Housing Studies, Social Class and Being Towards Dwelling

John FlintCRESR, Sheffield Hallam University

Housing Studies Association ConferenceUniversity of York 14-16 April 2010

Outline

• Allen and Webb's critiques

• Housing Research and Working-Class Communities

• A Critique of Relational Frameworks of Housing Consumptions

• Conclusions

Introduction

"We are always willing to make a saint or a prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a bit of advice to the educated."

C.K. Chesterton, 1905 (quoted in Collins, 2004: 277)

Allen and Webb's Critiques

• Allen (2008a;2008b; 2009; 2010a); Webb (2010)• Methodological superiority, based on systematic

methods, claim for special status and dismissal of residents and 'local' knowledge

• Spurious claims and underestimating resident opposition

• No fundamental critique and based on rational -scientific identification of public interest

• Grounded in academics' middle-class habitus, orientation to housing and own lifestyles

Housing Research and Working- Class Voices

• Need for authenticity and legitimisation of marginalised voices (Allen, 2008b: 180; Watt, 2008: 206; Slater, 2006: 749; Martin,2005: 67/86; McCormack, 2009: 410)

• Studies are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture brought into contact with poverty (Chesterton, 1905, quoted in Collins, 2004: 77)

• Schemes of understanding which are not those of residents themselves (Bourdieu, 1984: 373; Charlesworth, 200: 203)

• A phenomenological gap (Martin, 2005: 77)

Interviews

• Social sciences ask questions that are different to the questions (or lack of questions) of residents (Allen, 2009: 66)

• Habitus based on habituation and embodied technique, not cognition (Charlesworth, 200: 295)

• Interviews based on reflexivity and 'reasoned reasons' (Adams, 2006: 515; Callaghan, 2005; Allen, 2009: 66)

Silence and Inarticulacy? 1

"I'm afraid that's too big a question."

"Don't know, really I don't."

"Oh God, I'm no good at answering questions."

Mass-Observation Study of Working ClassHousing in the 1940s (quoted in Kynaston, 2008:

40-46)

Silence and Inarticulacy? 2

"I don't even know how to answer that question"

"I've got no knowledge of what those estates are like, tome they're just estates, I couldn’t compare them"

"I wouldnae say people think about areas in a general way like that, they're no…people dunnae sit and think about what's actually around them, I wouldnae even have thought about it myself if you hadnae asked me if you know what I mean…It's not even an interest until you actually said that to me, it's never been an interest to me."

Joseph Rowntree Foundation Study (2007-2010)

Explaining the Gap

• Middle-class habitus of academics? (Skeggs, 2004: 54; Charlesworth, 2000: 149; Allen, 2008b: 182)

• Social science violates meaning and corrupts phenomena (Allen, 2009: 55; Charlesworth, 2000; 184)

• Dismissal of anything that is opaque to social science, but we cannot open up dwelling without destroying it (King, 2008: 12)

• Projects of 'retrieving the irretrievable' (Reay, 2005: 912)

Filling the Gap?

Academics, along with urban elites "are the

only element in the city's life that sees the

city as a whole …while to Little Sicily or the

world of furnished rooms the city is merely

part of the landscape."

Zorbaugh (1929: 274; on Chicago)• The issue of muteness, silence and inarticulacy

(Charlesworth, 2000: 2-6)• Academics involved in an exercise of 'naming the

world' (McCormack, 2009: 396)

Relational Frameworks of Housing Consumption

• The need to understand working-class being towards dwelling on its own terms and not in relation to middle-class consumption practices (Allen, 2008a 6/195; 2008b: 182)

• Importance of class and studies of middle-class being towards dwelling (Savage et al., 2005; Butler and Robson, 2003; Savage, 2010)

Middle-Class Being Towards Dwelling?

• Unimportance of socially cohesive neighbourhoods; construction of a distinctive lifestyle; attachment to symbolic meanings (Savage, 2010; Savage et al., 2005; Martin, 2005)

• Middle-class play housing market to defend and secure a class position (Allen, 2008a: 101)

• Middle-class mobilise various forms of resource to decipher correct position for them to take and secure it (Allen, 2008a: 7)

The Juxtaposition

Such middle-class being in the world iscontrasted with the immediacy and utility ofa working class experience occurring in the'thick of everyday lives' and orientated to the practical necessities that govern life and its economy of housing consumption (Charlesworth, Allen, 2008a: 8/ 73; Martin, 2005: 77; Oliver and O'Reilly, 2010: 53).

A Partial 'Naming of the World?'

• A misunderstanding of many middle-class individuals' 'being-in the-world' towards housing

• Underestimates the sense of immediacy and practicality in housing practices, which are often characterised by the necessity of responding to changing circumstances, the focus on the utility of housing, in terms of size, amenities, location to family and work and connection to home and neighbourhood, rather than its symbolic or aesthetic value or sense of positioning in a space of positions (Flint et al., 2009).

The Middle-Class 'Project of the Self' (Giddens, 1990)? 1

• Over-estimates the sense of distance, freedom, possibilities, wellbeing and knowledge for many middle-class households whose experience of housing, and particularly moving home, is often one of anxiety, urgency, limited resources, and in some cases, crisis.

• The concept of the mobile, sovereign individual is largely a myth (Shields, 2008: 716)

The Middle-Class 'Project of the Self?' 2

"The middle-class intelligensia assume that its being-

towards-lifestyle is characteristic of the late modern subject

per se when, in fact it is particular to the social and

economic circumstances in which such a devotion to

lifestyle can be reflexively accomplished"

(Allen, 2008b: 182)

"Knowledge derived from social capital ties and

connections allows them [middle-class individuals] to

exactly pick out where they want to live within a middle

class 'project of the self' which…implies possession of a

world that consists of an infinite series of possibilities"

(Allen, 2008a: 65).

The Academic Habitus

• The attachment to the symbolic meanings of a place is a preoccupation of an elite or academic 'being in the world' (Martin, 2005: 85)

• It is academics who conceptualise social classes as occupying 'positions in a space of positions' (Allen, 2009: 73)

• It is an academic, rather than necessarily a middle-class, habitus that operates at a distance

Why?

• Lack of studies of middle-class identities• Weak empirical underpinnings of comparative

studies• Focus on middle-class activity in housing market,

juxtaposed to working-class 'in situ' dwelling• Positions in space of positions more relevant for

those without a home (allocation and homeless policies)

• Immigration and anti-social behaviour: a phenomenological gap for critical gentrification research?

A Second Consequence of the Relational Framework

• Symbolic violence and hegemony (Allen, 2008a: 89)

• Submerged consciousness and adhesion to the oppressor (McCormack, 2009)

• The domination of the dominated that encourages working-class people to have what they do not have, do not want and cannot afford (Allen, 2010a: 27)

The Limits of Symbolic Violence 1

• Many working class households do not aspire to this dominant ideal at all (Allen, 2010a: 27)

• Rejection of owner-occupation (Flint et al., 2009)

• High levels of satisfaction and ontological security (De Decker and Pannecouke, 2004; Mee, 2007)

• Community opposition to HMR and stock transfer

The Limits of Symbolic Violence 2

• Focus on absences, failures and injuries (Strangleman, 2008: 17; Callaghan, 2005)

• Focus on visible sites of interaction (education, urban policy) in the work of Bourdieu etc.

• Transposed so that class 'troubles the soul and preys on the psyche' (Reay, 2005: 924)

• But working class lives often viewed as unproblematic (Stenning, 2008:10)

• Importance of other drivers of orientation towards dwelling (family, community etc.).

• Landscape (physical, social or psychological) is not solely made in the image of capital or elite power (Martin, 2005: 68)

Conclusions 1

• Important contribution of Allen and Webb

• Greater awareness of partiality of 'expert knowledge' (Webb, 2010: 2) and need to make explicit this phenomenological gap (Allen, 2008b: 180)

• Misunderstanding primarily arises from an academic- scientific habitus and the very act of undertaking social science rather than the alleged middle-class position of academics.

Conclusions 2

• What is required is an approach which recognises, and is not afraid of, nuance and contradictions in accounts of social class (Stenning, 2008: 17)

• Critical researchers are involved in a process of 'naming the world'

• Afford equal recognition to the knowledge claims made by others (Allen, 2010b: 6)

Conclusions 3

• Working-class being towards dwelling needs to be understood on its own terms

• But a relational framework that juxtaposes a working-class experience of housing with an overly simplified account of middle-class practices misunderstands many individuals' orientation to their home and neighbourhood.

• Overstating the extent to which symbolic violence or the hegemony of dominant narratives is actually achieved within working-class communities.

Conclusions 4

• Presenting a particular working class being towards dwelling is a crucial project in its own right

• As Davidson (2008: 2402) suggests, nuanced or limited accounts do not diminish the importance of articulating the experience of particular sections of different social classes, or preclude analysis of the injustice of social processes or particular housing policy interventions. In fact, quite the contrary.

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