Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar

Abstract

This essay is a response to Michele Lancione’s Housing Futures Essay, which was recently published in this journal. Bleak urban futures and the obscure perspective on housing calls for renewed attention across several disciplines, approaches and geographies. Michele Lancione pleaded to study ‘radical housing’ within everyday practices of dwelling for those living at the margins, where the latter are understood as the site where ‘a politics of life’ emerges from uncanny, uninhabitable places - with explicit reference to the work of Abdoumaliq Simone. Assuming the importance of dwelling and its immanence, can the political dimension ascribed by Lancione to the radical housing approach, be complemented with the affirmative politics of Esposito and Braidotti and Agamben’s forms-of-life? Starting from these questions, this paper aims to engage with Lancione’s dwelling as difference and offer complementary readings suggesting the rubric of ‘inhabitation’ as the result of affirmative daily strategies of learning, navigating and governing the city. By expanding the notion of dwelling to include intersecting forms of caring, repairing and imagining the future, we will substantiate the concept we refer to as ‘inhabiting’ as a relational practice occurring in marginal and fragile environments, constituted by multiple incremental and transformative acts with the ultimate purpose to hold and resist marginalisation.