Housing and Social and Material Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Issues around the materiality of housing and inequality are increasingly important today. Yet, housing researchers have not settled on conceptual tools to account for and study the role of both social and material characteristics of people and their housing. Outlining a new research agenda, I use the idea of social and material vulnerabilities to stress the need to always account for how material and social characteristics relate in myriad ways that render some people and certain material environments more vulnerable than others. I suggest typologies and comparisons as useful tools researchers might use to investigate relationships – that can be malleable yet are often institutionalized – between social and material vulnerabilities, and caution against some assumptions that may skew our understandings of housing. I argue that attending to the social and material vulnerabilities of housing reveals ways in which the materiality of other built environments might also be important.

KEY WORDS:

• Materiality
• Post-social
• Bodies

Acknowledgements

For comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Mary Pattillo, Al Hunter, Paul Jones and the anonymous reviewers at Housing, Theory, and Society.

Notes

1. Hilary Osborne. “Poor doors: the segregation of London’s inner-city flat dwellers” The Guardian, July 25, 2014; Gina Bellafante. “A House Divided” New York Times, July 27, 2014.

2. For example, see Latour (2000) on how social scientists should reconfigure “the social”, and how distinction between social and material should be collapsed.

3. Many ANT theorists would retort that any seemingly “external” interests such as these are themselves produced through networks.

4. I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to make this point.

5. Coolen (2006) mentions “constraints” to people’s choices concerning objects but elaboration on this is not part of his contribution.

6. A large part of York Cornwell’s (York 2008) argument is thus that physical and sensual aspects of households serve as indicators of social disorder and a breakdown of norms. This is familiar territory for urban sociologists, as her argument resembles those made in studies of neighbourhood disorder. Studies of neighbourhood disorder treat social and physical disorder as largely synonymous, and posit that signs of physical disorder – such as litter, abandoned buildings and graffiti – as indicators of lack of social cohesion and control (e.g. Raudenbush and Sampson 1999; Sampson and Raudenbush 2004). Researchers read social disorder from physical disorder, believing not only that “neighborhood disorder makes social disorganization visible” (York 2008; 5), but that signs of physical disorder are more stable units of analysis that are more easily and objectively observed than social disorder (Raudenbush and Sampson 1999; Sampson and Raudenbush 2004). The emphasis York Cornwell (as well as scholars of neighbourhood disorder) place on objectivity – and indeed social norms – requires further discussion.

7. Some scholars contend that the design of public housing was not strictly negative, stressing the “glory days” of public housing when residents enjoyed the open park-like spaces and playgrounds that surrounded the well-functioning modern high-rise buildings (Fuerst 2004; Hunt 2009). The majority of scholarship on Chicago’s high-rise public housing, however, focuses on the decline and neglect of buildings and the dissatisfaction of residents. Even accounts of how public housing “works” stress that the built environments of developments impeded their success (see Bloom 2008).

8. Layouts of public housing developments, for example, afforded a high ratio of children to adults (Hunt; Venkatesh 2000). Vale (2013) documents how the design of the apartments in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green meant that families with the most children lived in the lowest floors. This became problematic when different families argued as those with multiple children could easily block elevators and hallways to any adversary families who lived in units on higher floors.

9. Multiple studies also stress the significance of “sniper-friendly flat roofs” (Vale, 332) and buildings’ “sidewalks in the sky”. In Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, for example, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) began installing floor-to-ceiling mesh wire over the open external galleries in 1972 because residents threw appliances and refuse onto the heads of people standing on the ground below, and, in one case a child died by falling through the cracks in the railing (Venkatesh 2000). This fencing-off however, allowed snipers the cover they needed to shoot police officers (Hunt 2009; Vale 2013).

10. This is reminiscent of Foucault’s (1994) claim that no architecture can ever be entirely freeing or disciplinary. Rather, he claims, only practice can ensure liberty or discipline.

11. Several children sustained injuries falling down shafts when the elevators had stopped between floors; a broken elevator prevented the fire department from saving the lives of three children on the 14th floor; faulty elevators slowed the police; and social workers – who were also often afraid of using the stairwells – refused to ride elevators to visit clients (Venkatesh 2000).

12. Gotham and Brumley (2002) develop the concept of “using space” to capture (1) that people have to act within existing physical spaces that condition how they move through them; and (2) that people also assign meanings to spaces that “are as fundamental to the organization of public housing as are bricks and mortar” (278). One example of this is the connotation of certain places within an otherwise dangerous public housing development as “safe spaces”.

13. Gieryn’s contribution thus draws heavily on the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach in STS, which emphasizes the role of users in shaping and determining the success and stabilization of any technological object (see Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003; Pinch and Bijker 1984).

14. Fennell argues that this change mirrors the way people think about public housing and welfare in American in general, and reflects the view of welfare recipients as wasteful and in need of monitoring.

15. Hommels developed this scale from her interpretation of Stuart Brand’s analysis of “how buildings learn.”

16. Jacobs and Gabriel (2013) also advocate for comparative research.

17. Recent work, for example, stresses the importance of aesthetics for recipients of housing voucher holders when choosing where to live (Edin, DeLuca, and Owens 2012; Turney, Kissane, and Edin 2013).