Oral Presentation Institute of Australian Geographers & The New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2014

(Un)bounding housing and home: economy, environment, politics (16957)

Nicole Cook 1 , Louise Crabtree 2 , Aidan Davison
  1. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
  2. University of Western Sydney , Sydney, NSW

This paper interrogates housing and home in relation to economies, environments and politics. In doing so it traces connections between the 'structures and practices' of dwelling and wider political and environmental contexts including neoliberalism, colonialism and the anthropocene. Understood as sites and moments within extensive and performative logics of exclusion and inclusion, housing is simultaneously unbound from its discrete materiality and bound to its wider conditions of reproduction. Drawing on contemporary philosophies and geographies of emergence, the paper also foregrounds the protean and experimental character of housing and home as sites of innovation in emergent-although not always progressive-political, economic and environmental systems.