Routledge Focus on Housing and Philosophy
2 total works
If we do stop to think on housing, what do we see? What is housing and what does it do? These seem deceptively simple questions, but they are often left unanswered. The reason for this is that a lot of discourse on housing is really a concern for policy-making and the critical evaluation of existing policies. Discourse, is not, properly speaking, on housing at all. It is concerned with provision, distribution and access, but this thinking on housing stops at the front door. It is only concerned with what is actually external to housing.
But for most people, housing already exists and they have access to it. Housing is not then about policy, but about how we can use what is a complex object in a manner that allows us to live well. Housing, for most of us, is about what we do when the front door is firmly shut and we are free from the external world.
These essays explore this idea of housing as an object that exists for use. Housing is pictured as an object that contains activity. These pieces look at what we do with housing once we have it and so provides a necessary underpinning for any understanding of why housing is important.
A further purpose of these pieces is to present different ways of thinking and writing on housing. It is an attempt to show that housing is a suitable topic for philosophical discourse. It is suggested that we can and should seek to establish a philosophy of housing, rather than just relying on the traditional social sciences.
This book consists of a single essay that speculates on the question what is housing?, and its opposite question, what is not housing? The essay is organised around two distinct discourses around which housing can be framed. The first, which is the dominant discourse, is what I term policy thinking. This is where housing is seen solely in terms of policy formulation and action. The second discourse is private dwelling, which describes housing in terms of a private space used by households. Private dwelling might be seen as a product of policy, but, in actuality, it precedes policy thinking in being the very purpose of policy. Having made this distinction between policy thinking and private dwelling, and so stated in principle what housing is, the subsequent sections of the essay explore the nature of private dwelling in more detail and so substantiate the distinction between the two forms of discourse.