S3, Episode 4: Home Unmaking

Much research about home has focussed on homemaking as a fundamental process and principle of housing. But this episode reverses this taken for-granted idea of homemaking, and instead considers home unmaking.  By which we mean what happens when homes are undone, when they are permanently or temporarily damaged or even destroyed.

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Podcast Transcript

Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, reaching you from Middlesex University London. I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz, and I’m hosting this third series to look afresh at what ‘home’ is, and what it means.

We’ve previously looked at home from a wide range of perspectives, including in series 2 some of our shared experiences of home during the pandemic. This season, we’ll be in conversation with academics and activists who have moved beyond traditional ideas of home as a place ‘of safety, privacy, and care’.

Each episode will propose alternative readings of home, from its engagements with histories of empire, the politics of micro-living under neoliberalism, home as a queer space, or the changing meanings of home for people who cross borders.

As always, we draw inspiration from our collections, and the stories missing in them, to rethink the past through the lens of the present.

Ana: In this episode, we’ll be looking at what home can be under compromised conditions, and how recent legislation in the UK has undermined the ability of many people to make home. In the collections of MoDA, there are countless examples of homemaking advice in books, pamphlets and magazines. For instance, in the 1950s to 70s, the magazine Homemaker was replete with advice for DIY enthusiasts and populated with images of heterosexual couples, belying many of the family norms of the time. And until recently, there has been a tendency in much of the research about home to focus primarily on homemaking as a fundamental process and principle of housing.

But today we’re going to reverse this a little bit and critique, the question of homemaking, and this taken for-granted idea. And instead think about another concept that has become much more common in the past couple of years, which is that of home unmaking, by which we mean what happens when homes are undone, when they are permanently or temporarily damaged or even destroyed. And the broader context for this is the economic recession and austerity policies, which have had profound impacts on housing provision, especially since the 2008 economic crisis: cities like London have seen accelerating house prices, and the provision of affordable housing continues to decline.

In an article in The Guardian 2019 two geographers that I’m really glad to be joined by today, Mel Nowicki and Ella Harris published this article and] noted the way in which there was an extreme lack of public housing between 1981 and 2016. This social housing in England decreased by 25 percent, while in the private rented sector there is a climate of precarity, which means that many have to put up with living in tiny living spaces, in undesirable households and badly kept accommodation. And so witness to all this, we wanted to talk about today, not about homemaking as much as about the ways in which homes are being unmade and eroded. And it isn’t just in a physical sense, but also in the ways in which they are experienced symbolically and lived. And to talk about this idea of home unmaking and how people might make home under compromised conditions, I’m so glad that we’re joined by Dr Mel Nowicki and Dr Ella Harris. Thanks so much for joining us. It’s really great to have you here.

Mel: Well, thanks for having us. It’s good to be here.

Ella: Yeah, definitely great to be here.

Ana: Just before we jump in, I’m going to give an introduction,

Dr Mel Nowicki senior lecturer in urban geography at Oxford Brookes University. Her research explores the political importance of home. She’s worked on a range of projects, including with formerly homeless families in London and Dublin and their experiences of temporary accommodation, the impact of the criminalisation of squatting in England and the rise of the tiny house developments as a solution to the housing crisis in the US.

And Dr Ella Harris is a Leverhulme early career fellow at the Birkbeck University of London. Her current project explores experiences of lockdown during the Covid-19 crisis, focusing on changing conceptions of freedom. Ella’s past work has focused on London’s pop-up culture, the glamorization of urban precarity and diverse forms of housing insecurity, and also very recently, this year, published the book Rebranding Precarity: Pop Culture as the Seductive New Normal.

Home unmaking and critical geographies of home

Ana: I just want to start by trying to define a bit this concept of home unmaking that features a lot in both your research and you’ve been thinking a lot about and how it sits within the understanding of homemaking as a positive process of making place and inhabiting home. Mel, would you like to start?

Mel: Sure, yeah. I suppose really home unmaking is a complication of the home and how we understand it as something that’s inherently positive and inherently safe, inherently secure. So in my work, I look a lot at marginalised groups whose homes are often destroyed, unraveled, eroded through housing policy. So I think the different ways in which there is an active unmaking of particular groups of people’s homes through housing policy, essentially.

Ella: Yeah, and I think, the important thing that we’ve looked at together in relation to home unmaking it how it’s at once something which kind of physical but also conceptual. So I guess in the kind of what obvious sense of the term, you could think about things like evictions and the decanting of social housing blocks as a kind of home unmaking. But we also looked at it as something which is about kind of feeling unsettled or destabilised or kind of feeling like you’re unable to make home in the place that you’re living, which could be for a number of reasons that could even occur  somewhere you’re permanently housed. For example, if it’s a gentrification in the area you feel out of place, that could be a form of home unmaking. And I guess related to that, we’ve also looked at the way in which the remaking of what constitutes an idealised home unmakes certain kinds of expectations about what home should be.

Ana: What I want to touch also on that question of idealised homes, because I think we have a fair amount of representations of those kind of homes in the collections at MODA. And so, there’s one poster I wanted to talk about, which was about a Building Society. So it’s from the 1930s. It’s encouraging people to become homeowners. And you have this picture of a family in a garden sheltered under a tree and this, you know, semi-detached house in the background. The slogan reads “Their happiness can be yours.” And this is just one of the many images that you can find the collections which at one point were considered aspirational ideals of home. But today, they would be seen much more as mythical constructions of home. And I think this links to some of what you were just saying now about the shift in geography, your discipline over the last two decades, in moving beyond these traditional representations of home as a space of comfort, of happiness. So I wonder if you can say something about that, how your work fits with this broader critique of the household and with ways in which understandings of home are shifting.

Mel: Within geography, the push to think more critically about home is really driven by, again that disruption, right, that these understandings we have of home, of idealised homes, of the kinds of homes that are promoted in that poster that you talked about, are just innate and kind of understood as the aspirational home, or as the only kinds of homes that we should be living in or we should be working towards.

So, critical geographies of home broadens that out, I suppose, and asks and thinks about how, what we see as an ideal home is constructed, right, it’s made, it’s not an innate thing. And actually what that means looks very different in different time periods and different parts of the world in all different kinds of contexts. So, that’s what I see is the really important function of critical geographies of home over the past couple of decades or so. And where my own work and our work that we do together fits into that conversation.

Ella:  Yeah, and I guess part of that is about kind of the way that those constructed ideas of an idealised home relate to certain kinds of idealised subject. So I suppose like the kind of nuclear family um detached house ideal related to a certain form of labour that people willi to do. And what we see now, are kind of new forms of housing, like how micro-living or co-living is a kind of shift towards  versions of home that encourage a more flexible neoliberal subject, which are more tied to contemporary forms of labour, which are about kind of moving between different jobs, being more self-employed, more entrepreneurial. So um, there’s very much kind of prerogatives in terms of how you should live and work that are attached to those idealised versions of home.

Mel: Yeah, definitely. This this ideal home isn’t static and it  evolves and is repackaged, to meet the social-political situation at the time, so now we live in a more precarious world. My generation, Ella’s generation are far less likely to be able to afford to buy homes than our parents were, and housing policy [changes?] along with it. Idealised homes are kind of shifting to meet that. So rather than kind of addressing the reasons behind why our generation might be less likely to afford homes, I think narratives around idealised homes are just kind of changing to meet that.

Ella: In some senses, the kind of idealised version of home is something which kind of like encourages certain kinds of economic structure. But it’s also responsive. So at a time of housing crisis when the kind of ideal homes we were encouraged to kind of aspire to aren’t really attainable anymore  that ideal is being like, remade around versions of housing that are more affordable, like micro-living for example. So it’s kind of like, it compensates for a lost ideal by kind of reconfiguring what we what we now see as something that’s aspirational.

Ideal homes?

Ana: Yeah, and I think we’ll get into much more detail to talk about those forms of micro-living like co-housing and other examples that you were giving Ella there. But before that, I’m also interested in pushing that point a little bit more about the way in which idealised home is obviously historically, but also politically situated. And I think it really comes across your work, how intensely political home is and how it’s been co-opted by different ideologies at different historical moments. And, you know, just to link to what you were saying earlier. We  have  an association in the 1930s to homeownership and idealised homes. There’s an expansion also of private developments in the suburbs, particularly in cities like London. But prior to that, in the 19th century and up until 1918, you would have had to own property also to have voting rights. So my question here is going more around ownership and the relationship this might have to ideal homes? And I know that you’ve done a lot of thinking about the post- 1980s period during Thatcher and thereafter. So can you talk a little bit about those ideologies that surround the idealised home? And is that linked to the sense of ownership in some way?

Mel: Yeah, absolutely, it’s attached to a sense of ownership, and as you rightly point out for a long time, that’s really been front and center of this aspirational home that we keep talking about. The nineteen eighties is an important time period in which to kind of think about this, not because before then ownership wasn’t idealised and wasn’t the kind of forefronted  aspirational home, but it was certainly very much ramped up in the context of Thatcher. And I talk a lot in my work: a lot of my work involves, not being very nice about Margaret Thatcher, but I think that’s reasonable [laughter]. Her, the right to buy is a really kind of pivotal moment in just absolutely cementing and accelerating this emphasis on ownership as being the end goal, the aspiration. And if you’re not aspiring to that or if you haven’t obtained that, then you’re failing not only in terms of your ability to  construct  and maintain a home, but you’re also failing more broadly as a citizen or resident.

Those of you who aren’t quite sure of the right to buy, it’s a pretty well- known policy. It was a policy implemented at the start of the Thatcher government whereby council tenants were able to purchase their council homes for a fraction of market costs, some in some instances up to 80 percent reductions in in market and of market value. Which meant that there was a sudden huge influx in home ownership and a lot of people who were previously council tenants were homeowners, which is a very obviously appealing and exciting policy at the time, but meant that huge swathes of council housing were removed from um council housing stock. And that’s had huge implications ever since that we’re still feeling today.

Ella: The idea that home ownership is not only the primary housing ideal, but also in some way the only kind of valid form of permanent home making, it becomes so entrenched that what we see at the moment is a plethora of interventions to try and make home ownership to some extent attainable for people rather than investing in social housing.

So you  have things like shared ownership, the Help to Buy scheme that  enable people to just about afford to buy some kind of home. And people aspire towards this because the idea of any other kind of homemaking has been so eroded by that kind of primacy of ownership as the ideal that I think there’s kind of a sort of collective understanding that the owning somewhere is  the only way to be settled, which obviously isn’t inherently true, but it’s become the way we imagine homemaking means.

Mel: But even the language around affordability of housing has become refigured to mean in relation to home ownership or partial home ownership. So previously, we’d have understood affordable housing to mean social housing or before that council housing. But now that terminology of affordability includes things like shared ownership and help to buy. So every aspect of housing and housing policy and housing ideology, including terminology that wasn’t normally part of the home ownership narrative, has been brought into the home ownership narrative.

Ana: You talk about this the way that affordability as a term has, become quite susceptible to co-option by these different narratives, particularly around home ownership.

I am just interested in hearing more about this term affordable housing, which you talk in that Guardian article I mentioned of 2019, you were particularly attacking the way in which that term is being used and how it’s become so hollowed out in its meaning. Can you say more about this shift in the use of language, maybe terms like public as well in terms of what original meanings they had and how they are currently used by government and property developers?

Ella: Yeah, I mean, I guess the word was becoming kind of quite clearly completely meaningless because most of the schemes that are branded as affordable are unattainable. I mean, like most of them, I wouldn’t qualify for and I’m an academic, so I don’t know who’s meant to be accessing this affordable housing, really. Although they kind of framed it as affordable what it means is just kind of like slightly less than the market price. A little bit of a strange term, I think, because what’s the implication of that? The government are calling certain housing intervention schemes affordable, is that implying that other housing  is unaffordable? which obviously is the case for the majority of people. But it seems like a strange thing to admit on the part of government or housing developers.

So, I guess it  shows, firstly, a real kind of stretch of language to try and justify a situation which is kind of increasable untenable. But it also shows the situation where the system isn’t working for anybody, is kind of having all these arbitrary solutions thrown at it, rather than addressing the fundamental problem, which is that housing is massively inflated in terms of its price on the basis of housing.

Mel: Yeah, I think that’s particularly the case with shared ownership. That’s really become a flagship affordable housing scheme over the past10 years. It was introduced by the Cameron government and  really when we talk about when governments or developers will talk about a new housing development that contains X percentage of affordable housing, often what they’re talking about is shared ownership or shared ownership will absolutely feature as at least a percentage of affordable housing, sometimes all of the affordable housing. But in the article, we, highlight how in places like Stratford, for example which is in Newham a borough of East London, which is one of the one of the poorest boroughs in London and actually one of the poorest local authorities, one of the most unequal local authorities in the entire country, affordability, there,  is when they say affordability, we’re talking about shared ownership, flats starting at hundred and thirty grand for a twenty five percent share in a property.

I mean, I don’t know in what world like I mean, like Ella was saying it’s like where, you know, we’re academics with decent salaries, I think I’d struggle to afford to put down the deposit  for that. So in what world that’s  affordable and for who is very questionable and we really see a kind of shared ownership seems to constitute raising market value. So raising property prices. So it’s all well and good to say affordable is  80 percent or less of market rates. But if you’re then, at the same time, on the other hand, increasing property values and market rates, then is anything really changing? But this word affordability continues to be slapped on it because of these very loose, stretched out definitions of that word.

Ella: As we wrote for The Guardian a couple of years ago about the way that the word public is now used to refer to any kind of housing that has some kind of partnership or intervention or even this kind of sanctioning from national government, which is really what social housing is meant to mean. But again, this kind of abstract terminology is used to justify the increasing privatization of housing while kind of box ticking or at looking like you’re doing something to constantly build more social housing.

Domicide: definitions

Ana: You’re listening to That Feel Like Home, the podcast from the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. I’m Ana Baeza, and in this episode I’m talking to two geographers, Mel Nowicki and Ella Harris about home unmaking. In the discussion that follows we discuss current housing legislation in the UK and  idea of domicide, meaning the deliberate destruction of home, which is something that Mel has thought about a lot.

Ana: I’d like to think about this in the broader context, which is recent housing policy in in the U.K.  And you both work in this area, but you’ve particularly written about recent legislation like Section 144, which criminalise squatting in residential buildings, but also the imposition of the bedroom tax. So these are all different policies and phenomena that Mel, you’ve noted have meant have meant that there is a normalisation of an austerity ideology, which is the backdrop to everything that we’re talking about. And just to quote from an article in 2017, Mel you noted that this ideology, and I quote: ‘Frames the forced eviction of those on low or no incomes as morally just.’ Could you speak about that rhetoric and how it’s enabled perhaps can we say a social acceptance of these kind of policies?

Mel: Yeah, absolutely. So in my work for, my doctoral research, I looked at the impact and implications of the criminalisation of squatting in England and Wales, (it was already illegal in Northern Ireland and Scotland) and the bedroom tax, both of which were brought into  policy and legislation around 2012, so again, towards the beginning of the Cameron government and what we might term the austerity era.

Mel: The bedroom tax. Just in case you’re not aware of what that means, it’s officially called the removal of the spare room subsidy, and it refers to if you are a social tenant on housing benefit, or now Universal Credit, I suppose, and you’re deemed to have one or more spare bedroom, then you have a reduction in your housing benefit. So a 15 percent reduction if you have one spare bedroom and a twenty five percent reduction if you have two or more. Central to my research, I suppose, was looking at how these policies were brought into being via this idealisation, this narrativisation of particular kinds of homes and the  flip side to that, which is no less explicit. That, like I alluded to earlier, I suppose if you’re not a homeowner, you’re not aspiring to be a homeowner, you’re not living within the very set boundaries of what it means to be a good resident, a good homemaker, a good citizen, then your rights to home are less valid.

Mel: And I saw the criminalisation of squatting and the imposition of the bedroom tax as putting into practice some of that rhetoric and some of those narratives of social tenants, of squatters, of people who are living outside of those aspirational, “norms”, as to being legitimate to reduce their right to housing, to reduce their access to housing, and to make their lives more precarious. And that was certainly the case. You know, I remember speaking to the social tenants who’d lived in their properties for 20 years and then 2010 hits, the rhetoric gets ramped up. And I remember her saying never before have I felt self-conscious about being a social tenant. But all of a sudden I feel the sense of shame, like I don’t want to disclose that I’m now being hit by huge financial penalties, you know, I’m losing vital income. And that is all tied into this legitimisation of removing home and destabilising home for these particular groups of people.

Ana: And Mel, you talk about this in terms of domicide it as well, which we haven’t mentioned yet, but it features across your research and it’s one that I wanted to bring up as well. Could you explain the ways in which you’re using this term, which literally, if I was to define it, is to suggest to me like the killing of home. You just said the removal of home. But this is a term that has had a longstanding existence in the literature, but often quite associated to the physical destruction. But the way that this is being explored in both your research is more thinking about other kinds of erosion of home that links to precisely what you are talking about here, that might be operating at  other experiential and symbolic levels. So could you just elaborate on that?

Mel: Yeah, absolutely. So, domicide, like you say, it means I think it’s a mushed together of Latin and Greek, but it means the intentional destruction of home. And it was coined by two Canadian geographers, John Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith back in the early 2000s. And in their work, they use it to think about like you say, the physical and I suppose material destruction of home. So one of their examples is how an entire village was razed to the ground to make way for a damming project in Canada, for example. They also talk about it historically in relation to  the mass displacement of first nation Canadians from their homelands in colonial periods. They talk about it in relation to homes being destroyed and people displaced in war.

And I thought this was a really important term and way of thinking about home that perhaps hadn’t really been explored too much or hadn’t been followed up on much since Porteous and Smith wrote their book on domicide.  And I started thinking about how policies and legislation like Section 144, the criminalisation of squatting and the Bedroom tax are also functioning in in this destructive way, but not in that material, you know, housing being torn down, people being physically torn from their housing, although that certainly is certainly part of it, you know, eviction plays a big role in both of these policies as one of the consequences. But I guess I was also interested in how this intentional destruction of home is built into language around who does and doesn’t deserve a home and then is built into policy.

I see Section 144 and the bedroom tax as inherently domicidal. They are very explicitly telling particular groups of people that they shouldn’t have the homes that they have and they are removing not just physically or not always physically, but also socially, I guess, and symbolically removing people from homes by  very explicitly stating that they shouldn’t be in them in the first place, that they’re not deserving of these spaces. So I guess my work picks up on Porteous and Smith’s definition of domicide, but perhaps expands it more into that rhetorical arena, if you will, but that I see is no less powerful, no less destructive for the people who suffer the consequences of these policies.

Ella: Yeah, I’m going to jump in there. I think one thing we’ve talked quite a lot about is the discourse around waste, which has really come into play around housing and the idea that if you’re in social housing, then you’re wasting public resources somehow that I had the ultimate aim is for everybody to be not just self-sufficient but also profitable. And that somehow you’re a burden on the state if you’re living in council-provided housing. And then we kind of see that discourse trickle into private housing, too. So I talk a bit in my recent book about things like Supper clubs or Airbnb, these kind of shared economy services that sort of financialise  people’s domestic spaces, either the ones they own or the ones they are renting.

And this kind of emphasizes the idea that if you’re not using your space kind of optimally in terms of generating profit, that you’re somehow wasting resources. And I think that kind of discourse is also part of domicidal strategy of reinforcing this idea that the point of housing now that was about it being an asset and anything else is kind of a waste, which really changes how we understand the idea of home.

Mel:  Definitely, I mean, the official name for the bedroom tax is the removal of the spare room subsidy, so thought that waste narrative is completely built into that that phrasing. The idea that if you’re not using if you’re using up every meter square of your home in a hopefully, ideally economically productive way, then you’re wasting it. And it’s a subsidisation not a home, a fundamental part of human existence is to have home.

Micro-living

Ana: Yeah, and this waste narrative, that you’re both talking about, which, you know, it’s also seems to be a lot about how to maximise or economise space is making me think of another strand of your work, which is about micro-living. And, it’s interesting to hear you talk about this and think about this in the context of this report that we’ve got in the collection, a copy of the Parker  Morris Report, 1961, which specified minimum space standards in new public homes, not for private housing. But this was established around the furniture that was considered necessary in each room and the space that would be needed around it. And so this idea of mandatory standards having, you know, quite spacious  minimum standards in a house, then scrapped again in 1980, So again, back to the conservative government under Thatcher, under the new local Government Planning and Land Act of 1980. Is that where the waste narrative begins, and then in its further development, we’re seeing these instances of micro living now branded as cool or as glamorised in some way. You’ve both talked about this as forms of precarity. Could you expand on that and sort of like maybe that waste narrative to the micro-living developments that we’re seeing?

Mel: Yes, so I think, again, let’s go back to good old Maggie and the 1980s that certainly laid the foundations for this this narrative around waste, particularly in public housing. But the 2008 financial crash and kind of ensuing austerity measures really have ramped that up and sent it into hyperdrive over the past 10 years to a point in which I don’t think even the conservative government of the early 1980s would necessarily expect things to go as far as they have. Having lived over the past decade in a time of austerity, of financial recession, of cuts to public funding and perhaps, well, arguably inevitable reductions in living standards and living space that might come with that. And this goes back to the language point that is so central to mine and Ella’s work, the next level of that that is especially frightening, I suppose, is how this has been repackaged as something positive, and this is almost a new aspirational, you know, we’ve talked a lot about ownership as aspirational, but the  remit of what that means is being forcibly changed to match] the rise of things like micro-living and more precarious housing in general.

Ella: Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you look at the way  micro-living is framed, it’s kind of almost marketed like you’re kind of boring if you want  a normal-sized house because it implies you want to be at home all the time. And I think it really pushes this idea that like micro-living, is for cool urban socialites who are so busy doing fun things that they won’t want to be at home. This is quite clearly a rebranding because I think I mean, like, fine, if you want to  live more centrally, but they probably also want a decent sized house. Some of the micro-homes are so tiny that it’s hard to really see how it’s a preferable option to having a two-bed flat or something. But yeah, it’s really framed as something desirable. So we’ve talked about that as a rebranding that kind of compensates for that reduced possibility.

Ana: Could you give some examples of micro-living just to be a little bit more specific, for listeners who might not know exactly what we mean when we speak about micro-living?

Mel: Yeah, definitely. So it takes a range of forms and there’s no one solid definition. But largely speaking, we’re talking about housing that is below minimum space standards. So that could be things like micro-flats. So there’s an example of a company called Pocket Living, which sells flats at 80 percent of market rate. So, again, this comes under affordable housing, to go back to our earlier discussion at and 80 percent of the 20 percent, rather, below minimum space standard. So that 20 percent cheaper because they’re 20 percent smaller. So that’s one example of a literal kind of shrinking of living space. And that being an important part of a key part of housing policy, particularly in high-cost cities like London.

Then another approach are things like co-living.  They are in essence, sort of student-style living, but targeted generally at young professionals. So your own private domestic space, as it were, is usually a fairly small bedroom, probably with an ensuite, you might share a very basic kitchen. And then the majority of the rest of the property of the development consists of communal areas. So a communal kitchen, a lot of places have things like a cinema room, a roof garden, maybe a communal bar. So those are two of the more common, I suppose, instances of micro-living in the UK.  And in the US context, perhaps more well-known form of micro-living, there’s more long-standing, but we’re increasingly seeing in the UK and globally is tiny housing, which is what it says on the tin. Housing that is well below minimum space standards, often built on wheels. So it’s kind of ambiguous as to whether it counts as housing or, you know, an RV is a vehicle.

Ella: I think, deliberately so to avoid building standards. I think  people put them on nominal wheels so that they don’t have to comply with regulations, but most of them probably aren’t moved very often.

Mel: Yeah, kind of. “What do you mean? This is my car, not my house.”

Yeah, those are probably the key forms of micro living. That are branded as such anyway.

Ana: And you reflect in your work how these developments also build on earlier quite more radical discourse of co-housing that involved housing cooperatives, that was about having alternatives to more capitalist modes of living. So how do you see the taking of those earlier alternatives around housing and how they can coexist alongside these very profit-driven and inherently capitalist developments?

Mel: I think the co-option of the communal has been a massive thing. So, something that is absolutely central to those more radical forms of housing that you that you spoke about are much more common in the 60’s to 80’s, maybe the little resurgence in the 90’s like squatting a much more formalised element of that kind of communal housing in co-housing. Things like co living, absolutely promote themselves using a language of the communal and of collectivity and of connectivity that things like squatting and co-housing movements were absolutely centred around as well. But of course, the difference is, is the mass financialisation of that, the co-option of that, and the bringing of that into neoliberal narratives.

Ella:  And I think that’s reflected in the kinds of collectivity that’s promoted. I mean, I guess kind of like squatting and other forms of co-housing that are more radical would have been based around sort of solidarity, often explicitly in an anti-capitalist way. Whereas if you look at some of these spaces of what foregrounded is the chance to network with potential kind of collaborators for entrepreneurial businesses, or you can kind of invent your start-up in the social area of this co-living  development. So it’s neoliberal as well in terms of the kinds of interactions that are assumed to take place there.

Mel: Absolutely yeah, it’s taking that desire to live in an anticapitalist or alternative way and bringing it under the capitalist umbrella for sure. And I guess just a note to add here, that co-living is not cheap. It’s extremely expensive.  The Collective is probably one of the most well-known ones in London. We’re talking about rooms over a thousand pounds a month. This is totally removed from things like squatting and co-housing, even though it might use a lot of the same language we’re talking about.

Ella: The cost of it is kind of showing you who is it aimed for,it’s in no-way alternative model really.

Making home in temporary housing

Ana: I’m Ana Baeza Ruiz and in this episode of That Feels Like Home I’m discussing issues around home unmaking with Mel Nowicki and Ella Harris. We’ve just touched on the idea of micro living, but now we’re moving on to think about the recent trend towards pop-ups and temporary housing, and what this might mean for people’s sense of home.

 Ana: There was something else I wanted to touch on which links more to your work Ella around the spaces of precarity or the I think you call it the spatiality of austerity urbanism, particularly in cities like London, but also elsewhere. And this is the term pop-up that you use, which is a term that has become very commonplace. We’ve seen it for lots of restaurants, shops, galleries that you emerge they’re there for a couple of months and then they move elsewhere or, you know, or they disappear if they’re not successful. But it’s also being used for social housing and temporary housing. Can you talk about the politics of these pop-up developments and how this connects to our discussion?

Ella: Yeah, I mean,  pop-up is something that kind of emerged probably or at least intensified after the 2008 crash. So at a time when there were lots of vacant spaces and not a lot of funding for arts groups or charities and small businesses, it was seen just kind of like a good solution to put underfunded groups into unused spaces. It became seen as a great solution to  this kind of decline of urban space, but also to reanimate those spaces that bring life back to the city. And certainly a lot of kind of really beneficial projects have used pop-up spaces, and still do. But I argue in my recent book that the overall mechanism of pop-up was to normalize and rebrand precarity. So the kind of problem with it is that almost its success in providing any kind of entertainment or  welfare relief  then is used to justify those provisions being temporary, and you get a situation where the idea that something like social housing is temporary, is pop up, is celebrated kind of like always innovative and creative.

So the kind of excitement that pop up facilitated in the creative arts sector then ends up normalising and justifying other things that really need to be structural and permanent, being temporary. So I guess it also relates to that discourse of waste whereby if we can provide less profitable spaces or services in the gaps between more profitable developments that is seen as ideal, because we’re not wasting space. So you see  things like social housing being delivered.  We looked at Place Ladywell, where the intention was that it would be a building that was kind of moved around a lot. I think it was  brought in there at the time with lots of creative groups, charities as they’re able to occupy spaces while developers wait to break ground and get their development going. So it’s kind of created a system where the use of the space that is not really profitable become subservient to the timescales of the ones that are more profitable.

Ana: Yeah, I wanted to follow up on that question, because you mentioned Place Ladywell as that temporary accommodation development in south London, and it’s  something that you’ve both worked together jointly with Katherine Brickell. I’m interested in  how not just the perspective now that we’ve been talking about, which is more from a policy perspective and the mainstream discourse, but also about the experiences of people that are  actually trying to make home in these kind of temporary accommodation. You’ve talked about mundane acts of resistance to the domicidal practices that we see um at in these kind of developments, but also in a policy context. So could you speak a little bit about that and the work that you’ve done in Ladywell.

Mel: Yes, I guess just to start and explain, PLACE/ Ladywell what that is, in the first instance, I guess. It’s like Ella mentioned, it is a temporary housing scheme developed by Lewisham Council and designed by Rogers Stirk and Partners, very- so you know, a very famous international architecture firm. And it’s temporary housing that is temporarily located or that again, as Ella says that was the intention. Whether that becomes the endpoint, we don’t know.

That was intended to sit temporarily on a vacant site in Lewisham, whilst the council decided what to do with the plot of land on a more permanent basis. And it houses the other aspects of temporariness to it, I suppose, that houses homeless families for a period of up to two years in theory while they’re bidding for permanent council housing.

And… I think, before we talk about resistance and kind of making home in these temporary conditions, I think it’s probably fair and important to emphasize that  these flats are  above minimum space standards, they’re of good quality. And residents were initially at least very relieved and pleased to be moving into these properties because they are far above the standards of usual temporary accommodation in London, which has become increasingly unsuitable of poor quality. We heard about whole families living in a B&B room for weeks, sometimes months at a time, vermin infested B&B’s, being moved constantly from pillar to post, miles away from their kids’ schools, from their places of work. So we’re talking about people coming into a situation that is unequivocally better than what they’ve got.

But it’s a low bar and we’re still talking about people entering, coming from temporary accommodation into temporary accommodation. So I think a lot of our argument around Place Ladywell, and the work that we’ve done with residents of Place Ladywell, in the first cohort, if you will, of residents was that while their immediate kind of material surroundings undoubtedly improved, nothing fundamental changed.

They were still in this precarious state of living in temporary accommodation, not knowing where they were going next. And this is really exacerbated by things like,  I suppose standard rental experiences, like not being able to hang pictures up, um, being worried about kind of damaging this flat and being kind of financially or otherwise punished for it. But I suppose the experience of that was so heightened  because these people have already experienced so much precarity, so much marginalisation, so much trauma through their experience of homelessness. And that was continued through their experience in Place Ladywell. There was also a sense that residents were being tested as well, or the languages, um that residents had was around. OKI guess if I keep this place nice and clean, even though it’s all white walls and I’ve got three kids, maybe that means I’ll end up with a better permanent property. That was almost like a suspicion that it was a test for them.

But to go back to the resistive element, I suppose what we found really interesting about Place Ladywell and other kinds of accommodation that we’ve worked in as well. This wasn’t just the case in Place Ladywell, but the desire and the importance of installing yourself and making somewhere home, even though it is temporary, was so important to residents. So, they talked about getting around, not hanging pictures up by they had these kind of wall stickers that will kind of peel off without damaging the paint as a way of, again, imprinting themselves into these  spaces and making home even if it was temporary. So we saw these as really emphasising how integral that need is to establish and maintain a sense of home is just for your psyche, your well-being, especially if you’re somebody that has been through the unimaginable traumas of eviction and homelessness.

Ella: Yeah, and I think we also saw there was one instance that we  talked about in our paper on the subject of a woman who had defiantly nailed the fireplace into one of the rooms, despite explicitly being told not to put the decorations up. I think that was interesting because it attracted a lot of media attention and in a sense, it was kind of somehow funny that she should nail the fireplace into the wall of temporary accommodation. At the crux of it is that it seems funny because you don’t expect people in temporary accommodation to be able to have fireplaces, it seems out of place somehow, which tells you a lot about the presumptions of how people  are meant to live while they’re kind of waiting for permanent housing. So you could be there for the two years, but you can’t have something make you feel at home like a fireplace. And so, I think her  kind of resistive action in you know what, I’m going to nail it  anyway, was the kind of really defiant sort of assertion of her right to make home, her right to be somebody that has a sense of belonging and settledness and the way that that was treated  really exposed ideologically how that wasn’t something she wasn’t meant to be entitled to.

Mel: Yeah, it’s pretty galling that we’ve been you know living in a year of stay at home when for the past 10 years, arguably beyond that as well, there has been a very consistent and intentional campaign to destroy the home lives and unravel and unmake to go back to, I suppose, the title of this podcast, the home lives of so many people

Ella:  And the kind the kind of idea of what it meant to be locked down at home was kind of like the idea that people who live in big houses with gardens and probably home gyms and plenty of rooms to get space from their families um so imagine them how it to be with a reality. A lot of people were kind of cramped up in tiny flats with one computer between five of them trying to get schoolwork done and sort of trying to make ends meet in a really difficult situation. And I think we kind of saw how naive government were  about housing for the kind of guy that was framed. I think there has been a kind of a new appreciation of the importance of home from being locked down. But I think we’ve also seen how  disjointed the kind of government understanding of people’s living arrangements is from the actual reality of it.

Ana: It’s been absolutely fascinating to talk with you and thanks so much for being here today.  Um, I feel like I’ve learnt a lot, but also I hope that listeners, this kind of equips them with more critical baggage to better understand the currency of the housing crisis and its many different manifestations and how they can be disguised through, you know, apparently sort of liberal discourses around freedom or around um communal sharing when we’re actually seeing that it’s something much more pernicious, I. So thanks so much.

Mel:  Oh, thank you for having us.

Ella: Yes, it’s a pleasure.

Ana: Thank you for listening, and especially a big thanks to my guests for this episode, Mel Nowicki and Ella Harris, for talking with us about the myth of the ideal home and taking us on a critical exploration of housing policy and how this shapes ideas about how we should live.

In the rest of the series we’ll continue to reassess traditional ideas of home and venture into other, more critical readings of this space.

If you enjoyed our podcast ‘That Feels Like Home’ (or even if you didn’t!) please let us know by completing this short survey: http://ow.ly/bzxM50EAwff

Further Reading

Baxter, R. and Brickell, K., 2014. For home un making. Home cultures, 11(2), pp.133-143.

Brickell, K., Arrigoitia, M.F. and Vasudevan, A., 2017. Geographies of forced eviction: Dispossession, violence, resistance. In Geographies of forced eviction (pp. 1-23). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Harris, E., Brickell, K. and Nowicki, M., 2020. Door locks, wall stickers, fireplaces: Assemblage Theory and home (un) making in Lewisham’s temporary accommodation. Antipode, 52(5), pp.1286-1309.

McCarthy, S., Penning-Rowsell, E. and Tunstall, E., 2008. Public attitudes to ‘community based’ small-scale flood risk reduction measures in England. Hazards and the Built Environment: Attaining Built-in Resilience, p.150.

Nowicki, M., 2014. Rethinking domicide: Towards an expanded critical geography of home. Geography Compass, 8(11), pp.785-795.

Nowicki, M., 2017. Domicide and the coalition: Austerity, citizenship and moralities of forced eviction in inner London. In Geographies of Forced Eviction (pp. 121-143). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Nowicki, M., 2017. Bringing home the housing crisis: Domicide and precarity in Inner London (Doctoral dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London).

Harris, E. and Nowicki, M., 2018. Cultural geographies of precarity. cultural geographies, 25(3), pp.387-391.

Links

https://soundcloud.com/insidehousing/is-talk-of-a-council-housing-renaissance-really-fake-news

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/13/talk-public-housing-renaissance-london-fake-news-housing-crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/07/live-shoeboxes-housing-standards-minimum-space

Credits

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Mel Nowicki and Ella Harris 

Editing by Zoë Hendon, Ana Baeza Ruiz and Paul Ford Sound 

Transcription by Mia Kordova  

Music Credits 

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License 

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) 

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License. 

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.