Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar

Abstract

Bleak urban futures and the obscure perspective on housing calls for renewed attention across several disciplines, approaches and geographies. Michele Lancione (2019) recently pleaded to study 'radical housing' within everyday practices of dwelling for those living at the margins, where the latter are understood as the site where 'a politics of life' emerges from uncanny, uninhabitable places -with explicit reference to the work of Abdoumaliq Simone. Assuming the importance of dwelling and its immanence, can the political dimension ascribed by Lancione to the radical housing approach, be complemented with the affirmative politics of Esposito and Braidotti and Agamben's forms-of-life? Starting from these questions, this paper aims to engage with Lancione's dwelling as difference and offer a complementary readings suggesting the rubric of 'inhabitation' as the result of affirmative daily strategies of learning, navigating and governing the city. By expanding the notion of dwelling to include intersecting forms of caring, repairing and imagining the future, we will substantiate the concept we refer to as 'inhabiting' as a relational practice occurring in marginal and fragile environments, constituted by multiple incremental and transformative acts with the ultimate purpose to hold and resist marginalization.

UNRAVELLED HOMES: Forced Evictions and Home Remaking in Jakarta

“…Studies that explore informal settlement eviction and its political eff ects risk reducing homes to mere physical houses and viewing eviction as the penultimate expression of forceful ambitions for modernization, thereby ignoring the plights of evicted residents who were resettled. Furthermore, such an approach to the material condition of dwellings occludes a more encompassing debate over homemaking and unmaking, that is, the politics of inhabitations and of the various ways of being in the city that elides reification and fixed categorizations (Lancione, 2020 ;Boano and Astolfo, 2020 ). Eviction and rusunawa should be considered part of the lexicon of the state, which declares its own sanctioned model for living and being in the world while muffl ing the alternatives.…”

Borderzone Departure Cities: Jumping‐Off Urbanism of Irregular Migration on the Edges of Europe

“…Inhabitance, suggests Butler (2012:116, 126), is indeed performed by “active and meaningful participation in social life that flows from the right to use urban space”, with the “politics of inhabitance” being “attempts to reappropriate space through self‐managed alternatives”. Rolnik (2014:294) also sees inhabitation as fundamental to inclusive urban life, arguing that the “condition of inhabitance” is at the “core of all ‘right to city’ urban struggles” (see also Boano and Astolfo 2020). Urban inhabitation performed by irregular migrants through autonomous spaces could therefore be seen as a political act claiming inclusion while working against the state's exclusionary bordering apparatuses.…”

Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice Making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice , by Luce Beeckmans, Alessandra Gola, Ashika Singh, and Hilde Heynen (Eds), 2022, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 425 pp., $69.50 (paperback), ISBN 978 94 6270 293 6 (paperback)

“…For a deeper analysis of migrants' spatial and architectural agency in the process of homemaking it is particularly interesting to look at Lozanovska's recent book on Migrant Housing (2020), in which she elaborates on Tadao Ando's (1991) idea that the process of inhabitation involves 'battles' with the house. Whereas Ando's notion of 'battling' relates to how clients often do not feel at home in architect-designed houses, Lozanovska uses the concept to explain how embodied dwelling habits (or habitus) that migrants bring with them often do not 'fit' with local housing forms in immigrant cities (see also Boano & Astolfo, 2020). In the subsequent physical 'battling' between migrants and houses, Lozanovska not only considers the agency of the migrant but, by referring to the psychoanalyst theories of Slavoj Zizek (2006), she also conceptualises the house as an active agent that draws the migrant into action, which is in line with Bruno Latour's concept of actant (1999).…”

“…She wishes to sever domesticity from its conformist overtones and to kill the Angel once and for all -not, however, by shunning houses and housekeepers altogether, but rather by valuing feminine domestic practices that also can be lived and cherished outside the heterosexual norm and outside patriarchy (p. 3). Critical geographers and urbanists are likewise rethinking 'radical housing' (Lancione, 2020) and 'practices of inhabitation' (Boano & Astolfo, 2020) in order to strip the idea of 'dwelling' from its Heideggerian conservative overtones, and to open up these concepts in order for them to include liberation from oppression and care for the planet. Indeed, these critical interpretations take their cues from marginalised urban practices, where people are inhabiting places that seem uncanny and uninhabitable from a mainstream point of view.…”