The politics of housing/home

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 ‘feeling at home’ (Easthope 2004, 136) as a single question.