The politics of housing/home

digital commodity of real estate, the neoliberal invention of housing as a liquid asset and source of welfare provision, and the bundling of car and home in housing markets. The more-than-human relations of housing and home are articulated through the role of subur ban nature in the making of Australian modernity, the marketing of nature in waterfront urban renewal, the role of domestic territory in subversive social movements such as seasteading and tiny houses, and the search for home comfort through low-cost energy-effi ciency practices. The transformative politics of housing and home are explored through the decolonising of housing tenure, the shaping of housing policy by urban social movements, the lived importance of marginal spaces in Indigenous and other housing, and the affective lessons of the ruin. Beginning with the diverse elements gathered together in housing and home, the text opens up the complex realities and possibilities of human dwelling.

International Journal of Housing Policy, 2019

Urbanites worldwide fight for their right to housing and the city in ways that encompass what Westernized and masculine takes on ‘radical politics’ make of them. This intervention proposes a decolonial, grounded and feminist approach to investigate how resistance to housing precarity emerges from uncanny places, uninhabitable ‘homes’ and marginal propositions. This is a form of ‘dwelling as difference’ that is able to challenge our compromised ‘habitus’ of home at its root, from the ground of its everyday unfolding. The article argues that only looking within those cracks, and aligning to their politics, new radical housing futures can be built with urbanites worldwide.

In this chapter Mirjana Lozanovska examines how since the 1950s migrants from eastern Europe have adapted the standard housing of Melbourne’s suburbs to make homes that look and feel like home. Migrant houses multiplied in several suburbs in Melbourne, Australia as a result of an influx of immigrants from Southern Europe that settled there in the 1950s and 1960s. While post-war migration occurred from other cultural origins, the houses that resulted from the use, adaptations and expressions of migrants from southern Europe, including Italy, Greece and Macedonia, made a prominent visual impact onto the urban culture of the city. It shared this with other immigration cities, especially Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. The perspective of house behaviour brings attention to the ways houses are appropriated, adapted and consumed as objects of social display, and how they in turn, consume space and culture. The Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that when it comes to taste, and especially aesthetic taste, we enter a cultural battle-field between the dominant class and the everyday practices of ordinary people that result in non-conforming cultural production. So powerful is an aesthetic tradition that one is born into, that taste is internalized and embodied, and can result in both ‘disgust’ and ‘sick-making’ of the taste of others. Significantly in migrant home-cultures, through taste, the oral sense related to language, food and eating, intertwines with practices related to the visual and aesthetic field through the use and adaptation of the home. As basic housing, the migrants’ houses of suburban Melbourne varied from adapted existing worker’s cottages in the inner suburbs to Federation-style houses on larger outer suburban blocks; but both developed different aesthetic expressions to the quintessential brick veneer houses that constituted the Australian suburbs. This distinction raises the questions: why do migrant houses behave differently to ordinary Australian houses? The answer lies in the complex cultural interrelationship within migrant cultures found in the juxtaposition of the visual and the oral which is heightened as the ‘house’ so powerfully mediates the private and secret realm of the inhabitants and the public (and fantasy) realm of the street and neighbourhood. With this theoretical approach in mind this chapter will examine the migrant appropriation of existing housing stock and look beyond the brick-veneer housing typology that appears to dominate the Australian suburb. It will draw upon extensive studies of migrant houses in Melbourne, Australia, and will refer to in-depth analysis of the particular stories of a few houses that have been inhabited for long time by their elderly southern European occupants.

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

What is a home/house? How can we bridge between the concepts of a house, as a physical structure, and a home, with its symbolic and human meanings? The paper suggests an outline for a theory of housing/dwelling that considers the multiple facets of homes/houses: a top-down manufactured object, an ideal representation of ontological security, and a site of everyday lives and complex social relations. Combining several philosophical backgrounds-phenomeno-logical dwelling, actor-network theory, Foucault's dispositive, and Illich's vernacularity-the home/house is investigated along three layers: (1) housing regime, that is the home/house as part of a broader system of planning, economy, or national goals; (2) critical phenomenology, aimed at finding and describing the gaps between the ideal-home image characterizing a given society and the home/house's actual behavior; and (3) active dwelling, which regarded this gap as an engine for home-making as a political and agentic process. The theoretical arguments are briefly demonstrated through the case study of Palestinian homes/houses in the Occupied Territories, as political sites of both vulnerability and agency.

2006

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2013

The idea of property is a fundamental and foundational component of modern industrialised economies and yet, as a growing body of work shows, property is far from settled as a concept, or as a set series of relationships—whether between institutions, humans, places, and/or other species. Property systems are part of emergent, complex socioecological systems, reflecting and manifesting social and political phenomena, and asserting particular forms of citizen/self as acceptable, preferable and dominant. Predominant Western understandings of property rely on, enable, and anticipate increases in property value over time, reflecting particular conceptualisations and experiences of time shaped by Judeo—Christian teleological narratives in which time moves towards a perfect state that ironically remains perpetually imminent. This essay is concerned with tracing the ontological baggage of predominant understandings of property and time and exploring the terrain of their Others, as well as e...

193

Housing, Theory and Society, 2017

This article examines the narratives offered by those displaced through the gentrification of neighbourhoods in Melbourne and Sydney. Extensive qualitative interview data generated from encounters with self-identified displacees in these cities is used here to examine their responses to changes in and after they moved from their originating neighbourhoods and the impacts these changes had on them. This data reveals that despite displacement commonly being defined in terms of physical movement, in many cases, participants became dislocated and isolated by the physical and social changes that took place while still residing in neighbourhoods as they changed. The article traces these twin modes of displacementboth as a series of impacts generated by direct market dislocation but also as feelings of loss connected with a home that might be imminently lost and the cherished place around it. These narratives reveal how private renters respond to a symbolic violence that they locate in a changing built environment and a shifting social physiognomy that impinges and threatens the viability of their tenure of these places. The article locates these resentments and displacements within a sociopolitical context that celebrates ownership and investment in the very homes and places that are now lost to them.

Geoforum, 2006

This paper responds to challenges made by Castree [Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79-90] and Sneddon [Sneddon, C., 2000. ÔSustainabilityÕ in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521-549] for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the Ônew ecologyÕ. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geographyÕs place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires.