Landscape for a Good Home: Inhabiting Ethics in the Tenement Houses of Buenos Aires and New York City

Abstract

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of the materiality of practices, which includes kitchens, furniture and clotheslines, this article contributes to an understanding of ethics of dwelling that acknowledges humans’ and nonhumans’ entanglements in homes they inhabit together. It builds on a case study analysis of tenement houses – a common type of unregulated, private rented housing in Buenos Aires and New York City at the turn of the nineteenth century. The article draws on this type of housing to propose an understanding of ethics that reconsiders the emphasis on rule-following behaviour and judgement-based action, which has been influential in the study of ethics and morality across disciplinary boundaries. It shows that ethical practice is locally grounded, adaptive, and rooted in improvisation rather than in individual interest, universal reason or obedience to norms. Ethical practice is emplaced or place-based, but never place-bound. Home is reimagined as a material and affective place that is negotiated in practice and tied to other spaces and temporal horizons.