ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the failures of several prominent social housing programs that emerged in the wake of the 2006 crisis. The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste’s post-independence story has been about houses and housing. The chapter shows how post-independence schemes to rebuild and improve housing have contributed to an oikopolitics – a politics of houses and housing – that focuses new relations of state ‘care’ and ‘abandonment’ on the culturally recognizable medium of domestic architecture. It demonstrates how what can be considered to be biopolitical programs are made at once consonant and incongruous with Timorese cultural ideologies and reflexive sensibilities about houses as a qualitatively marked ‘form-of-life’. Houses both objectify and act as arenas for the articulation of social belonging, status, and moral personhood through forms of ancestrally mandated practice. The chapter suggests that social housing projects are seen as ‘biopolitical’ interventions since they marshal statistical knowledge in efforts to improve or optimize the life conditions of so-called vulnerable populations.
