Thinking relationally about housing and home

Introduction

In 2008, in Housing Studies, Gabriel & Jacobs (2008) reviewed developments in ‘post-social’ theory in housing studies. Their article noted the dearth of current literature and aimed to provoke further research and debate. A review of housing research since that date shows relatively little advancement in this field, despite a flourishing of relational thinking in allied disciplines and a small but long-standing engagement with these ideas in housing studies (Büdenbender & Golubchikov, 2017; Cowan et al., 2009; Harris et al., 2020; Lovell & Smith, 2010; Webb, 2012). In urban studies, many pages of the best journals have been dedicated to exploring the networks, relations (Jacobs & Malpas, 2013) and assemblages (McFarlane, 2011) that constitute urban spaces (Simone, 2011; Wachsmuth et al., 2011). This work has produced significant advances in understanding the dynamic nature of policy development and transfer (Baker & McGuirk 2017), processes of urban assembly and city-making (McFarlane, 2011), as well as the more-than-human relationships shaping cities (Franklin, 2017). These efforts have mobilised a range of different relational frameworks, drawing on a diversity of theorists ranging from Bourdieu to Latour, to Deleuze and Guattari, to Wacquant (Harris et al., 2020; Logan, 2017; Lovell & Smith, 2010; Meese et al., 2020; Rogers, 2017).

There is little consensus amongst housing researchers about the utility of relational and post-social theories, how they should shape the research process (for example, see this exchange: Simone, 2011; Wachsmuth et al., 2011), and whether these theories can productively move us beyond current housing methodologies (Baker & McGuirk, 2017; Rogers 2017, 2018; Harris et al., 2020). For instance, Cowan et al. (2009, p. 282) argued that ‘one of the frustrating aspects of ANT [actor network theory] is its continuous re-invention, partly because studies undertaken in its name are generally empirical and take it in different directions’. Wachsmuth et al.’s (2011, p. 741) ‘critique in this debate thus stems from concerns that are in the first instance practical rather than ontological or scholastic’. They offer a suite of limitations with these theories, core among them the failure to adequately define the core conceptual ideas and to account for the political-economy of housing and urbanization (structural and institutional power, property and labour, racism and violence etc.). They note that not all engagements with these theories ‘result in these pitfalls’ (p. 742) and conclude with a call for specificity and accuracy in the theorization and deployment of these theories.

This special issue is an engagement with this challenge in the housing field. We hear the warnings of scholars such as Cowan et al. (2009) and Wachsmuth et al. (2011), but wish to hold open and explore the possibilities of these theories for housing studies. We agree that these theories and the methodologies that are drawn from them need to be rigorously theorized and defined, and that they need to get to the questions that are often at the core of critical approaches to housing studies, such as the relationships between people, power and property. Yet, we want to hold open the possibility that political-economy might not have to be the central frame and that we might not need to agree on universal interpretations of these theories and their methodological utility to find value in them. Indeed, it is perhaps the way these theories are being taken up, rethought, or combined with insights from political-economy that makes them useful for housing studies (Baker & McGuirk, 2017; Rogers, 2017). A good case in point is Cook et al.’s (2016, p. 2) book, wherein they argue, relational approaches to housing and home allow researchers to challenge traditional conceptual boundaries that often fail to recognize that housing and home are always a ‘coproduction of diverse elements’.

Wachsmuth et al. (2011, pp. 745–6) ask ‘for those committed to such methodological procedures to articulate the basic theoretical and normative-political agendas that underpin them, and to make a strong case for their advantages relative to competing approaches’. This is a reasonable and important request, and much of the recent work drawing on relational theory in housing studies does exactly that. For example, Cook et al. (2016, p. 2) suggest that relational theories offer rich opportunities to raise ‘new normative, conceptual and empirical questions’ regarding housing and home, and they outline what these new opportunities are. For them, the value of these approaches lies in the capacity ‘to open up the house as a site that mediates between the particular and the systemic’ (2016, p. 1). Similarly, for Jacobs & Smith (2008) such approaches offer a ‘revised rematerialisation of home’, opening ‘the black boxes of economy to scrutiny’ while interrogating how the emotional terrains of home are ‘inextricably tangled with the material, economic territory’ of housing. Smith’s relational housing research is similarly engaged with a critique of the normative philosophies and inequalities that define contemporary housing regimes (Jacobs & Smith, 2008; Lovell & Smith, 2010; Smith, 2015), while more recently Power (2019) and Power & Mee (2020) mobilize relational approaches to critique the individualizing of care responsibility through housing. In opening the black-boxes of housing, relational approaches offer a view into the ‘lifeworld of structure’ (Berlant, 2016, p. 393), the dynamic practices and forms that organize and make up housing systems and the practices of dwelling.

In this tradition, this special edition prompts a deeper engagement between housing studies and relational theories with the objective of critically examining the value and utility of a selection of relational theories for housing studies. The seven articles in this special issue engage with the theoretical, methodological and political application of relational theory to housing studies in different ways. Alam et al. (2020) use a range of relational theory to analyze the informal homes of rural migrants in Khulna City, Bangladesh. These extend across the neighbourhood and into the houses of their employers. Glass et al. (2019) use assemblage theory to analyze tenant activism in response to gentrification in New York. Staying with New York, Goldfischer (2019) brings a geographical sensibility from Doreen Massey to discursively analyze how the language that New York City authorities used to refer to street homeless people changed over time, and the concrete implications of this change in language. Maalsen (2019) draws upon assemblage theory to theorize the smart home as an assemblage of social, economic, political and technological apparatuses, and therein suggest that digital technologies might offer innovative methodological opportunities. Murphy’s (2019) innovative use of performativity and calculative theory demonstrates the ways in which housing markets are made through calculative practices. This article focuses on the calculative practices that are used in development feasibility or residual valuation analysis. Heslop et al. (2020) return to the debates about actor network theory to undertake the dual task of rethinking: housing as a relational composite of economy, space, politics, legality and materials structured by relations of power and resource inequality; and housing as a space of learning through comparison. This ambitious article compares how housing is produced, distributed and inhabited across three cities in the global north and south. Penfold et al. (2019) use postcolonial and Indigenous studies to consider Aboriginal understandings of housing as home in Australia. They argue the need to move beyond Western notions of house-as-home and to better incorporate Aboriginal and Indigenous knowledges in housing studies.

In the remainder of this editorial we briefly look across the seven articles in this special issue to draw out their key insights regarding their: (1) theoretical developments, (2) methodological advances, and (3) implications for housing policy and practice.

Theoretical developments

The papers in this Special Issue mobilize relational approaches to develop new conceptual understandings of housing and home. These elaborate extended spatial ontologies of housing and home and bring new insights into the agencies that constitute and drive change within housing systems. Relational approaches are positioned across these works as a means of holding the particular and the structural together in understanding housing.

Relational approaches are used to elaborate the extended spatial, material and affective ontologies of housing and home. Alam et al.’s analysis of the informal homemaking practices of rural migrants in Khulna City, Bangladesh develops the concept of ‘unbounding’ to show the ‘mutual constitution and overlap of houses and their neighbourhoods’. Their work brings into view the everyday, spatially extensive and mobile practices through which housing and home are made by households living at the economic margins of large cities and the ways that these communities are able to ‘creatively unmake and remake liveable homes and livelihoods’. In Australia, Penfold et al. engage with Indigenous Australian relational understandings and experiences of house and home. Here home is made through relations that bring the material affordances of housing together with relations of kin and Country. Operating outside of the ‘western dualism of mind and body, culture and nature’ Penfold et al. and their Indigenous co-researchers show that the making and unmaking of home extends beyond the house and ‘must additionally be conceived through the connections and disconnections with Country, that are anticipated and folded through the body, and may be articulated as a physical sensation, such as ‘spiritual freedom'’. Goldfischer addresses the conceptual stretching of housing and home across the neighbourhood in a very different empirical context. He examines the relational geographies and changing policy and policing approaches to homelessness in New York to demonstrate that ‘the idea of a homeless hotspot … and the financialised home are co-produced and co-dependent, created through one another’. These relational understandings in turn have substantial material and political consequences.

Relational approaches also bring new insights to the agencies that constitute and drive change within housing systems. In examining tenant activism in New York, Glass responds to the critique that assemblage theory ‘is ineffective at analyzing why some relations are more stable or ‘sticky’ than others’. Here assemblage is engaged as a theoretical and methodological route to conceptualizing how a seemingly stable set of political and spatial arrangements might change. Murphy’s interest is the calculative practices of residential property valuers. Murphy establishes the value of relational approaches in opening up market practice to reveal the ‘conflicts’, ‘power struggles’ and ‘political economy’ shaping contemporary housing systems. Challenging a view of housing actors as ‘passive responders to external forces and denied agency in the construction of market prices’, relational approaches make visible the performative dimensions of market operation to show that in housing markets ‘economics is not a methodology employed to describe market behaviour, but is constitutive of market behaviour’. In her consideration of the social, economic, political and technological apparatuses that make the ‘smart’ home, Maalsen likewise demonstrates that relational approaches enable the conceptualization of stasis and change, by demonstrating how the components of a housing ‘assemblage can either support or subvert social and political processes’.

Ormerod et al. are also concerned to demonstrate that not only can relational approaches allow for insights into housing experiences and housing systems in a broad sense (what they call ‘resonances’), they can also allow for attention to ‘singularities’. They introduce an experimental comparative approach to open ‘a conceptual space for rethinking housing’s relationalities through difference, and across the Global North-South divide’. In bringing together different relational lineages including actor-network theory and state theory they consider how housing is ‘a relational entanglement of all manner of materials, knowledges, economies, regulations and policies’ made through a ‘balance of power relations, politics, social networks’ and structural forces that shape housing in different ways in different contexts. They demonstrate that comparative approaches can reveal both resonances and differences in housing globally across four key domains: housing economies, the role of the state, housing materialities and social networks.

Methodological advances

The papers draw upon a wide range of methods, many of which an informed by ethnographic research practice. The boundaries between the researcher and the researched are also relational and the blurriness of these boundaries is an important methodological consideration across the papers. The study by Glass et al. was able to draw on the insights of one the researchers who was living in the community under investigation, while Golsfischer was working with the homeless people he was researching for three years. Such research practices are incredibly valuable in undertaking relational research into housing and home. However, they are also often challenging due to various constraints, including time, resources and the expectations of academic employers and research funders. There are however lessons to be learnt from ethnographic research approaches, which can inform ‘ethnographic sensibilities’ (Maalsen) in the selection and conduct of research methods.

Penfold et al. demonstrated the value of working with co-researchers from the community of interest when the authors were not community members. Their paper presents findings from research that employed Indigenous-led research principals. Their approach facilitated the co-development of project aims, designs, fieldwork and interpretation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, enabling knowledge sharing amongst the group. This research design also embraced more-than-human co-creation of knowledge, through an understanding of, and respect for, the important role of Aboriginal Country in the creation of knowledge.

However, even when such ethnographic engagements and local community co-creation of research are not used, ethnographic sensibilities can still inform relational studies of housing. Examples from the papers include Alam’s walking interviews, and Maalsen’s interviews and her analysis of documents, understood as ethnographic artefacts. Maalsen also points to the possibility of innovative methodologies that draw on the agentive capacities of smart technologies. In her paper on the smart home, she asks whether technologies such as smart phones can be recruited as co-ethnographers who can access places and information that human researchers are unable to.

Finally, Ormerod et al. speak to the utility of comparison as a methodological tool. They contend that thinking relationally about housing across different cultural, economic and political contexts demonstrates not only that housing is ‘a relational entanglement of all manner of materials, knowledges, economies, regulations and policies’, but also demonstrates how ‘the form of relationality varies’ across and between those contexts.

Implications for housing policy and practice

Across diverse empirical contexts and challenges, the papers in this Special Issue use relational approaches to question the constitution of housing systems, demonstrating how housing systems are made and unmade, identifying opportunities for change, and suggesting alternative visions. The relational approaches employed develop an open and fluid understanding of housing. Rather than starting with pre-conceived notions of what a housing system is and how power operates through housing, relational approaches allow researchers to trace the power and politics of housing systems at work. Uncovered across the collection of papers is a sense of how housing markets and policies are negotiated through assemblages of information and power and the activity of market and state actors, as well as how the macro- and micro-politics of housing are negotiated and constituted in the everyday. Beyond the conceptual and methodological contributions to research, these bring implications for housing policy and practice.

Alam et al. and Penfold et al. call for greater recognition of housing and home making cultures and practices in everyday life, arguing the need for these to inform housing policy and production. Alam et al. bring new insights into how marginalized populations both strategically and affectively ‘engage with under-recognised agencies and actors in informal settlements’ to develop an understanding of how these groups make home differently. They recognize the possibility of exploitation by powerful actors in the absence of any formal land titles or rights to land and argue that planning and policies should bring greater attention to the variegated ways that ‘migrants build spatial competencies and sustain homes in cities’. Penfold et al. are concerned with the provision of culturally appropriate housing for Indigenous Australians. They argue the need for design professionals to better understand and embrace Indigenous ontologies when designing housing for Aboriginal Australian people. The Indigenous relational ontologies that they apply allow for new knowledge of how their ‘co-researchers’ understandings of home [were] grounded in relations of co-existence with Country’, culturally relevant notions of privacy, changing household compositions, and so on, which have implications for housing design.

Possibilities for change are a theme across several papers. For Glass et al. assemblage thinking supports recognition of the opportunities and limits for change. They use these approaches to uncover the nature and drivers of rapid neighbourhood change following a five-decade period of stability. Goldfischer likewise uses relational approaches to ‘understand the ways that homelessness and housing constantly produce new spatial conditions of possibility and impossibility’. Their approach uncovers how the ways in which visible homelessness is spoken about reinforces its selective policing, with ‘drastic consequences for people trying to survive in neighbourhoods with rapidly diminishing opportunity for housing, shelter and homes’. Murphy journeys further into the possibilities for change, suggesting that relational approaches bring a transgressive potential. In showing how housing markets are made through residential valuation calculations, Murphy uncovers ‘deep seated assumptions that effectively narrate housing markets in ways that marginalize the agency of housing actors’ stifling innovation and reform through militating ‘against the production of affordable housing and promot[ing] practices that institutionalise a financial vulnerability within the sector’. By ‘rendering the performative nature of [these] calculations visible’, Murphy opens up the possibility of alternative understandings of housing markets that could produce better housing outcomes.

The politics of housing systems is an overarching theme, with relational approaches offered as a means of tracing the fluid relations and plays of power that constitute housing. Maalsen opens the black box of the smart house. She calls for a more open and critical understanding of this ubiquitous and future-leaning turn, reminding us ‘that ‘smart’ is more than technologies – it is an assemblage of materials, visions, economies and ideologies – and these have material effects’. Ormerod et al.’s work opens up housing in a different way, arguing that examining the differences between housing systems provides opportunities for considering alternatives to the status quo, with implications for global flows of housing policy and practice.

In examining often taken for granted and less visible aspects of housing, the papers in this Special Issue create space for considering different housing futures and practices.

Concluding thoughts

Relational approaches provide an important and complementary addition to housing research. Such approaches allow for a deep understanding of complex phenomena. This has been most evident to date in housing research that has focused on the concept of ‘home’. Yet this is not the only area within housing studies where relational understandings have utility. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the utility of relational understandings of housing systems, by exploring the relationships between people, power and property. As well as the theoretical and methodological advances this implies, relational understandings of housing make a political contribution. In-depth, relational understandings of housing systems open a space for questioning the status quo and considering alternatives and sometimes radical visions for change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).