Crisis Urbanism: House and Home

Question 1

How might we conceptualise ‘home’?

Answer 1

Rather than view the home as a fixed, bounded and confining location, geographies of home traverse scales from the domestic to the global in both material and symbolic ways. The everyday practices, material cultures and social relations that shape home on a domestic scale resonate far beyond the household.
(Blunt and Varley, 2004)

Home is made up of complex and contradictory elements.

• domestic labour
• intimacy
• privacy
• safety/comfort
• eroticism
• fear
• control
• violence

Question 2

How does Harvey’s (2003) ‘accumulation by dispossession’ feature in the housing crisis?

Answer 2

When there is a housing crisis, capitalism responds by accumulating more capital (to make up for loss).

Capitalism is in constant need of new spatial ‘fixes’ to resolve 
its crises (the city – and housing – become a key site).

Dispossession and destruction allows capital to renew itself and create surplus value.

Question 3

Difference between politics and Politics?

Answer 3

politics - every power relations

Politics - political party/government, etc

Question 4

Describe evictions.

Answer 4

Evictions have become a commonplace
feature of the contemporary city.
Evictions represent processes that operate across a number of scales from the global to the urban to the intimate.
Evictions depend on the production of particular practices, knowledges, sentiments. Dispossession is an everyday process which unmakes places.