Opening inwards and outwards
Coffee tables, moonbeams, credit and cash, hopes and fears, all interleave with the mobilisation and management of a core element of the materiality in owned housing.
(Smith 2008, 11)
The diversity of elements in Susan Smithâs conceptualisation of housing, above, is striking. Rather than being a self-evidently discrete object, housing composes a myriad of component parts; an assemblage of materials, affects, ideas and finances that only come together through collaboration. While drawing our focus to the quotidian, this foregrounding of the materiality of housing is not a petition for the specific or the everyday. It is rather to open up the house as a site that mediates between the particular and the systemic. This always processual site is a meeting ground in which intensive practices, materials and meanings tangle with extensive, financial, environmental and political worlds. In these spaces the cultural activity and meaning of being at home is inseparable from the techniques, technologies and objects of housing. To encounter the house and home as a site of interleaving and entangling, then, is to unbound it in two directions at once: towards the concrete, the intimate and the experiential; and, towards the general, the institutional and the collective. This unbounding not only makes visible the continuities and inter-dependencies that exist across the diverse range of professions and disciplines that participate in the design, construction, investment, exchange, management and representation of housing. It also highlights the irreducible capacity for novel configurations of human dwelling.
This collection embarks on the bi-fold motion of unbounding housing and home. Specifically, it interrogates the coproduction of the materials, meanings and practices of dwelling and worlds of finance, nature and power. Our interest is to explore the making and unmaking of political, economic and environmental relations in and through housing and home. Throughout the text, contributors broadly focus on hybrid objects of inquiry, including that of housing/home. We do so to explicitly challenge the traditional bounding of housing research with technical questions of matter, finance and policy (housing) and symbolic questions of meaning, identity and selfhood (home) (Jacobs and Malpas 2015; Jacobs and Smith 2008). That is, we seek to keep open the possibility of home as a physical and institutional manifestation, and the cultural and psychological possibilities of âfeeling at homeâ (Easthope 2004, 136) as a single question.
While housing research is richly diverse, a founding premise of this collection is that to address housing/home as a coproduction of diverse elements is to raise new normative, conceptual and empirical questions. Specifically, this approach extends the range of phenomena gathered in the achievement of housing/home, while also recognising the contribution of human dwelling to wider concerns of social and ecological wellbeing. In terms of expanding the scope of elements that contribute to housing/home, Susan Smithâs work on owner-occupation in modern capitalist societies is indicative, showing that, as much as bricks and mortar, homes are constituted by flows of money, materials and affects (Smith 2008; Smith et al. 2006). This work has done much to open the âfinancial black-boxâ of housing markets, increasingly understood as habit and feeling, as much as explicit calculation (see Smith et al. 2006). Inspired in part by science and technology studies, home has also been positioned as a socio-technical event: an uneven and fragile achievement held together through multiple policies, practices and materials (Jacobs 2006). A more-than-human lens has added animals, plants and microorganisms to the mix, marking a growing recognition of the role that non-humans play in the constitution and feeling of âhomeynessâ, and the limits of human agency that animal and plant architectures imply (Power 2005, 2009, 2012). Running alongside these more-than-human interventions, urban political ecologists (Heynen et al. 2006; Kaika 2004) and sustainability researchers in geography (Crabtree 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Davison 2006, 2011; Lovell and Smith 2010) have brought housing into contact with its technological and ecological outside, engaging with the resources and communities âexternalisedâ in the private home. Building on the conceptualisations of housing/home as an extensive network of materials and relations set in wider social and ecological worlds, the collection explores and troubles conventional distinctions between form and affect, markets and environments, materials and politics. For some chapters, this may mean working with the hybrid housing/home, while others unsettle and redraw the borders and boundaries of housing in other ways.
In unbounding the house/home, this book moves with the material and relational turns in social theory over the past three decades â associated with endeavours such as posthumanism, naturecultures, actorânetwork theory, assemblage theory, relational materialism and cosmopolitics (Bennett 2010; Braun and Whatmore 2010; Connolly 2013; Latour 2005). These innovations ground ontological questions of being and becoming in performative worlds of practice. In light of these conceptual openings, the contributions here variously consider housing/home as (often protracted and extensive) events within temporalities and spatialities established and maintained through webs of lived relation.
At home with power-relations
The work of unbounding housing/home is not, however, a retreat from concerns about uneven and unjust forms of economic and political power. Recent work in cultural geography, for example, has conceptualised a range of intimate domestic spaces and materials as part of broader political projects of identity, belonging and citizenship. Photographs, mementos and visual materials have been connected by Divya Tolia-Kelly (2004) to processes of decolonisation in the UK, affording British-Asian women a sense of home within the context of colonial histories. Similarly, home-repair and renovation are revealed as processes that for Allon (2008) underpin Australian nation-building and that for Gorman-Murray (2009, 2014) challenge the predominant political scripting of heteronormativity in Australia. Gender relations, too, are challenged in Coxâs (2015) discussion of masculine home-making in New Zealand so that the space of renovation is a dynamic process of gender construction.
Building on these openings, the concern of this text is to explore the relationship between intimate practices and places of housing/home and the increasing entangling of housing with global capitalism, environmental change and colonial and neocolonial projects of dispossession. In capitalist, settler societies, such as Australia, interrogation of such relationships is surprisingly uncommon. Part of the reason for this neglect rests in the way that the normalising of owner-occupation, Australiaâs dominant tenure form, has enabled it to resist critical inquiry (see chapters by Crabtree; Davison). Public acceptance of owner-occupied housing can exclude and mask vital questions about the resources, economics, politics and social differences through which such housing is sustained. This includes: the resilience of market-models of housing against rising household debt; recognition of investors at the expense of residents on the margins of home-ownership; contemporary Indigenous dispossession and housing markets; and environmental sustainability and climate change. Recognising the significance of these interlinked questions, a core focus of this text is to open the myriad practices of housing/home to these wider political geographies.
The contention of this collection is that the intellectual, affective and bodily attachments that people have to particular manifestations of housing/ home are integral to regimes of power. The aspirations of and risks faced by homeowners and potential homeowners are the forces that also marshal colonial, capitalist and other forms of power. Together these trajectories of inquiry provide a new lens through which the organising power of housing/ home, and its tensions and contradictions, can be better apprehended. These strategies for unbounding housing/home penetrate more deeply into the norms and hegemonies in our time, providing insight into the ways these social realities take hold, and the ways they might then change. This mode of systemic inquiry is paradoxically both comprehensive and modest in its intent. By encompassing the actual complexity rolled and enrolled into housing/home, we are afforded a more realistic appraisal of possibilities for transformation, and more accurate account of what is at stake in political agendas for change.
Contributors to this volume employ a variety of strategies, from the purely theoretical to the highly empirical, and much in between, with which to unbound housing/home. To navigate the extensive, shifting and multiple networks that constitute and that are constituted by housing and home, while remaining true to the textures and contexts of actual houses and practices of home-making, we next draw out three key themes that run through this book. These themes are the identification of unchartered economies; environmental politics; and constitutive outsides in housing/home. Drawing on diverse disciplines (including from housing studies, geography, sociology, law and philosophy), we offer a partial synthesis of research under these themes and an account of the further inquiry this work provokes, before offering an overview of the contributions to this inquiry offered in this volume.
Unchartered economies of housing/home
One of the outcomes of encountering housing/home through socio-material and more-than-human geographies is a widening of the phenomena that might be recognised as participating in human dwelling. This materialârelational turn unsettles the borders between the economic and the political, the social and the material and the cultural and the natural. For example, Smith et al. (2006), in their study of house prices in Edinburgh, found that house prices were derived not through cognitive and objective calculation, but through collectively produced forms of sensing or feeling. The attachments of owner-occupiers to goods and services purchased through in situ home equity withdrawal similarly reveal the affective and familial logics that drive mortgage-led consumption (Cook et al. 2013). While the risks of over-indebtedness should not be understated, this work found that âdebted objectsâ can hold homes and families together as much as pull them apart. Margaret Atwood (2008) argues more broadly that the ubiquity of housing debt in many modern societies exceed direct economic explanation, and is in part derived from the interplay of housing finance practices and narratives of risk and excitement.
Katherine Brickell (2012) traces the relationship between feelings of comfort and being at home with uneven economic development. In a literature that is usually preoccupied with the impact of geopolitics on the home, she calls for greater analysis of the ways that images and discourses of Western domesticity anchor uneven and unequal geopolitical relations. Harkerâs (2009) account of mortgage lending as a geopolitical regime is another example of the ways that everyday practices of mortgage consumption are entangled with the maintenance of political processes. To these insights, we add the ways that prosaic acts of home-making are also institutional, legal and financial acts that uphold different aspects of memory, identity and entitlement, and erase others. Crabtree (2013) develops this point in discussing opportunities for decolonising property in Australia, highlighting how particular forms of dwelling bound up in owner-occupation under capitalism often rest on and propagate a routine denial of Indigenous custodianship and occupation of land.
The interplay of human sensibilities and housing markets provides one of many examples of the presently unchartered economies of housing/home opened up by materialârelational ontologies. This âturnâ throws light on inconsistencies and tensions produced in structures and markets conceived as habits as much as calculations, governed by affects of risk, security and hope, as much as supply and demand. It draws attention, too, to the striking â yet seemingly taken for granted â tensions in housing markets, such as the inelasticity of house prices and car parking (Taylor, this volume), and the uneven access to housing equity as welfare provision (Laurence and Rehm, this volume). The invitation here, then, is to unsettle conventional borders of housing and home so as to identify and interrogate the alliances across diverse fields that require investment and effort in order to sustain housing outcomes.
The environmental politics of housing/home
It is common to observe that housing and home are shaped by economic, environmental and political contexts, in the sense that these forces are taken to act on the domestic realm from the outside. Less common is to recognise the production of environmental logics through housing/home, that progress not through discrete sites but through dispersed systems that encompass everything from resource extraction, to outdoor recreation practices, environmental social movements, school curricula, urban population growth, wilderness photography, architectural fashions and building technologies.
For example, aesthetic sensibilities cultivated by concern about the growing scarcity of ânatureâ in many modern societies have arguably gained expression in the price premiums and architectural logics now evident in much housing juxtaposed with urban nature, such as coasts, rivers, forests and mountains (Jim and Chen 2006; Randolph and Tice 2014). Housing thus enables limited and highly uneven social access to privileged (and predominantly scenic) encounters with urban natures.
From this perspective, our interest in this volume is to explore the simultaneous making of political, economic and environmental relations in and through housing and home.
More generally, housing/home is implicated in networks of resource use and waste production that bring with them a set of environmental politics. What are the forces that hold energy-, water- and material-intensive housing development in place? This implicates not just bodies and practices of homemaking and dwelling, but legal and property rights, water and energy infrastructure, ecological processes, natural landscapes, everyday practices and expert knowledges of maintenance and repair. Despite longstanding critique of the role of urban form, and housing type, on resource metabolism and waste production (Bunker and Holloway 2006; Newton and Meyer 2012; Quastel et al. 2012), and interest in homes as sites of new practices of sustainability (Lane and Gorman-Murray 2011), tensions between environmental outcomes and social outcomes associated with housing, dwelling and homemaking have barely been interrogated. Exceptions include studies of the complex policy dilemmas that result when environmental critiques of housing such as the âMcMansionâ (Dowling and Power 2011) or low-density housing in traditional suburban neighbourhoods (Cook et al. 2013) are brought together with the social and personal values afforded by these housing forms, ...
