Risky Communications and Precarity in London's Shared Housing

Köz-gazdaság

The paper assesses housing as a global issue affecting wide sectors of societies not just in less developed countries. Trends and cases show the crucial role that building industry cycles have played in the financialization of the economy and its speculative side effects, even in sectors presented as alternatives to mainstream production, as the sharing economy. We are, therefore, experiencing a radical change today in the meanings attached to terms like city, identity, rights, and growing inequalities affecting ever-larger shares of the population. When the fundamental human right to housing is denied the social bonds and trust on which citizenship relies is lost.

Environment and Planning A, in press

What might it mean to think of 'the single' as a potentially queer subject and in what ways does singleness pose a challenge to heteronormative conceptualizations of the lifecourse and household formation? In this paper I explore some of the contested meanings of ‘home’ for those who are single; and examine how single people have created new forms of home and new spaces of at-homeness with those with whom they are not biologically (or romantically) related. I conclude by asking how we might help foster, build and create new forms of dwelling that might better match single people’s imaginings and desires for a home outside of heteronormative coupledom. Ultimately the paper argues that the exclusion of the figure of the single is one of the key omissions in the work of those interested in challenging the geographies of exclusion and inequality.

Housing Studies, 1996

Migration and Domestic Space, 2023

Many migrants opt for shared accommodation as a way of coping with the shortage of affordable housing in large cities. As a distinct type of co-housing, flat sharing has been described as one of the many forms of housing precariousness, and even as a type of homelessness. This chapter describes a series of substantive and methodological issues arising from an ethnographic study conducted with Peruvian migrants in Madrid. It examines how people produce a sense of home in the context of sharing an apartment, and how this process is related or not to the act of dwelling in a particular flat. In doing so, it argues that dwelling in a given place and developing a sense of home are closely related, but do not always go hand in hand. The (in)congruence between living in a given place and evoking feelings of home depends on the role that dwellers play within the shared household and the degrees of control that they have over different settings within the flat. The usage of the domestic space and the ways in which its settings become compartmentalised constitute entry points to methodological issues emerging from the study of dwelling with strangers.

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.

The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of ‘cultivating home’. In a context characterized by transnational mobility, ethnic segregation and social marginality, domesticity—understood as the potential to enact a domestic dimension in meaningful places—is an important asset to resist present hardships, cultivate memory and lay out projects for the future. In this Editorial, we seek to untangle the multiple stakes entailed by the practices of ‘making home’ and ‘feeling at home’. We invite scholars to observe how, even in minute and mundane details, dwelling places and the built environment come to be imbued with social and cultural meanings, which are pivotal to survival and social recognition. The articulation of domesticity, commonality and publicness can be fruitfully mapped through the concept of ‘thresholds’, which brings together the case studies that follow. By doing so, this Special Issue as a whole lays out a new research agenda at the intersection of housing, urban and migration studies.

Housing, Theory and Society, 2018

The household as a social formation is being assigned a renewed function in the provision of social welfare via neoliberal austerity politics. Government inaction regarding housing provision is forcing millions of young adults into “parental co-habitation”. In contrast to the dominant ideological view of the family as a school of liberty through the provision of welfare, this article argues that the dependence of millions of young adults on the parental household is degenerative both for the individual “recipient” and for the future democratic character of the polity. Mobilizing a Neo-Roman analysis of Liberty, I argue that housing policy is promoting the long-term creation of “slaves” as part of a wider strategy of oligarchic domination. The article seeks to articulate an explicitly political theoretical critique of “parental co-habitation” and advocates for directed government action in the area of housing provision to secure the autonomy and independence of a generation otherwise reduced to “slavishness”.

Springer eBooks, 2024

Geoforum, 2019

Drawing on assemblage-thinking and specific assemblage concepts, this article explores the ways in which young, less affluent people create a sense of home in an unregulated, market-based private renting sector (PRS) that confers reduced tenant agency and frequent, undesired residential mobility. For this context, we propose the concept of 'home-assembling' to account for the ontologically, normatively and emotionally different processes involved in constructing a sense of home than those connoted by home-making. Through in-depth telephone interviews and photo elicitation, we explore: the transient, incomplete nature of practices of home personalisation; the destabilising effect of broken things which erodes the sense of home and instils feelings of unworthiness; and processes of de-territorialisation, particularly unwanted real/feared relocation, space sharing and confinement in small rooms. We document that the struggle to continually assemble, de-assemble and reassemble a sense of home drastically reduces private tenants' wellbeing through stress, anxiety, depression and alienation. However, we also indicate potential lines of change towards alternative futures not least by the emergence of a tenants' 'collective body' as well as by casting tenants' housing ill-being as a matter of public concern.

The British Journal of Sociology, 2017

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing-both in relation to rental and ownership-disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures. In this paper, we consider two key questions: (1) What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change? (2) How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this? Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasising that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction. We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.