Abstract
In this paper, we examine how to understand housing as a relational process. Drawing on research in three diverse cities, we stage an unlikely dialogue that brings together narratives of housing across the global North–South divide. In doing so, we are concerned with thinking housing relationally in two broad senses: first, housing as a relational composite of economy, space, politics, legality and materials, structured by particular relations of power and resource inequality. Second, housing as a space of learning through comparison, which connects geographically and culturally in distinct cities. What do we learn about relational thinking with regards to housing when we compare it across the global North–South divide? In response, we explore a dialogue between a set of cities often off-the-map in debates on housing and urban research: Gateshead (UK), Kampala (Uganda) and Tirana (Albania). In comparing how housing is produced, distributed and inhabited, we seek to contribute to a wider understanding of the relationalities of housing.
Highlights
We move onto our comparative analysis, paying particular attention to what we identify as the key factors that resonate across the three case studies and that animate the relational nature of housing: household economies, the state, social and political networks, and housing materialities
What we offer is not a fixed framework for understanding relational housing, but an approach that opens up thinking housing relationally through comparison
The nature of and work done by those materials could hardly be more different, enfolded as they are into a politics of aesthetics in Gateshead, territorialization in Bathore, and radical diversities of housing in Kampala
Summary
Bringing forth an analysis that is both situated and general, and which roams across three quite different contexts, demands a degree of analytical tentativeness and provisionality, a certain openness to connecting housing across vast geographical space while paying attention to particularity (Lancione & McFarlane, 2016). It is, inevitably, a less linear and more entangled process. We use comparison as a way of seeing and understanding both differences and resonances across the three cases, generating a narrative which moves back and forth between specificity and generalization This offers a deepened insight into housing relationality globally; how it is produced, consumed, contested, exchanged, politicized and governed
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