on housing. What we are doing here is thinking on housing and not thinking about it. This is the difference between a spotlight and a floodlight. A spotlight is targeted on something specific. It is a bright light shining on a small area. It highlights something and makes it the sole focus of attention, whereas a floodlight gives a more diffuse and general light. A floodlight literally floods an area with light. It is less specific, less targeted and aimed at a more general coverage.
To think on housing is to see housing as the only thing, the sole focus of our studies. We are concerned with housing and nothing else. ‘Thinking about’ is more general and implies we are looking at housing and the things around it, on the connections and things nearby. But we want here to focus only on one thing and to highlight it and understand it fully, and to do this before we start to make connections and linkages. There is a need to put a narrow spotlight on housing, to give it star billing, and to keep everything else for the moment in darkness. The thinking needs to be on housing and not around and about it. There needs to be a direct focus that is singular rather than a diffuse lack of focus whereby we might be attracted by something outside of housing and allow it to dominate our thoughts at the expense of the one thing that really matters.
What does thinking on housing involve? It is the undertaking of the rigorous examination of concepts, ideas and initiatives on housing. It is not restricted to any particular method or approach, nor is it linked to any particular discipline. We are not claiming any scientific status for our endeavours here. Indeed, this is a crucial point. There is no particular disciplinary focus. Instead there is simply a focus on the subject of housing – it is thinking on housing and only housing. We are placing housing at the centre: it is housing we are looking at and not discipline-based methods and theories. We are, so to speak, being housing-centric.
We are concerned with taking housing discourse further than it has currently gone. We are not seeking to apply existing disciplinary frameworks to housing without expecting housing to change in the process. What we are doing is not passive. We expect housing to be active and for discourse to develop in new ways and form new patterns as we open up what housing is and does more fully. Thinking on housing therefore does not rely on existing concepts, theories or methods but rather focuses critically on housing as the only thing.
So there is no attempt to build a theory or to model housing in any way. There is no attempt to build a system. We are looking to develop concepts and ideas that come out of housing rather than attempt to bolt housing onto any already existing conceptual apparatus. Thinking need not be strictly theoretical, therefore, but rather requires the application of rigorous analysis to housing. What we wish to do instead is to describe housing in its generality. By this we mean housing as an object of interaction, as a receptacle, as background and as a flow. Housing can be seen as an object of activity. Housing is an object that has an activity as its intrinsic quality. Housing holds: it bears use and meaning.
The worth of these thoughts is in the light they throw onto housing, and that is all. As thoughts they are self-contained and have no absolute purpose beyond themselves. They are only on housing and attempt to say nothing beyond housing. They are neither first thoughts nor last thoughts.
The clarity or obscurity of these thoughts is a function of the capability of thinking in this manner. We have moved to another place and rely on rather different foundations for our thinking. But this is thinking that needs to be done. There is a current lack of clarity, with the seriousness of housing hidden under a cloak of policy discourse and the traces of disciplines that bring already formed abstractions to bear on housing. But in doing so, they leave obfuscatory layers of preconception over housing that prevents thinking that is clear and precisely targeted.
The aim of the thinking here on housing is both to isolate it and to keep it in its place. We must not move it, progress it or persuade it to join with others. We must not misname it or confuse it with what it is not. We must not lose it in a mangled mess of otherwise unconnected thoughts. We are only interested in housing.
This thinking is not concerned with its reaction to other things. We do not wish to compare, to relativise or to make unnecessary associations. We do not wish to embed our thoughts in anything other than housing. This is thinking as a description of things as we see them.
Thinking, however, has consequences. Thoughts are definitive: they may end nothing or they may keep on, but once stated, thoughts are there and they are capable. All thought builds on what has been thought already, but it can also start new things. Thoughts can be beginnings, the spark that lights the fires of invention. Thinking is an attempt at understanding, but with no necessity of being final, of finding a solution. Once stated, a thought remains present, to be added to, criticised, contradicted or ignored. The intention of a thought need not be accepted, but nor should it necessarily be ignored. We should not impute motive but instead simply reflect on what has been thought and said.
This discourse on housing most assuredly has its limitations. Principally, it assumes that housing already exists. We have little concern here for supply, affordability or access. We are solely concerned with how we can use what already exists. We are not suggesting that supply and affordability are unimportant, but merely that a discourse based on these things tends to obscure a discourse of equal significance. We are suggesting something additional to existing topics of housing discourse and not trying to supplant them. We are not trying to advocate this approach as the only one, or argue that it should be pursued to the exclusion of anything else. Rather, we wish to pursue this approach because of its apparent utility.
Perhaps a more fundamental limitation has already been alluded to: that the intensity of thinking on housing is completely at odds with the thing itself and our use of it. Thinking on housing prevents complacency and stops us using it in its unconscious completeness. There is a price to pay for thinking in this way, and that is in the leisure to enjoy our own use of housing as a non-reflective object.
Like housing, a term which encompasses both the unaffordable commodity and the loose doorknob, thinking moves from the consequential to the banal and back again, and with little awareness of the consequences of what really matters. But sooner or later, thinking on housing always returns us to what we are doing just now, and in this place. Because to think seriously on housing is to focus on what it is to become located, to be placed, to be pinned in position, and for us to recognise that this locatedness is what really matters in making housing the place which, sooner or later, we must always return to.
But housing is not home, and in our thinking we should clearly distinguish between the two. This is because ‘home’ is no longer a term we can use with any certainty or much comfort. It has been captured by policy to refer simply to units of accommodation, to mere brick boxes. Developers build ‘homes’, social landlords manage ‘homes’ and governments boast about how many ‘homes’ they have funded. What matters here is that the word used is now always ‘homes’: it is a plural, a collection of entities that become anonymous by their amalgamation into the whole. This use has led to a cheapening of the concept of home, reducing it to a sentimentalised vehicle for aspiration. ‘Housing’, on the other hand, is much more than home. It is a much bigger concept. Housing connects us with the full range of meaningful use. ‘Home’ is merely used as a noun, while ‘housing’ can be, and is, both noun and verb. Housing connects us to things and to actions. There is no ambiguity. We use housing, but what does it mean to use home now that it has been so adulterated by the language of policy? When we talk of meaning – as we must – we refer to housing and know this to be more extensive than home. Housing is an activity without the limits of home. It can take us outside and allows us to touch the implacability of the object that is the house without compromise. Housing is outside and inside; it is not just façade, even though we need the face to be there. Home lacks a façade other than providing cover for sentimentality.
Housing contains the past, the present and the future. It is what we are currently doing and what we have now. But it is also what we did and had before, and what we may do and have in a time to come. Housing is both a store of memory and is stored in memory. Housing is for the future, for what might yet be. It can carry our hopes, even as they might be deluded. Housing is what we had then, have now and might still have.
We can object to housing but not to home. We can object to policy and aspiration, and housing allows us to do so. Policy and aspiration only pervert home while they keep housing intact. Home is used precisely because it can only be positive, and so it sentimentalises aspiration as a utopian future.
If these studies of thinking on housing have one over-riding strength, it is that they actually inform us as to why all other studies, be they on supply, affordability or access, are important. They form a necessary propaedeutic to policy studies on housing. They are not merely an alternative, but a crucial underpinning for more conventional studies. These studies do not answer all of the important questions, but they do answer the most important: what does housing do?
The need for this approach to housing can be justified in three basic statements. First, much of the existing literature that purports to discuss housing is simply a concern with policy and policy-making. Second, policy is not housing, as it cannot explain the gathering of meaning through use. Third, housing is important precisely and entirely because of how we use it and what meanings we come to attach to it as a result.
This work is essentially a commentary and development of these three statements. The chapters that follow explore a series of concepts that substantiate these statements. They do not prove them, because this is not our aim. They do not say that they are the only things that matter about housing. However, they will help in our appreciation of housing as the only thing.
Much of what we have to say about housing makes the saying redundant, but only after it has been said. Housing only appears as it really is in a certain light, and only then to those who know how to look. By this we mean that we have to think about housing in the right way. Once we are able to achieve this we will then appreciate that the significance of housing is precisely in its ability to lose significance. We will then have the ability to use housing, and use it well, without even attempting to understand the role that housing plays and why it does work well.
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Chapter 2
Housing is
We can say what ‘housing’ is and we can try to provide a tight definition. It is a noun that describes a collection of physical structures capable of allowing human residence. It is a verb that describes the activity of providing, managing and maintaining that collection of physical structures. But once we have done that, what then? What does this actually tell us? We can say what a house is; we can measure it and value it and we can compare it with other dwellings. But what does this really tell us? How far does this really go towards explaining the significance of housing?
Housing may be the only thing – the focus of our attention – but, properly speaking, it is made up of many things and it connects us to many more. There is no contradiction here, in saying that housing is both the only thing and that it is made up of many things, because there are many things that come out of – derive from – housing. Housing is not an accessory, an adjunct, a subsidiary or a peripheral. Housing is the thing that encloses us along with all those other things that matter to us. Housing allows us to keep things close. We are enclosed by housing, and it encloses all we are, all we have and even all we might wish to be. We make much of our housing, as a nest, as a refuge, as a home. But it is still more than this. It is through being enclosed by housing that we are able to weave a meaningful life for ourselves. It is how we are able to bring distinct things together. The enclosure that is housing allows us to settle with things that we need and wish to use.
Housing is where we include things that become meaningful by this enclosed inclusion. We might say then that housing is inclusive because it is capable of enclosing. But being enclosed, these things are not in plain sight. We cannot, as an observer, a researcher, a thinker on housing, come to see these things directly. We have, of course, our own experiences as dwellers within housing, and we have our knowledge of family and friends and what we can glean from our popular culture of how others live. But the very enclosure of housing prevents us from seeing in too far, and so we have to be indirect and come at housing from a different path. Instead of the direct path of definitions and clear descriptions, we have to come to housing via a winding path, picking up clues and signs about what direction we should move in. In other words, instead of housing is, we can only know housing as. We can know housing only through allusion and association. Even as we see housing as the only thing, we have to accept it as a bundle of things and try to disclose what these are and what they mean. We can never do this directly.
But how do we unbundle the collection of things that housing is? We can make a list and this will doubtless be helpful. But we might also look at the word ‘housing’ and start to play with it. We have tried to define this word, to say what it means. But what precisely does it allude to? What do we mean when we say ‘housing as’?...
