Spaces of Belonging and the Precariousness of Home

Erik Bormanis

doi:10.5399/pjcp.v2i1.2

Abstract

In this essay, I pose the question: what does it mean to be at home in a world where housing is increasingly a private commodity? I draw upon phenomenological analyses of the experience of home from Bachelard and Heidegger, both elaborating upon the fruitful descriptions of home as anchoring our temporal experience, while at the same time critiquing Bachelard’s all too hasty claim that all human beings begin in welcoming homes. As such, I claim that insofar as spaces of dwelling are not simply available in an increasingly precarious world, we ought to commit ourselves both to the work of cultivating more spaces of dwelling, and resisting an economic and political understanding of dwelling that reduces it to a purely material structure, or worse, an essentially fungible commodity or investment property, rather than a place that provides the conditions and parameters for human life.

Highlights

On May 20, 2018, the New York Times published “Unsheltered,” an article series detailing the ways that New York City landlords abuse the housing court system, one of the busiest courts in the United States with 69,000 cases a year, in order to evict tenants from the apartments they called home (Barker et al 2018)
It is my contention here that this understanding of housing as commodity and investment is complicit in creating a world where fewer and fewer people have adequate housing in the very concrete sense of having a shelter that will guarantee a minimal level of stability for the foreseeable future; that the lack of such housing and the way its distribution is organized forecloses the more general possibility of feeling situated or “feeling at home” in the world at all
Whether or not we want to entertain his conclusions in the face of such facts, I believe Heidegger’s critical question during the post-WWII housing crisis in Germany – “what is the state of dwelling in our precarious age?” – remains timely (2001, 158)

Summary

Introduction

On May 20, 2018, the New York Times published “Unsheltered,” an article series detailing the ways that New York City landlords abuse the housing court system, one of the busiest courts in the United States with 69,000 cases a year, in order to evict tenants from the apartments they called home (Barker et al 2018).

Results

Conclusion