The Transformative Potential of Everyday Life: Shared Space, Togetherness, and Everyday Degrowth in Housing

Abstract

This paper proposes that everyday life in housing contains the possibility to shape and transform its material, cultural, and social conditions.Mobilizing a materialist ontology and insights from human geography, we examine how shared spaces manifest practices of togetherness which prefigure the enactment of socioecological degrowth.We draw on ethnographic fieldwork on a housing estate in Manchester (UK) to identify practices that characterize everyday housing geographies, including reappropriation, commoning, accepting limits, and territorializing tendencies.These constitute a therapeutic assemblage, facilitating wellbeing while simultaneously enfolded with(in) the political possibilities being realized on the estate to form a contingent, yet durable, instantiation of everyday degrowth.We thus contribute to revealing how transformative degrowth politics are sustained in everyday housing contexts.