Dwelling Practices Research Articles

Three theses on informal housing in Europe

This editorial introduction to the Special Issue ‘The rules, institutions and politics of housing informality in Europe’ argues for a more holistic interpretation to housing informality in Europe as a critical heuristic for re-thinking the dynamics of informality in the global North. In so doing, it offers three modest theses. First, housing informality is an endogenous phenomenon in the development of European cities, closely connected to the logics of capitalist modernity and currently located at the intersection of new patterns of forced migration and an ever-intensifying housing crisis. Second, housing informality is (also) a by-product of direct forms of public support, toleration and legitimation, as well as the consequence of deliberate (in)action by the State. This results in a clear public politics of informal space, in the framework of which informal housing is an instrument of governmentality in the hands of ruling elites. Third, housing informality is normatively ambiguous. In fact, informal dwelling practices create an archipelago of institutional micro-geographies at the city scale, that generate, in turn, heterogeneous spheres of urban citizenship rights. This selective spatial autonomy can be inhabited as much by processes of rights expansion, emancipation and solidarity as well as by practices of right-restriction, exploitation and precarization.

Managing Luso-Utopia in Guinea-Bissau: Imperial Fictions and Dwelling Practices in Late Portuguese Colonialism (1945-74)

Portugal ruled Guinea-Bissau (then Portuguese Guinea), one of the last European colonial empires, until 1974, when the fifty-year dictatorship was overthrown and the colony dismantled. Until that time, its power had been maintained through the productive nationalist fiction, commonly referred to as luso-tropicalism, that the Portuguese created peaceful multi-racial colonial cultures through miscegenation. This paper examines the spatial production of this fiction as a concrete political utopia in the empire’s last phase in Africa, from 1945 to 1974, by looking at how colonial spatial practices in Guinea-Bissau contributed to both the assembling and the disassembling of empire. Grounded in original archival and field research conducted in Guinea-Bissau from 2019 to 2023, this paper asks what architectural and urban planning practices supported the fruition of a luso-tropical horizon. This involves analysing not only experts and their designs, but also how these contributed to everyday experiences of space through which Portuguese and Guineans dwelled in the luso-tropical utopia. Dwelling is here understood as both a set of architectural practices that define housing and city as well as the lived experience of urbanity. This approach enables a critical examination of how Portugal’s enduring imperial fiction was produced, managed, and lived in colonial spatialities, while also identifying the residue from colonialism that has persisted from these dwelling experiences into the present. This article, thus, expands the field of colonial architecture historiography by presenting a little-known case study which exposes architecture’s ties to governance, violence and resistance; it also assesses the political effects and residues of a colonial utopia in the present, by addressing the lived experience and agency of Guineans in architecture history.

Urban shift and dwelling practices impact on the identity of Amman’s public stairs: Jordan’s Cinema Steps as a case study

ABSTRACT Historically, Amman’s seven hills made stairways vital for navigation. As the city grew, stairways, especially Jordan’s Cinema Steps, became social hubs rather than just functional paths. This research examines the transformation of these steps, drawing from Ingold’s “Dwelling” and Heidegger’s “Dasein.” It also explores “place attachment” and its link to the stairway’s users. The core question is: how do interactions shape the place’s authenticity and identity? Findings suggest dwelling practices reinforce the Steps’ role as an urban landmark, informing urban planners about potential revitalization of other stairways in Amman.

Navigating spatial inequalities: The micro-politics of migrant dwelling practices during COVID-19 in Antwerp

The COVID-19 pandemic and its multiple lockdowns disrupted city life, while restrictions on physical distancing and urban activities highlighted the importance of our living environment and its links to our well-being. As part of the COVINFORM research project, this case study uses a micro-political lens to explore the specific spatial challenges which migrants faced in two of the more socially deprived neighbourhoods in Antwerp, Antwerpen-Noord and Borgerhout. This study aims to understand the specific spatial challenges migrants encountered during the pandemic and examine how they navigated and asserted agency within the confines of their living situation during this period. We combine participant observation with 25 semi-structured interviews with migrants living in two neighbourhoods in Antwerp (Flanders, Belgium), namely Borgerhout and Antwerpen-Noord. Findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced urban spatial disparities, where people’s strategies of adaptation were suddenly disrupted. Lower-income migrants were particularly affected, living in crowded housing without access to private open space. Access to public and green spaces, as well as facilities and public transport links, became more important during the pandemic, especially for those in poorer housing conditions. Within this context of spatial inequalities, migrants deployed their agency through claiming access to the city, shifting dwelling practices, and leveraging neighbourhood and community networks.

Persistent structures of public housing in the face of changing dwelling practices. A case study of Vienna’s municipal housing stock

Persistent structures of public housing in the face of changing dwelling practices. A case study of Vienna’s municipal housing stock

Performativity and the domestic space Practices of embodied dwelling through enactivism, participation, and auto-construction


 
 
 This paper examines the transformative potential of performativity in reimagining the concept of dwelling and of domestic spaces. Drawing from enactivist and embodied cognition perspectives, we delve into the dynamic relationship between individuals, their bodies, and the architectural environment. Emphasising the role of bodily engagement, sensorimotor experiences, and interoceptive awareness, we explore how individuals actively participate in and shape their architectural surroundings. Moving beyond individual interactions, we also highlight the social and collective dynamics influenced by the built environment, underscoring the impact of cultural conventions and societal norms.
 This paper investigates some contributions that advocate for a reappropriation of institutionalised domestic spaces through imaginative interventions that challenge conventional norms and envision future-oriented dwelling practices. Within the context of institutionalised domestic spaces, we investigate the role of the fantastical and the monstrous as disordered qualities that challenge traditional boundaries and offer opportunities for transformation. Through case studies, we examine projects that blur the lines between public and private realms, enabling participatory practices and urban influences to reshape functional space utilisation.
 In conclusion, this paper underscores the importance of a dialogue between embodied performativity and the concept of dwelling. It proposes a re-evaluation of our relationship with space that is not just functional but enactive, and it champions the transformative potential of the arts in conceiving our future homes. With a renewed focus on sustainability, participation, and the interplay between the human body and space, we can begin to imagine a future of dwelling that is as dynamic, inclusive, and vibrant as the lives we wish to live within these spaces.
 
 

Museums in Motu in the Anthropocene: From Active Space to Spatial Actions

Abstract In this article I offer an in motu rhetorical analysis of museums in the Anthropocene. Instead of discussing curations inside museums in detail, I examine spatial and rhetorical dialogues between the Jinhuagong National Mine Park, a fifty-year-old coal mine, and the Yungang Grottoes, a Unesco cultural heritage site. Pulling together threads from Heidegger and Chinese environmental philosophies, I redefine museum as spatial action with three entangled lines of action: building, dwelling, and saying. Unlike in previous studies of museum as active space, museum in motu turns museum into museuming—a gerund indicating ongoing actions adapting to contingencies. Through museuming, human beings keep exploring the meaning of building in diverse practices of dwelling and adapting to relational existence with the more-than-human world.

Round or square? Ethnic processes and Saami dwelling practices in Hallingdal, southern Norway

ABSTRACT In Hallingdal, southern Norway, a number of round dwelling structures have been documented. A contemporary parallel to these constructions is the stállo foundations in the mountains along the Norwegian-Swedish border, which are recognized as a Saami type of dwelling from the Viking Age and Early Middle Ages AD (800-1300). Based on analyses of the round structures in Hallingdal and stállo foundations further north, the paper suggests that the dwellings in Hallingdal may represent similar ethnic processes that initiated a homogenization and standardization of Saami material culture and consolidation of Saami identity all over Sápmi in the Viking Age and Early Middle Ages, and that Saami identity was manifested and materialized through practices of dwelling in the mountains of Hallingdal.

Tent encampments in Toronto, Canada: Excavating Northern housing informalities

This paper examines the ambiguities of municipal state regulation in relation to the dwelling practices of Toronto’s unhoused population. This paper argues tent encampments are a persistent mode of urban informality in the global North, where tents and other small structures provide a source of housing, particularly in cities with limited housing options. Using the City of Toronto as a case study, this paper analyzes how urban informality is reproduced and mediated by state policies, protocols, and actors. The findings suggest the local state—at times ambiguous and negotiated relative to an array of actors, property relations, and desirable formalities—routinely clears encampments from public property. The city’s enforcement and regulatory regime often removes tent encampments without rehousing people, thus contributing to cyclical patterns of informal urbanization. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research to better understand the similarities, differences, and nuances of this mode of urban informality in global North cities and to open the regulatory and policy field to options beyond criminalization.

Understanding coastal zone innovation: The ‘Waterdunen’ project as an ecology of practices

The coastal zone has many uses; people live, work and recreate in these areas, protect nature and create protective barriers between the sea and the people living near the coast. In this study, we examine the unfolding of the ‘Waterdunen’ project in the Dutch province of Zeeland as a form of coastal development. By using practice theory, and specifically the notion of ‘ecology of practices’, we unravel factors that hindered or stimulated coastal development related to different practices: coastal defence, salt-water nature development, recreation and tourism, dwelling and farming. Our analysis of newspaper articles, project publications and interviews showed that for Waterdunen to happen, tourism and recreation and salt-water nature development needed to be bundled whereas farming and dwelling practices had to be unbundled, sometimes even through (the treat of) expropriation. We gained detailed insights into the coastal development process by examining underlying cultural-discursive, material-economic and socio-political arrangements. The approach presented in this article shows a promising potential for also studying other developments related to coastal zone transformation. Our study suggests that policymakers and managers are better off when they move beyond a mere description of stakeholders, their interests and powers at play and instead approach policy in a more modest and subtle way by trying to understand the more fundamental nature of the processes they seek to influence. Analyzing how practices co-exist, overlap or interfere with one another invites more deliberate interventions also taking care of the cultural discursive arrangements that underlie most social practices. By doing so, a promising mode of enquiry is for example participatory destination and land use planning.

Adapting owner-occupied dwellings in the UK: lessons for the future

With 80% of the 2050 housing stock already built, the UK has at least 19 million existing homes in need of low carbon retrofit. Practice–theory-based studies have argued that these retrofits must be understood in the context of wider home adaptations and routine practices of dwelling. Therefore, changes in practices caused by the Covid-19 pandemic create a gap in the knowledge regarding the impact on home adaptations and integration of low carbon retrofit. This research compares two stages of interviews: the first undertaken in 2015–16 (30 households), investigating home adaptations and the practices of dwelling they supported. The second stage undertaken in summer 2021 (nine re-interviewees) asking participants to reflect on how their practices of dwelling had changed and how their homes had accommodated this. Rigorous line-by-line coding of the relationships between attributes of the home and practices of dwelling allows comparison between stages, offering original practice–theory-based insights into the implications for home adaptations. The findings show that practices of homeworking in particular placed great spatial and environmental pressure on the homes of growing families. If continued, these practices would create increased demand for dedicated workspaces, and significant opportunities to integrate fabric improvements and low carbon technologies into these adaptations. <em><strong>Practice relevance</strong></em> Long-term adoption of home-working practices could trigger home adaptations among households of growing families. Analysis of pre-pandemic adaptations to support homeworking suggests, first, this is likely to manifest in loft conversions; and second, these present a significant opportunity to integrate renewable energy in the form of solar panels. Furthermore, higher rates of homeworking have facilitated a stronger appreciation by owner-occupiers of the benefits of energy efficiency measures in creating normative standards of comfort that support practices of dwelling. These findings are significant for practice because they identify the opportunity that home adaptations to accommodate altered practices of dwelling present to integrate low carbon retrofit technologies into these homes. This will require action from policymakers and industry to increase practical understandings of these technologies among owner-occupiers; increase the availability of specialist installers; and implement appropriate regulations and financial procedures to support the integration of low carbon technologies into practices of home adaptation.

Dwelling activism: making the personal political in the English home through a feminist dwelling lens

Inspired by feminist literature on the notion of ‘dwelling’, this paper asks: how does the personal dimension of dwelling relate to the political discourses of housing activism. The aim of this paper is to (re-)consider the political dimensions of housing activism and research through focussing on the intimate and private experiences of ‘being at home’, thereby extending and pluralising housing activism as ‘dwelling activism’. Methodologically, this paper ‘throws together’ two data sets. The first is an arts-based study on the intimate experiences of feeling at home that was conducted with 18 mental health service users in the UK. The second study interviewed 14 urban community land trust activists in England about community engagement and housing activism. A plural, disintegrative analysis offers a symbiotic reading of the close entanglement between the inward-facing personal practices of dwelling like building shelter and security, and the outward-facing more public practices of dwelling, like building relations and togetherness.

Venice as a short-term city. Between global trends and local lock-ins

This paper examines the ongoing transition of Venice towards a short-term city, posited as an urban form which accommodates the dwelling practices of temporary populations as tourists, at the expenses of a stable resident population. This shift is approached through the conceptual framework of resilience, which is also explored in its political and discursive dimensions. At the base of the emergence of a short-term city, we analyse the redistributive impacts of short-term rentals mediated by digital platforms and their influence on the housing market, but also the related entrenchments of a local policy agenda supporting the resilience of the industry itself above that of the city as a living organism. After illustrating the development of the hospitality sector in the city fabric over the last four decades and presenting the historical challenges that Venice has been facing in regard to its capacity to retain a stable population, we seek to unravel the debate on ‘the future of Venice’, which confronts local and global agents defending a ‘conservationist’ approach for Venice as an ineluctably tourist city, with social actors who claim for the defence of residence – and therefore for a ban on STR – as a necessary condition for a socially resilient alternative.

La Regeneración de los bosques. Paisaje, prácticas y ontologías en el sur de Chile

Dwelling practices that contribute to regenerate the remnants of the template forest among local communities in southern Chile depend upon a relational ontology that is nourished by the Mapuche experience in the Andean foothills. The ethnography of everyday life in the borders of the twentieth-century timber expansion reveals that such practices orchestrate individuals of different species’ actions making daily subsistence possible. However, is not a mercantile definition of nature what inspires such practices but an understanding of the relationships among species as families or associations, where trees play a significant role, as exemplified by cases obtained in the field. The local communities' residential pattern embodies the intimate links among human and other beings conceived as partners in the process of being. However, this relational ontology takes place in hybrid landscapes and is strongly influenced by the historical circumstances faced by communities that have been dispossessed by the expansion of the logging industry. This article suggests the need to integrate the historic and the vital versions of materialisms for a better understanding of the ontological processes as experienced in the capitalist peripheries. Meanwhile, the recognition of these communities' contribution to the regeneration of native species remains unacknowledged.

Thinking with Quarantine Urbanism?

A short reflection on Quarantine Urbanism. Reflecting on the urban discourse which is apparently coalescing around the coronavirus and its effects on the city, are a series of arguments and hypotheses, bound by an epidemiological vision of space, in which attention is placed on the system of relationships that define our practices of dwelling and space production rather than on the inhabitant or society as a whole.

Resilience and resisting resilience: ethnographies in neoliberal L’Aquila post-earthquake

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationships between neoliberal institutional management of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake and the local dwelling practices, which consequently originated in the new urban layout.Design/methodology/approachIt presents itself as a post-catastrophe ethnography carried out from a specific approach, that is, the street ethnography that consists of collecting the practices and discourses of inhabitants, administrators, experts and commercial operators, which take place on or around the street.FindingsIllustrating the stages from the declaration of the state of emergency to the expertise-proposed reconstruction models, it shows the differences between resilient strategies and policies of urban management and resistant dwelling practices that are analyzed progressively focusing on a particular social group: the teenagers of the alleys.Research limitations/implicationsDescending in the alleys means to take a micro-sight that ables to identify present living paths.Practical implicationsBased on a long fieldwork, it bridges the gap between “theories” and practices, and it highlights those fields of action that despite being dominated by wide-ranging disaster management and urban planning logics bring out the work of social life in reweaving its threads in contexts of crisis.Social implicationsPaying attention to a social portion that often escapes from ethnographic investigation, this study has the merit of dealing with teenagers in this kind of situation.Originality/valueIndeed, this part of society and its creative “culture” receive the focus of a few studies, especially in case of catastrophes.

The Terrestrialization of Amphibious Life in a Danube Delta 'Town on Water'

The Danube Delta town of Vilkovo is often called the ‘Ukrainian Venice’ because of its 40 kilometers of canals. Many of these canals, however, are rapidly filling in with silt and are often impassible by boat. Tourism entrepreneurs and town administrators have begun lobbying for funding for a large-scale canal restoration project and for the town’s designation as a heritage site. Their tourism-development narratives, however, often overlook or simplify a complex set of social and environmental factors that have shaped residents’ past and present relationships with the Danube River. This article counters this tendency by providing an ethnographic portrait of terrestrialization—a term I use to name the confluence of geomorphological, ecological and social change in Vilkovo—that draws on townspeople’s descriptions of their dwelling practices. It combines insights from amphibious anthropology and social science literature on water infrastructure in order to pinpoint issues that need to be addressed in developing the town’s tourist economy, and makes the case for including studies of terrestrialization as part of an amphibious anthropology.

Engaging with nature through the dwelling practices in garden landscapes

ABSTRACT Based on an empirical study in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article investigates whether and how a more diverse nature can be integrated in the dwelling practices of garden owners and users. Is concern for biodiversity part of the engagements inherent in gardening practices? And are such engagements integrated in the embodied competences of garden owners? Drawing on and discussing the theoretical approaches applied in affordance theory, Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective, relational geography and practice theory, the article analyses the affordances and affects that are maintained in common gardening practices and how these practices sustain or hinder the integration of a broader variety of species in suburban gardens. The study finds that concern for biodiversity and a deeper care for wildlife do not appear to play a significant role in gardening practices. But concern for wildlife and biodiversity does have a latent presence among the affects, conceptions and ideals that are – or potentially could be – enacted in the constitution of gardens landscapes. Based on its empirical findings and theoretical discussions, the article furthermore suggests that we need to consider how secondary experiences and media representations are an integral part of the co-constitution of landscape and dwelling.

Living 'in between' outside and inside: The forensic psychiatric unit as an impermanent assemblage.

This paper presents analysis from 'a study of staff and patient experiences of the restrictive environments of a forensic psychiatric unit. The paper conceptualises the forensic unit as an impermanent assemblage, enacted in and through practices that hold a future life outside the unit simultaneously near, yet far. We show how the near-far relations between life inside and outside the unit operate in three ways; 1) in relation to the 'care pathway', 2) practices of dwelling, and 3) creating and maintaining connections to life 'beyond' the unit. The paper concludes with a discussion about possible ways to overcome the limitations to recovery that can arise through practices of impermanence.

Home away from home: landscape as a mediator between place and belonging in the peripheral areas of the Marche region in Italy

This article looks at the possible intersections between emigration, immigration, multiple dwelling practices, tourism, and sense of place in the peripheral rural/mountain areas of the Marche region, Italy. It will do so by focusing on two different realities: 1) that of people who, in the last two decades, have emigrated from their small villages to pursue better career possibilities both in Italy and abroad; 2) that of foreign residents (mostly, but not only, definable as 'lifestyle migrants') who, since in 1980s, have decided to move to the same areas in the Marche Apennines in pursuit of a simpler, more 'authentic', way of life. The article shows that these dynamics, quite different at a first glance, have a common factor, which is the connection with the Marche landscape and the attributes attached to it.