21 - Housing Struggles: Dwelling in Crisis Economies

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary economic geographies have been profoundly marked by two recent global crises. The first, the 2008 global financial crisis, was first and foremost a crisis of financialization of everyday life, and notably of mortgage debt, which triggered a still ongoing crisis (at the time of writing) of housing affordability and security worldwide, exacerbated by the implementation of austerity measures and neoliberal logics (Rolnik, 2013). The second is the still ongoing (again, at the time of writing) crisis that developed in response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic (see also Chapter 12 in this volume). This one, too, has placed housing and home at the centre, through containments policies and support measures that revolved around home confinement and home-working.

In both cases, policy responses revealed a profound gap between the normative imaginaries of home/work underpinning governments’ approaches, and the economic and dwelling realities of the majority of the world's population, across both Global North and South (Saleem and Anwar, 2020; Vilenica et al, 2020). At the same time, the experience of vulnerable dwellers showed a further retrenchment of processes of residential precarization, through less visible but fundamentally transformative processes of digital control and extraction.

In this chapter, I reflect on the centrality of dwelling to recurring crises for understanding economic geographies of urban living, with a specific focus on less visible practices in global cities. The chapter begins with a reflection on the invisibilization of everyday reproductive activities that informed the pandemic discourse of the economy ‘grinding to a halt’, and its roots in the persistent binarism between economies within and outside the home (see also Chapter 27 in this volume). Challenging normative imaginaries of home, I draw on two ethnographic vignettes to argue for a renewed focus on dwelling as a way of addressing emerging areas of economic geographies, frontiers of extractivism, and their intersection with forms of resistance and self-organization.

Dwelling in the shadow of the economy ‘grinding to a halt’

In March 2020, while many governments began introducing varying degrees of restrictions to everyday productive activities to contain the unknown effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, photographs of deserted cityscapes became viral representations of global economic activities ‘grinding to a halt’ (The Economist, 2020).