Book review forum: For a Liberatory Politics of Home

Michele Lancione, For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023; 304 pp.: ISBN: 978-1-4780-2052-3, US $107.95/£89.00 (hbk); ISBN: 978-1-4780-2530-6, US $28.95/£24.99 (pbk); eISBN: 978-1-4780-2742-3 (eBook)

Introduction

Colin McFarlane, Durham University, UK

Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a rare and remarkable piece of scholarship. It breaks new ground and will likely make a lasting impact in Geography and Urban Studies. It does what all great books do: inspires new kinds of thinking, and does so by mobilising a deceptively straightforward argument, the kind of argument that when you read it the topic in question seems to have shifted on its axis. In this forum, an exciting group of scholars – Ash Amin, Katherine Brickell, Erin McElroy and Saanchi Saxena – come together to appreciate what the book opens up, and to debate what the book does for how we understand both home/homelessness and the wider urban condition.

There is a huge literature on homelessness and the home. Michele’s book, always with generosity and care but nonetheless with a critical voice, turns that work on its head and opens up a new direction for research, politics and activism. As the contributions here will show, we come to know the ideological, political, economic and cultural constitution of ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’ in new ways, and different ways of addressing them slide into view. The book does this not only through skilled theorisation but by carefully listening. Listening through committed and caring ethnography of place, of struggles, of lived experience and experimentations with different interventions. We arrive at a place in this book in which method, argument and politics cannot be separated.

Positioning the geographies of home and homelessness as matters of the same grammars and structures of dispossession, Michele shows how homelessness, including often well-meaning efforts to address it, enters into the making and operation of the home–homelessness relation. From this position, a new imagination emerges, and a different set of emancipatory interventions come to the fore around habitation and its struggles. The shift here is as seemingly simple as it is radical: housing, in this framework, is not the solution to homelessness. Instead, it is one element amongst a host of concerns required for a liberatory practice of homing the world for the many.

The argument is not that there is somehow no value in arguing for housing or that life without a house is equivalent to life with one. The point is different. The category of ‘home’, as it is constituted through dominant processes of historic power, necessarily entails ‘lessness’. Race, patriarchy, heteronormativity and class shape what home has come to mean, alongside the wider inequalities of land, property and citizenship. Even progressive interventions can end up replaying old problematics, leaving unexplored a larger affirmative politics that reconfigures how home and homelessness are made and materialised. There is no single blueprint here, but the book is clear that paying close attention to what those who experience and struggle with housing precarity do and say is a vital route to necessary change.

At the heart of the book is a beautifully crafted ethnography of urban inhabitation and its struggles, and it is there that the affirmative potential of the book comes to life with heart. In thoughtful, careful and sometimes moving accounts from Turin, we see how the book’s conceptual problematics are made meaningful in everyday life and perception, and in the possibilities for radical change that emerge in glimpses from those contexts.

Where does this leave the rampant inequalities around housing? As Katherine Brickell argues based on her work, building more homes is not in itself a silver bullet solution, as much as that absolutely does matter. The book resists the temptation to get into what Ash Amin calls ‘big-sweep reforms’, and some readers will be left wanting more on this front. But, as Ash also argues, the book is avowedly committed to another politics, one that emerges from the forms of living that people themselves seek to weave. From this ground, we might see another politics, one that shifts how we think about the house and the home, to think, as Erin McElroy notes, ‘beyond inhabitation’ and ‘to theorise a housing future yet to come’ – a ground where, as Saanchi Saxena outlines, inhabiting can be a political act that makes claims ‘by infusing the space with intimacy, connection, and feelings of home’.

The collection concludes with a short response from Michele.

Commentary I

Ash Amin, University of Cambridge, UK

This is a bold, confident and ambitious book. It wants us to rethink the categories of home and homelessness, so that new modes of settlement and just forms of habitation can be imagined. Lancione seeks to frame homelessness as part of a capitalist, gendered and racialised home-making machine that naturalises skewed distinctions of settlement, and reproduces precarities for those with and without homes. For the former, the problems of indebtedness, poor housing, domestic violence, racial profiling, segregation, proprietary identity and wastefulness; and for the latter, the problems of expulsion, exposure, street and institutional violence, dependence on a care industry, and identification as home-less and no more. There is no good in one and bad in the other, since both sets of subjects remain strangulated by the same homeliness machine. Lancione’s claim is that the problem of homelessness cannot be divorced from the arbitrary presumption of the owned, nucleated home as the norm. It is the wider connections that matter, not the specifics of what a good home is or what getting someone off the streets requires.

I cannot think of another book that offers such a profound reformulation of home-lessness, and it does so with breathtaking mastery of critical theory, the political economy and biopolitics of capitalist dispossession and expulsion, and evidence from around the West of what the machinery of home and homelessness produces on the ground. Its ambition is to get us to step out of dualist thinking and see the relational nature of the home(less) machine, informed by Deleuzian thinking on the interpenetrations of molar and molecular planes of existence. In his reimagination of the dispossessing and alienating character of the ‘home’ as property and security machine, Lancione exposes the class, racialised and gendered iniquities associated with becoming housed, being expelled from homes, and casting street dwellers as those who lack the traditional nucleated home.

The reconceptualisation is without mercy, and it is total, at times at a level of abstractness that requires some persistence. Yet, it is necessary, since the tropes of ‘lessness’ that Lancione foregrounds demand a new lexicon and grammar of ‘home’ beyond the usuals of housing access, equity and quality. We come to understand his argument through illuminating case evidence. Two chapters on Italy illustrate the strangulations of the home(lessness) machine by showing, in one, how the history of home ownership has built on fascist, Christian Democratic and neoliberal political cultures of home as white, proprietary, male and truly Italian, and in the second, how the condescensions of caritas, petty bureaucracy and racialised othering characterise the treatment of street dwellers. Lancione proposes both sets of subjects as victims of an embedded political culture of ‘lessness’ that diminishes them, their autonomy and their potentiality. Another chapter explores this culture elsewhere in the West, replicated as a form of global cultural coding of home and its other. There are rich examples in the chapter of how a certain moral discourse of normalcy and decorum shrouds street dwellers in their occupancy of diverse public spaces.

The final part of the book leads us out of the mire of the home(lessness) machine towards new possibilities drawing on the practices among radical housing movements around the world of shared grassroot organisation, squatting and lived coexistence. Lancione, himself close to some of these practices, puts non-mainstream housing struggles at the heart of a new politics of subjectivity and communal existence. He does so, importantly, without any glorification of the precarities of life on the margins, while decidedly breaking free of the home–homeless machine as we know it. Even well-meaning charities working for the homeless come off badly.

The book’s normative slant leaves it silent on big-sweep reforms that could make life better for millions expelled by the home(lessness) machine, but I sense the silence is deliberate, in its commitment to a decolonial, post-capitalist and non-patriarchal code of habitation. It is the molecular and not the molar that prevail in Lancione’s advocacy. I would have liked to see more on the possibility of mid-ground policy reforms that could improve things for those cheated within and out of the machine, because small shifts of rights, access, tenure, or financing could bring tangible benefits, and enact institutional reform allowing grass-root experiments to amplify and gain traction. I wanted to see more of what can be done while the machine is exposed and dismantled, since the lives traduced by the deceptions of the home(lessness) machine need urgent care in our times of extensive displacement and dispossession.

It is not that Lancione is unaware of these questions. Instead, impatient that the cogs of the home making and unmaking machine turn and turn, facing no imminent collapse, he settles for a politics of working up the lived practices of cohabitation that allow people to flourish and engage. The book’s politics are not naïve, but of necessity they are scattered, piecemeal and experimental. Perhaps this is the only truly radical course to take, given the repeated failures of housing policies towards those without homes or without shelter. Perhaps Lancione’s position stems from years of immersion in housing struggles and sophisticated engagement with critical theory. Either way, the exegesis is authoritative and deeply meditated, delving deep into the structuration of disappointment by prevailing logics of home to imagine a new premise of settlement. The book is original and important. It needs to be taken seriously.

Commentary II

Katherine Brickell, King’s College London, UK

For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a monograph which is extremely rare – to stunning effect Michele combines the conceptual, empirical, personal, practical, philosophical and political in a text that asks a huge gamut of actors, from academics, to policy makers, to the ‘homelessness industry’, to think about, and ‘do’ home and homelessness differently. Again and again in the book, the reader is presented with evidence of the expulsion and extraction which are part and parcel of home, yet are so often jettisoned in normative understandings of home in geography and beyond. The book asks much needed questions, without compromise, and not sparing discomfort. It turns homeless studies on their head by shattering the oppositional frames of home and homelessness and centring an anti-capitalist critique of housing. The feminist-routing of the book also weaves through its pages, including the author’s critical and self-reflexive discussions of his own place in geography, and indeed academia more broadly.

For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a ‘must read’ for geographers committed to social justice and advances geography across multiple domains of the discipline, namely social and cultural geography, feminist geography, urban geography and political geography. In my review I have chosen to focus on three areas to comment on.

First, the book renders the violences of home/homelessness stark. The book asks, in this vein, ‘what kind of home are we fighting for?’ – this is a vital question. Michele elaborates on this question on page 7, explaining,

I am writing this book convinced that the only way forward – in the sense of being the only way to stay meaningfully alive – is through a global fight for housing justice. And yet I also believe that a radical fight for housing justice, in order to achieve its goal, needs to recenter the question of the kind of home it is fighting for.

Absolutely. But I want to pick up on a tension, albeit a productive one, that pulsates through the book. Given that a key argument of the book – as I read it – is that ‘home’ also needs to be understood as a fiction, a fallacy and a force in some ways of alienation, where does this leave the push for the right to home? This is a conundrum that invites further articulation and dialogue in geography and urban studies today.

Second, I wanted to turn to Chapter Four of For a Liberatory Politics of Home titled ‘A Local Violence’. The arguments made in this chapter are incredibly powerful and encourage the reader to think critically about the ‘logic of lessness’. Temporary and emergency accommodation is discussed in-depth, including the thorny question of whether investment in better quality provisions of these ‘in the meantime’ actually shores up the existing ‘order’. The ‘meantime’ is not a term used in the book, but what is interesting is how the book questions this meantime as never-ending given the lack of transformative political economy change there is to the system – a system which is undergirding peoples’ chances and ability to access a stable home which can provide ontological security. In this sense, there is mileage for the myriad contributions made in the monograph to be extended still further to explore the ‘meantime’ and its significance in social justice concerns related to home and urban life more widely (Harris and Coleman, 2020; Harris et al., 2019; Sharma, 2014).

Third, in this review I would like to take the opportunity to reflect on Michele’s monograph and its value for tending to my own thoughts around the relationship between home and debt. This relates to research I have been undertaking with Mel Nowicki on the role of debt in family homelessness and life in and beyond temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester (see Brickell and Nowicki, 2023). We found that even when homeless families leave temporary accommodation and are allocated permanent social housing – when their homelessness officially ‘ends’ in a statutory sense – it is not uncommon for debts to continue to impact their domestic lives, and futures, with traumatic effects. As Michele’s book makes clear (in Chapter One, page 6) in respect to homelessness, ‘some people do get out – or so we are told. Some do get better. Some do get back home. This getting home is supposed to be the line of flight, the breakthrough … The End.’

Like Michele, I believe that this ‘end’ is a lie. Reading Chapter Two ‘Expulsion and Extraction’ pushed my thinking on this still further. In discussing the segmentation of different forms of homelessness used by scholars advocating for a global framework for conceptualising and measuring homelessness, Michele provides an insightful critique. He explains on that when refusing to reduce structural violence to different ‘sorts’ of homelessness, he is usually met with the response that, ‘I am avoiding a clear definition … and therefore become unable to do anything about the problem of people sleeping on the street, in temporary accommodation, in the inadequate housing, or in violent households’ (p. 64). But he writes, ‘such a unidirectional way of looking at those life experiences is not the only possibility; it is also possible to refuse segmentation and to address the multiple troubles making up precarious lives as a whole’. I very much agree.

The research I have undertaken espouses the probably unpopular opinion that building more social housing is not the silver bullet to ‘solving homelessness’ in England (Brickell and Nowicki, 2023). Yes, I agree with the mainstream contention that building more social housing is crucial to tackling the debt trap in women’s lives. Having a home is a vital foundation of life that families are urgently waiting for. While increasing the supply of social housing is a priority, my research with Mel shows that social housing will not release the full grip of debt in women’s lives. No area of policy failure is left spared. Housing. Welfare. Employment. Health. Education. Transport. What I think Michele’s book is getting at, and which I agree with, is that to ignore the ‘wider structurations’ of violence and harm ungirding home/homelessness is to continue to dwell with violence and harm. This third and final set of reflections reveals, once more, how For a Liberatory Politics of Home is an ideal resource to think with, and act on, in radical engaged research.

References

Brickell K, Nowicki M (2023) The debt trap: Women’s stories of navigating family homelessness and temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester. King’s College London. Available at: https://sharedhealthfoundation.org.uk/publications/the-debt-trap-report/ (accessed 11 December 2024). Google Scholar

Harris E, Coleman R (2020) The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures. Time & Society 29(2): 604–631. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Harris E, Nowicki M, Brickell K (2019) On-edge in the impasse: Inhabiting the housing crisis as structure-of-feeling. Geoforum 101: 156–164. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Sharma S (2014) In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar.

Commentary III

Erin McElroy, University of Washington, USA

For those familiar with Michele Lancione’s immensely powerful body of scholarship on radical housing politics and the complex borders of inhabitation, perhaps the key themes of For a Liberatory Politics of Home are of no surprise. Yet his book really opens up a window into how politically personal these themes are for Lancione, regarding the migrations and movements not only of his own life within Italy and beyond, but also of his mind. As a whole, the book reads so lucidly and honestly, whether in recounting childhood memories of a dispossessed relative showing up at this home or later memories of eating pizza with his precariously housed friend, Paolo. There are deeply poetic moments throughout the pages, from his witty recounting of ‘whitened—heteronormative—pasta’ (p. 94), to more sombre encounters of lessness and affective becomings. Equally lucid are Lancione’s engagements with theoretical frameworks and trajectories, never in a forced or overdetermined way but rather as if the many scholars and epistemological interventions offered throughout the book are his friends too, dwelling in the urban present, crossing invisible borders and haunting the hallways of this thing we all too often unquestioningly refer to as housing.

Indeed, there is something hauntological about the way in which housing gets troubled throughout the book, for instance in Lancione’s exploration of the extractive spectres of Italian Catholic patriarchal fascism which creep into Italy’s housing present. One of his main interventions renders housing a place of lessness not only for those who have been pushed out of possibilities of being housed, but also, for the housed. In this sense, he theorises housing as a space where the cisnormativities that often accompany life with a roof, rental payments and mortgages stir restless ghosts. In other words, it is not ‘the housing question’ as much as ‘the question of housing’ that he argues we need to further interrogate. As long as housing requires the negation of the unhoused, we remain trapped in an endless cycle of avowal and disavowal. Put differently, why push for futures in which the unhoused are housed when the very bedrock of housing is so violent?

Some of the most compelling stories in the book detail encounters with unhoused and precarious people who refuse to play into salvific paternalistic gestures that render them without agency. Lancione interrogates their interpolation as poor, destitute bodies that housed people, NGOs, or perhaps government policies need to save. Why not instead queer the very notion of housing, and instead consider deinstitutionalising it altogether to fabricate something new – something that does not rely upon its own negation to affirm the moral, juridical and economic aspirations of the modern subject? It is this move towards desinstutionalisation that I find particularly compelling, one that Lancione suggests is necessary before reinstitutionalising something new. Here I began to wonder about certain experiments with housing and land reform that have taken place historically, for instance through property nationalisation during state socialism in Romania (a context that we both have studied), or through the formation of community land trusts or even landback movements in the West. While perhaps inspired by these, instead what Lancione is proposing is a set of guiding principles useful in examining what housing contradictions can be fully disavowed, and which we might continue to navigate.

Lancione’s book begins with Beckett’s (1970) short story of Lessness, which features an array of ways to read 60 sentences revolving around the greyness and perhaps loneliness of being a refugee stranded amongst ruins. As an experimental piece of writing, it useful in allegorising some of the book’s central themes. Yet it also made me think of yet another story, this one more of a speculative fiction. Butler’s (2003) Kindred features a protagonist, Dana, who is forced to time travel back to the antebellum United States South to save her white ancestor Rufus – a vile man who enslaved and violated her great-great-great-grandmother. Dana is thus faced with an incomprehensible task of having to save this villainous ancestor to ensure her own future. Yet on her trip back to the present after having completed her task, Dana loses part of her arm, which gets stuck in the wall of her house. Chakravartty and da Silva (2012) reflect upon this moment in their own essay, seeing her plaster-caught appendage as allegorical of the racial capitalist underpinnings of housing foreclosure, in which the historically dispossessed are placed in impossible cycles of debt to racial capitalist property regimes. Housing and its many hauntings are the problem here, which Lancione’s book helps crystalise and elucidate.

Though the book is largely based upon Italian settings, it nevertheless speaks to and helps illuminate housing’s contradictions beyond. In fact, I was thinking about how crucial Lancione’s intervention is amongst the exhausted narratives of housing on the West Coast of the United States – a place that I call my own ‘home’, and also a region cast by both conservatives and liberals alike as problematically seething with unhoused vagrants. While the conservative US Supreme Court recently criminalised the act of sleeping in public spaces based upon a case in Oregon, liberal cities such as San Francisco are popularly narrativised as ‘failed’ due to high rates of homelessness (Bowles, 2022). This has incited liberal politicians and even the California governor to support violent sweeps, continuing cycles of dispossessing the dispossessed. It has also inspired a Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) pro-growth movement to suggest that the only way out is to increase the housing supply, no matter the type. While these processes are deeply embedded in carceral property logics, their solutions presume housing as we know it to be problem-free.

As Lancione helpfully questions,

Can we house otherness without having to save it, in ways that can radically alter what it means to house and home the world? In other words, can housing be taken into consideration as a gateway for liberatory forms of inhabitation, centred on the affirmative power to change and emancipate life histories, rather than being treated as a technological solution to construct, contain, and police its supposed other? (p. 170)

Lancione’s articulation is crucial here in articulating that housing comes with strings attached, with ghosts embedded in the plaster, and with fascistic and heteronormative visions inscribed on its walls. What does it mean then, to move beyond inhabitation, or to radically inhabit housing? Attempting to guide readers in exploring this question, Lancione opens up space to theorise a housing future yet to come.

References

Beckett S (1970) Lessness. London: Calder & Boyars. Google Scholar

Bowles N (2022) How San Francisco became a failed city. The Atlantic, 8 June. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/ (accessed 11 December 2024). Google Scholar

Butler O (2003) Kindred. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Google Scholar

Chakravartty P, da Silva DF (2012) Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism—An introduction. American Quarterly 64(3): 361–385. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Commentary IV

Saanchi Saxena Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy

‘Hearing from’ the margins of the home

‘There is no home worth going back to’ and the ‘impossible possibility of home’ are the central arguments of Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home (2023), a brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to the fields of urban studies and critical geography. Where the book shines is in its proposal of a radical epistemology that breaks the dichotomy of home and homelessness, reads those occupying the sites of homelessness as performing their own politics of inhabitation, advocates for a structural overhaul of the way we think of housing and housing interventions, and on a broader scale, prompts us to rethink our understanding of urban inhabitation. Reading and thinking with this book has enriched my own research, which focuses on the everyday experiences of women street vendors in Mumbai, a group that occupies the margins of urban inhabitation. Therefore, I believe that the book’s conceptual interventions would be extremely useful to geographers, urban studies scholars and anthropologists working across different precarious urban contexts.

I want to start by highlighting the story of Paolo, a homeless man in Turin, one of Lancione’s close confidantes and friends. His is a powerful, evocative story, and forms one of the cruxes of the book. The refrain ‘What if Paolo does not need to be saved? What if Paolo does not want to be brought back home?’ (p. 187) tells us how people construct their own politics of inhabitation that are, to borrow from Abdoumaliq Simone, ‘beyond capture’ of state policies and dominant imaginaries. Here, Lancione differentiates between classical ethnography and ‘hearing from’, where hearing from becomes an act of epistemic care as well as liberation. Lancione presents Paolo’s story not as an ethnographic piece of data to be mined but as Paolo writing and telling us his story himself. This helps us view urban inhabitants like Paolo as political actors, and challenges the framing of them as manageable or understandable targets. Lancione’s work is a prime example of this epistemology of hearing from the within, writing through the minor, and connecting experiences of embodiment with broader structural formations, and has relevance beyond the streets of Turin where his book is based.

There is another layer here, of a form of inhabitation beyond capture that happens ‘closer to home’, and how what we know as the ‘everyday’ is constituted by the spatial politics of social reproduction. Through an analysis of the micropolitics of inhabitation, Lancione argues that it is precisely through this everyday that certain structural violences are inscribed and reinscribed. This then excavates the various power relations that constitute the performance of politics by urban inhabitants in the margins. The question arises – what are the everyday kinds of social reproduction that are beyond capture and how, at the same time, do they contribute to maintaining systems of violence? This is something that I engage with constantly in my own work on women street vendors, who are similarly ‘trapped’ by these spatial power structures because vending, like all urban informal work in India, is reproduced by caste and gendered labour. Building upon the work Lancione does in uncovering these various intersections is something feminist, anti-caste and anti-race geographers would definitely find worthwhile, even beyond the ambit of urban geography.

Finally, in the section ‘Inhabiting is Always Political’, Lancione conceptualises dwelling as a political act – as a way of meaning-making and as a way to preserve and hold together contested understandings. Here, dwelling becomes a means of making spatial claims by infusing the space with intimacy, connection and feelings of home. He also points out how dwelling, beyond inhabitation, can also bring about the collective transformation of a space, and hold within it the potential to rupture habitual modes of being. To me, this is the main takeaway from the book: that those ‘without’ a space can also create and build a space, and that you do not need to have a home to be a participant in city-making. It is a compelling argument, both politically and epistemologically, as it highlights the power of the intimate knowledge that urban informal groups hold, producing urban space as they use it and live in it, even (or especially) in conditions of extreme precarity. Thus, Lancione’s work enables us to reflect on the act of building of home in the absence of home – what that does to destabilise the category of home and how it might extend its affordance to others as well, beyond the margins of housing and in the city at large.

Author response

Michele Lancione, Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy

For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a study of a relationship: how being at home and not being at home are constituted as part of the same violent (racialised, anthropocentric, patriarchal and heteronormative) function of life in contemporary capitalism (in the West, and in particular in Italy). The issue is not simply to say that the home is ontologically unsafe because it is trapped in racial financial capitalism. At stake is the impossible possibility coming out of such an entrapment. On the one hand, home promises to wrap things permanently up, shelter once and for all, and include things so they cannot spill over. Such a promise is always there: either as an actualised material arrangement in the present or as a projection, an affective promissory attachment for the future yet the come (Anderson, 2023). On the other hand, despite what it promises, home can ever only offer a temporary arrangement, or accommodation: an alignment of things that can suddenly turn ugly without altering the possibility of home to sustain the lure of its original promise. The light goes out – in eviction, in environmental backlash, in household violence – but there is always the promise that home will fix things, that a return is possible, that at home, the light will come back on if only one is able to understand what to adjust.

Colin McFarlane and Ash Amin recall in their contributions to this forum that the impossible possibility of home is grounded on the recursive constitution of that which is not at home. For it is only by assuming that there is an ‘out there’ from which home must protect and to which home offers shelter, that home can speak of its promise of salvation. But such an assumption is not a given fact of life: it is a production, it must be created as such to exist and offer the stand upon which home can be (re)produced. In the book, I present this recursive constitution as a colonial project. To exist, the home requires the constitution of that which is not ‘home’ – nature, social deviancy, the ‘homeless’ – to which it relates violently to take its standing. I discuss the colonial functions of this machine of dwelling using notions of expulsion (the reductive segmentation and production of the other) and extraction (the varied assemblages gaining societal, cultural and economic forms of value from expulsion) in the context of Italy and then specifically at ‘homelessness’ cultural formations and policies in the North Atlantic context.

As Erin McElroy highlighted in their contribution, the ultimate proposition of this book is to queer homing and housing, in at least two ways. First, freeing home from its possible ‘solutions’ is necessary. Given its violent colonial foundation, home cannot be saved but must be burned down. Not adjusted, not fixed. Just burned down. Such freedom, even if attained, will not last long precisely because of the productive and recursive nature of expulsion and extraction (it will be co-opted back into home-as-usual in contemporary racial, financial and heteronormative capitalism). Therefore, the second and fundamental proposition builds on feminist, Black and queer thinking, as well as my own years of housing activism and engagement with houseless people. Home needs to be liberated. Liberation here is a project contra to expulsion and extraction, and capable of devising a beyond. Can we imagine a home that does not require an alterity to stand? To me, envisioning such a home is already present in the desire for habitation articulated by those currently made ‘other’ and pushed into lands of the uninhabitable. It is not that those lands – what we might conceive as the conventional being ‘homeless’ – are the solution to home. Indeed, they are its colony. Rather, it is that within the makings of expulsion and extraction, other assemblages of habitation are also going on, albeit their sense of direction, their propositional politics, is occupied outright by scholarly’s explanatory postures, policy’s frantic search for a ‘fix’ or faith-based’s dreams of redemption.

Liberating home must start from breaking these entrapments, to hear what those who have made less have to say about ‘home’. Perhaps, as Saanchi Saxena also finds in her work with gendered and racialised street vendors in Mumbai, there the desire is not to go back to the given – not to go back to those functions of the homely that have generated the othering in the first place. Perhaps, if one learns to hear from the uninhabitable, a different cartography of habitation emerges. As Sayda Hartman (2018: 468) writes, there one might find a latent history [that] has yet to emerge: A revolution in a minor key unfolded in the city […] driven not by uplift or the struggle for recognition or citizenship, but by the vision of a world that would guarantee to every human being free access to earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

The last passage is crucial, mirroring in a long-standing tradition of anarchist writing on housing (think Ward, 1985): ‘according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations’. But how do we get there? As Amin recalls, indeed, the book does not offer much in terms of mid-ground policy reforms. That is an angle that I did not explore sufficiently. At the same time, the book does not shy away from ‘big-sweep reforms’ that could make life better for the many living at the tail end of home (lessness). One of these is about dismantling and ridiculing the business of homelessness studies and knowledge production. Such an endeavour is only apparently disconnected from the betterment of those lives. Rather than openly tackling the root causes of the problem – a home founded on racial financial heteronormative capitalism – those ‘homelessness industries’ produce the specialist parcellation of misery, which, as Katherine Brickell reminds us in this forum and as evident in her brilliant joint work with Mel Nowicki, at best provides relief but surely does not offer liberation (Brickell and Nowicki, 2023; Gowan, 2010; Roy and Malson, 2019; Willse, 2015). From my situated position within the Academy, that is the big-sweep reform I would like to see: to counter the senseless production of policy recommendations based on what one might call ‘scientific othering’, and, from there, to instantiate a renewed epistemology of homing.

The core of such an epistemology will be to work with the propositional politics emerging from what is currently made less, refusing its colonisation. What might happen if the next social worker or policy maker that we are going to form within our classrooms ends up refusing the medicalisation and othering of their ‘clients’? History has shown that big-sweep reforms can arise from rewiring the epistemological foundation of social welfare and social interventionism (take for instance, as I do in the book, the case of Basaglia and the closing of the asylum in Italy; Basaglia, 1968). Yet, those kinds of reforms need to start from the mundane encounter with that which is made other – with the querying and queering of the framing of that encounter (Amin, 2012). There, as McElroy recalled, the housing question becomes a problem of how we ask the ‘question of housing’. The book is an attempt at exploring that terrain. I want to deeply thank the authors of this forum for their generosity in providing further lines of enquiries to that end.

References

Amin A (2012) Land of Strangers. Oxford: Polity Press. Google Scholar

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