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.
Vandeventer, J. S., Lloveras, J., & Warnaby, G. (2023). The Transformative Potential of Everyday Life: Shared Space, Togetherness, and Everyday Degrowth in Housing. Housing, Theory and Society, 41(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2023.2241475