Housing: an infrastructure of care

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care. Drawing on the recent infrastructural turn in social sciences we understand infrastructures as dynamic patterns that are the foundation of social organization. New infrastructural analyses attend to how infrastructures pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use. We argue that housing patterns care across three domains: through housing materialities, markets and governance. First, we identify how housing patterns the organization of care at a household and social scale. Second, we attend to the relational politics of care through housing, asking how care is ordered through housing and to whose benefit. Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing. This third direction opens a substantively new approach in housing scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage that is constitutive of care. We provoke housing researchers to ask: is this a housing system that cares?