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Care is a practice and form of labour making human survival and flourishing possible. This Symposium explores the place and work of care within housing movements, asking how care operates as a politics, an ethics, and a set of practices through which tenants survive-and ultimately seek to transform-the structural violence of capitalist housing systems. Situated in US cities with abiding associations with Blackness and indigeneity, papers in the Symposium examine housing movements that take care as the starting point. As we discuss in this introduction to the Symposium, in such movements, care operates as connective tissue across households and modes of difference; challenges relations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that underlie dominant understandings of who deserves and can demand care; and drives calls for public care and experiments with non-propertised forms of ownership. Housing systems are care infrastructures, making housing movements a vital place for care work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractDrawing on new infrastructural scholarship, this paper conceptualises housing as infrastructure, outlining a way forward for housing researchers to draw the concept into their empirical practises. We demonstrate how and why we should research housing as infrastructure, using co-living housing as our empirical touchpoint to develop a framework for infrastructural housing studies. This paper has two parts. First, we identify what it means to conceptualise housing as infrastructure. Infrastructure is: a socio-material system or pattern, relational and generative. Second, we outline some useful vantage points for thinking infrastructurally about housing. We consider affordances, politics and inhabitation as three useful locations to understand the infrastructural work that housing does to order and organise the social world. We suggest thinking infrastructurally about housing can be done by interrogating how the dimensions of infrastructure work to order and organise affordances, politics and inhabitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared housing is an important infrastructure for young single professionals living and working in the city. Co-living is a contemporary shared housing infrastructure. But it certainly is not the first. We advocate for what Flanagan and Jacobs (2019) call taking a "long view" by drawing connections between early 19th-century gentlemen's clubs, mid-19th-century residential hotels and contemporary co-living. We argue each have been dynamic infrastructures of mobility, work, and sociality that make certain practices more or less possible and reflect on how the socio-material form of these infrastructures connects with the infrastructural work it does. We draw on our own research study into co-living, connecting our findings with research on the historical housing types. Our findings show that shrinking private spaces, maximizing productive spaces, and integrating services are strategies that animate the infrastructural work of these housing types. By linking co-living with historical housing types, we demonstrate the importance of taking a "long view" when thinking infrastructurally about novel housing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how people experiencing persistent housing insecurity hold on to or restore ontological security. Conceptually it recognises ontological security as an "ongoing accomplishment" that is "actively sought", and introduces four coping constructs theorised by Giddens as ways that individuals cope with persistent threats to security. The domestic practices of low-income, single older women living in various forms of insecure housing in Australia are the focus. The paper identifies "emotion-focused" and "action-focused" strategies through which women sought ontological security, including efforts to mentally accommodate insecurity, tenancy practices, through which they engaged with housing risk, and the use of storage facilities as holding sites of identity and routine. These strategies resonate with and extend Giddens' four coping constructs to the housing field, reflecting pragmatic acceptance of housing risk, sustained optimism in the face of housing risk, cynical pessimism, and engagement with housing risk. The paper reveals dynamic and fraught relations between home and ontological security that are frequently an exercise in cruel optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic restructuring and welfare reform are driving new forms of urban poverty in the global north. Shadow care infrastructures is a new frame for conceptualising the complex and interconnected practices through which marginalised people seek survival in this context. It remaps welfare landscapes across a continuum that includes formal and informal, established and improvised practice, the not-for-profit sector, informal community networks and exchange and the black market. Conceptually, it centres the care practices that sustain life and the infrastructures that sustain them. Activating a 'shadow geographies' tradition it foregrounds care infrastructures that are necessary, but rarely visible within, welfare discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renters in homeowner societies like Australia, the United States and United Kingdom occupy a complex moral landscape, maligned for failure to achieve homeownership but pivotal to the value of investment properties. Identification of 'good' and 'risky' tenants is an important landlord practice. We investigate how tenants conceptualise and perform the 'good tenant' through research with 36 single older women renting in greater Sydney, Australia: a cohort on the margins of secure housing. The good tenant demonstrates responsibility through paying rent on time and property stewardship (reporting repairs, making home). However, these practices are made necessary and risky through limited tenure security. The emotional and financial risks attending performances of the good tenant drive paradoxical relations; a good tenant is also acquiescent and silent, not reporting property repairs or lapsed leases to avoid rent increases and/or evictions. Variegated performances of the 'good tenant' reflect cultural property norms and valorize the investment function of housing yet could also productively unsettle tenant-landlord relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Despite their ubiquity and significant impact within the house-as-home, pests have largely been absent from discussions of home-making. This article addresses this absence by drawing on depictions of pests [...]

This paper develops knowledge of the logistics of moving house amongst older people living in insecure housing. These people typically do not move once and settle into a new house, but face ongoing moves driven by factors including housing affordability, tenure conditions and eviction. The paper identifies four domains of experience faced by people undergoing cumulative, involuntary residential moves: the material (process of relocating oneself and possessions), economic (costs of moving house), embodied (physical experience) and affective (how relocation is experienced and felt). The logistics of relocation are examined through the experiences of single older women living in insecure housing in the greater Sydney region of Australia. The accounts of these women foreground the costs and challenges of insecure housing that are a consequence of relocation. Conceptually this work contributes to understandings of mobility-based disadvantage in older age through drawing out the ways that the logistics of moving house – of relocating oneself and possessions – contribute in distinct ways to mobility-based disadvantage through risks to identity and senses of home. Empirically it addresses gaps in gerontological and housing scholarship through developing knowledge of the logistics and experiences of ongoing, involuntary residential moves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Motivated by growing policy and research emphasis on the economic care values of housing (which assume homeownership), this paper investigates how housing figures within household care strategies and practices across tenure. We place housing in two broader frames. First, we attend to the care values of housing, conceptualising the purpose and value of housing across tenure through a political ethic of care. Second, we place housing within broader geographical imaginaries of housing and home, attending to how care practices are negotiated within and through the house-as-home. We then bring together two distinct but connected in-depth qualitative case studies, both located in metropolitan Sydney, Australia, to identify the affective, temporal and material dimensions of care and bring focus to the care work and opportunities that owner-occupied, private and social rented housing afford to residents. Tenure intervenes in possibilities for household caring. It is most fully actualised through secure ownership and inhibited for renters and social housing tenants. Evaluating affordances and constraints of tenure and how they drive household care strategies is crucial in a political climate where the care securities of homeownership are prioritised. It demonstrates the limits of liberal care philosophies and raises questions around attributions of care responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financialised capitalism’s proclivity for assets helps explain growing investment into new housing asset-classes, including co-living, Build-to-Rent and Purpose-Built Student Housing. To date, research has focused on institutional and financial settings driving the assetisation of property. Less common is research into the microgeographies of assetisation. In this paper, we contribute to research on the microgeographies of assetisation by examining how households and their inhabitants are actively reworked within co-living housing. Our analysis identifies how households are rendered more investable and profitable, demonstrating how assetisation processes can exceed the bounds of real estate property as an arena of value. Assetisation is intimately navigated in microgeographic sites, with implications for residents’ housing security and domestic experiences. Our analysis draws on research conducted between 2016 and 2022 that charted the emergence, maturation and transformation of the co-living sector in New York City, San Francisco and Australia. The paper identifies the three key practices through which co-living providers realise value from households and residents: (1) Running an asset-light business model, allowing profit from property outside the risks of ownership. (2) Rescripting residents as subscribed members rather than legal tenants. (3) Curating household forms, delivering experiences through hospitality-like services and capitalising on the residents as community members to generate maximum profit. This work supports economic and housing geographers to go beyond conceptualisations of financialisation as a ‘monolithic and inevitable process’, shining a light on microgeographic sites, actors and practices holding up wider financial ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care. Drawing on the recent infrastructural turn in social sciences we understand infrastructures as dynamic patterns that are the foundation of social organization. New infrastructural analyses attend to how infrastructures pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use. We argue that housing patterns care across three domains: through housing materialities, markets and governance. First, we identify how housing patterns the organization of care at a household and social scale. Second, we attend to the relational politics of care through housing, asking how care is ordered through housing and to whose benefit. Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing. This third direction opens a substantively new approach in housing scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage that is constitutive of care. We provoke housing researchers to ask: is this a housing system that cares? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal ideologies and associated market imperatives are widely identified as the predominant sets of ethics transforming social housing in western liberal welfare states. This paper advances a politics of care in social housing, identifying relational caring as an alternative political ethic operating in this space resisting and reworking governing logics. Bringing governmentality informed conceptualizations of resistance together with feminist care ethics the paper makes two key interventions. First, it expands existing knowledge of how housing managers resist power structures within organizations to show that care also sustains resistance to sectoral transformation. Second, it examines how housing managers vest care in market practices. Asking how "caring qualities" may be extracted from market relations, the paper argues that market-driven transformation can, in some circumstances, bolster caring capacity. These ideas are advanced through analysis of staff practices in not-for-profit housing providers in Sydney, Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of "caring with" as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring‐with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring‐with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co‐constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring‐with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring‐with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research. At a time when care is being cast as an individual responsibility, this paper asks what makes care possible. It develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analysis of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking to place care in a sociomaterial, temporal, and spatial frame. The paper theorises the production and translation of care across space and identifies the assemblages that enable future care. Empirically it asks how older women care in precarious housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companion animals are rarely considered in rental policy or research. This absence belies their prevalence and growing centrality within practices of family and home, and persists despite evidence of links between companion animals and rental insecurity. This paper begins to address this gap. Through an online survey and in-depth interviews with people who rented with companion animals in Sydney, Australia, over the 10 years to 2013, the paper identifies connections between pet ownership and rental insecurity, including perceptions about the low availability and poor quality of advertised 'pet-friendly' properties. The paper argues that pet ownership can trigger feelings of rental insecurity, and advocates for inclusion of pet ownership as a variable impacting secure occupancy. It suggests companion animals are an escalating rental risk, their significance to their owners causing some to accept accelerating levels of rental insecurity by keeping pets without landlord knowledge. These experience impact on the ability of renters to feel 'at home' in rental properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dogs are important facilitators of social interaction. However, little attention has been given to the specific mechanisms through which these relations proceed, or to the ways that dogs help to broker, maintain, and even disrupt social relations. This paper addresses this absence through an in- depth qualitative analysis of the everyday experiences of 24 dog owning households who live in apartments in Sydney, Australia. It shows that dogs encourage people to spend more time outside, make people recognizable within their neighborhood, provide a topic of conversation, and actively solicit the attention of strangers. Dogs help make people recognizable and identifiable to others, while also creating social distance. The paper connects to broader literature on neighboring and community practice to show that community relations shaped by dogs involve practices of inclusion as well as exclusion. Exclusion provides an important motivation for new community formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gardens have been considered predominately in terms of a nature-culture binary, with nature positioned as a passive object of human control. Placing the human at the centre of the garden, these perspectives understand this space in terms of human cultures, needs and understandings. This paper critiques these perspectives, questioning whether gardens are ever simply human constructions. Actor-network theory (ANT) provides a framework for this research, which examines human-nature relations through a focus on the material processes of gardening. Drawing on interviews with suburban gardeners in northern Sydney and the analysis of two popular gardening magazines, the research shows that gardening entails an embodied engagement between active human and non-human actors. Involving processes of collaboration, negotiation, challenge and competition, gardening is a dynamic process. Describing human relations with the plants of the garden, this research argues for gardens to be understood as hybrid achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an agenda for a broadened conceptualisation of urban caring within geographical research. We open by identifying three existing domains of urban care research: examining spaces of care, materialities of care, and asking who are the subjects of care? We then synthesise three platforms that can be the foundation of a geographical theory and approach to urban care. Drawing from feminist care research and recent keystone pieces on urban caring, we argue, first, that there is a need for a broadened conceptualisation of urban care that emphasises the universal need for care and care that supports human and non‐human flourishing. Second, we propose an expanded scale of urban care analysis that attends to the ways that lives are lived within and through the city. Third, we open up an analysis of where care is located in cities, arguing for the value of locating urban care beyond interpersonal care and care through welfare, to urban governance and planning, markets, and more‐than‐human materialities. We conclude by conceptualising how care might inform utopian dreamings for the just and caring city. We challenge urban geographers to think through the possibilities of care to transform cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]