For housing yet to come: Rethinking infrastructures of care as everyday resistance

Keywords: care, infrastructure, affect, everyday resistance, housing, home
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 35

Abstract

In view of the burden of the pandemic culminating in the private home, the aggravating effects of the current housing crisis become evident in the pressure on cities as places of social reproduction. Tenant organizing has further called attention to the intersecting scales of housing as social infrastructure, expressed and produced through everyday practices. In the home, the possibilities to care diversify across scales, from gendered, racialized, and (dis)abled bodies to unequal structures of income and ownership. In the light of a growing interest in infrastructures as socio-material systems of everyday life, I understand housing as an infrastructure of care.
The paper asks how care is articulated through and shaped by housing and in turn how care practices construct lively infrastructures. Rethinking care as infrastructure allows us to consider the reciprocal interactions between care practices, materialities and the housing system. I argue that infrastructures as socio-material systems can be produced and appropriated through everyday practices of care and therefore contribute to an understanding of home-making as everyday resistance in the neoliberal city.
The paper approaches infrastructures of care through the experiences of female, older renters in the private rental market in East Germany. With biographical interviews and collective mapping, I want to make care visible as affective infrastructure of urban dwelling.