ABSTRACT

How might an examination of “questions of housing” help us to better understand the politico-economic transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? This is a central question around which the essays in this volume are organized. In pluralizing “the housing question” through an exploration of its tensions, continuities, and contingencies, this volume inverts the procedure most often utilized to understand the city. Rather than focusing upon housing simply as an outcome of larger processes—for example, of a particular set of policies or dominant ideologies—this volume, and the conference from which it derives, centers upon questions of housing as a problem space through which to interrogate larger urban processes and the interrelations between them. At the same time, the authors here are deeply concerned with house and home as elements within larger networks of “infrastructures”—understood not merely in the sense of the organization of roads, buildings, sewers and other physical elements of the city, but rather, to borrow from Zarecor’s contribution to this volume, as scaffolds that organize and lend fixity to the urban through linkages to the past and to possible future trajectories. This notion connects technical processes and politico-economic transformations, definitions of communities and the means by which they are formed, included in, or marginalized from, urban and national polities. In short, such infrastructures transform and are transformed by enactments of house and home. This trading in of a singular housing question for contextually situated questions of house and home, then, enables fine-grained reflections upon such issues as national belonging, modernism as a politico-economic and urban project, and the rise of neoliberalism to near dominance as both a discourse and an explanation of contemporary urban transformation.