The transformative potential of everyday life: shared space, togetherness, and everyday degrowth in housing

Vandeventer, James Scott ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9712-1479, Lloveras, Javier and Warnaby, Gary ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6696-6671 (2024) The transformative potential of everyday life: shared space, togetherness, and everyday degrowth in housing. Housing, Theory and Society, 41 (1). pp. 69-88. ISSN 0281-5737

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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.