Abstract
The amount of living space we have access to is one manifestation of the unequal distribution of housing resources within societies. The COVID-19 pandemic has required most households to spend more time at home, unmasking inequalities and reigniting longstanding debates about the functionality and experience of smaller homes. Drawing on interviews across three UK cities, this article attends to the changing household routines of individuals living in different types of small home, exploring daily life before and during 'lockdown'. Using the concept of urban rhythms, the data show that the lockdown has intensified existing pressures of living in a smaller home - lack of space for different functions and household members - whilst constraining coping strategies, like spending time outside the home. Lockdown restrictions governing mobility and contact acted as a mechanism of exception, disrupting habitual patterns of life and sociability, and forcing people to spend more time in smaller homes that struggled to accommodate different functions, affecting home atmospheres. For some, the loss of normal strategies was so significant that they sought to challenge the new rules governing daily life to protect their wellbeing.
Highlights
Space in the home is an important part of health and wellbeing (Carmona et al, 2010)
The findings show that before lockdown, everyday life in a small home was characterised by a series of particular spatial and relational negotiations
Everyday life in a small home already involved compromise and negotiation, but the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the utility of thinking of small homes as sites of intensification in which existing challenges were exacerbated
Summary
Space in the home is an important part of health and wellbeing (Carmona et al, 2010). Lockdown exacerbated the challenges of living in a small home, whilst removing some of the adaptive mechanisms used by residents This had practical and affective impacts, as residents shared space with others and required this space to deliver a greater number of functions, in relation to work. A structure of feeling is ‘a collective mood that exists in complex relation to other ways in which life is organised and patterned’, a way of thinking and living in a particular time and place that is shared and cuts across different domains of life (Anderson, 2016: 116) Such broader affective conditions within society can be intensified around particular sites and people (Harris et al, 2019); wider collective anxieties and uncertainties of the pandemic can be intensified in certain spaces. This takes affective life beyond the individual subject, setting limits on action by giving sites and encounters a particular ‘feel’, whilst acknowledging the way in which atmospheres envelop and are expressed through particular ensembles of bodies in space (Anderson, 2016)
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