Stay at home! The clear message issued worldwide almost simultaneously in mid-March, urging us to leave home only in extreme need, interrupted our familiar daily routine and straitened our living environment from one day to the next, limiting it to the domestic space available to us. In that time of needs must, domestic space turned almost instantly into an amalgam of activities and routines that had previously been outsourced and were not intended for it, superimposed over those of our companions, family members and flatmates.
“Now the cubicle had contracted”, Elias Canetti’s protagonist Kien observed painfully, after giving up three of his four rooms holding 25,000 books to his wife. In doing so, he had to bid farewell to the pleasure of being voluntarily barricaded in his “residential district”, cut off from the world. The 40-metre walk up and down, the gazes and thoughts drifting through open doors and windows, and the breeze blowing through the rooms were all at an end. The narrowness that entered, “the serious change in his surroundings”, filled him with a miserable feeling of imprisonment.
To what extent we experienced over two months with limited outside time as a staycation (1) or suffering depended mainly on the living space to which we were confined fulltime during this time. Little focused the general public’s attention more than housing and the space we call home, with the presupposition implicit in the across-the-board appeal to “stay at home”. The appeal was the same for everyone, but the realities were very different. Those who were able turned their second residences into temporary homes for the duration. Others were faced with the reality of what happens when infrastructures such as libraries or public services for keeping warm and socialising were closed, or shelter was a shared dormitory representing a high-risk environment. What is the alternative when your only home address is barely comfortable, or when communal living is marked by overcrowding? Whereas public space previously offered necessary emotional compensation and a spatial buffer, going outside now looked set to become a crime. Both the everyday environment experienced by the individual and the available urban space shrank in space and time. This was due firstly to the one-kilometre radius of movement introduced in many places (2), the closing of parks, playgrounds, community gardens and other public spaces, and then to the one-hour time limit or scheduled sport. Suddenly, urban space became a Fata Morgana. The apartment lost its extended living room, stripped of an essential quality and, therefore, somehow significantly devalued. This temporary loss and contraction of available space revealed the widespread reality of uncomfortable, inadequate housing in cities that generally offer their inhabitants only a minimum and lack vital qualities. This is true not just for low-income households, but also to a large extent for people with an average income. What is more, lockdown, with its imposition of indoor time, heightened the misery of poor housing, an outrageous, already apparent state that has become worse in recent decades, to which children are increasingly exposed. The health crisis has not just made poor housing more visible, with economic consequences that threaten to aggravate the situation, it has also highlighted the extent to which housing in general is inadequate for well-being. This is the central question of today: What can we do to change this general absence of quality in housing, and quickly?
The health crisis has not just made poor housing more visible, it has also highlighted the extent to which housing in general is inadequate for well-being. This is the central question of today: What can we do to change this general absence of quality in housing, and quickly?