Home environments in an age of precarity

Abstract

Environment-behavior research prior to the 2000s often portrayed homes as relatively self-contained, insular settings that provided residents refuge from the demands and distractions of the outside world—a kind of safe haven for domestic activities and family life. Residential security was viewed largely in relation to personal assets and the nearby environment, including one's capacity to afford high quality housing, defensible space design of the dwelling, and the absence of nearby threats such as fire and flood hazards, seismic risks, and undesirable land uses like oil drilling sites, landfills, and congested roadways. These proximal sources of residential precarity still play a role in people's lives, but their impacts on people are amplified nowadays by a variety of increasingly pervasive threats situated at societal and global levels such as climate change and extreme weather events, disease pandemics, rampant cybercrime, and growing worries about the spread of nuclear weapons. Also, the modern home has become a polyfunctional hub for both household and non-domestic activities, owing to the infusion of work, educational, and recreational activities into residences via their online connections to the outside world. We offer a social ecological analysis of the changing meanings and functions of home environments in the early 21st Century, and a conception of domestic precarity that highlights its links to broader existential concerns driven by societal and global forces. Future policies and environmental interventions to effectively curb residential precarity will require collaboration among individuals from multiple fields and between diverse organizations and institutions working at municipal, state, national and international levels.