From backyards to balconies: cultural norms and parents’ experiences of home in higher-density housing

Abstract

Families increasingly make home in higher-density housing, a major transition for low-density suburban cities. Adjusting to everyday life in apartments requires distinctive material and emotional homemaking practices, particularly for families with children. Dominant cultural norms frame detached housing as more appropriate, with apartments merely transitional, or ‘unhomely’ and unsuitable for children. Scarcely has research examined how cultural norms shape parents’ experiences of home in apartments. This paper responds by analysing experiences of 18 apartment-dwelling families in Sydney, Australia. Conceptual influences from emotional geographies reveal the work of making apartments home. While parents associate apartment living with lifestyle benefits, their sense of home is undermined by persistent questioning of parenting and housing choices. Contradictory experiences result in doubt about future capacities to make apartments home. Alongside uncertainty, parents feel guilty about ‘failing’ children through housing constraints and choices. Such experiences signal a need to rethink urban consolidation discourses, planning regulations and building design to better recognise the diversity of apartment residents.

Keywords:

• Densification
• cultural norms
• parenting
• home
• emotion

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank the participants involved in this research for generously sharing their time and lived experiences. Thank you to Dr Charles Gillon and to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This research was conducted with the support of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the University of Wollongong Global Challenges Scholarship. We would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Geographical Society of New South Wales who part-funded the lead authors attendance at a writing retreat organised by the Society. Participation in this research event created the space for the development of the first draft of this publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The focus of this paper is on cities of the Global North that are transitioning from predominantly low-density to high-density living, and families’ everyday experience of housing and home amidst such transitions. We acknowledge that in many contexts, it has long been common for children to live in apartments (for example, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris and Moscow), and that there is a risk that the present analysis reinforces a western, Anglocentric perspective on urban transitions and cultural norms. Nevertheless, we contend that the case examined here is relevant beyond the Australian context, especially to other rapidly densifying western cities where similarly suburban cultural norms have dominated, and in non-western contexts where predominantly single-storey homes (including in informal settlements) are rapidly making way for high-rise structures – as in much of Latin America (cf.Harris, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

University of Wollongong Global Challenges Program Scholarship; Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.