Housing Studies

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Housing: an infrastructure of care

Emma R. Power & Kathleen J. Mee

To cite this article: Emma R. Power & Kathleen J. Mee (2019): Housing: an infrastructure of care,
Housing Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2019.1612038

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HOUSING STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2019.1612038

Housing: an infrastructure of care

Emma R. Powera and Kathleen J. Meeb
a
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia; bDiscipline of
Geography and Environmental Studies, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of
Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this article, we conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of Received 20 June 2018
care. Drawing on the recent infrastructural turn in social sciences Accepted 23 April 2019
we understand infrastructures as dynamic patterns that are the
KEYWORDS
foundation of social organization. New infrastructural analyses
Housing; home; care;
attend to how infrastructures pattern social life and identify the infrastructure; governance;
values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)produc- materiality
ing social difference through use. We argue that housing patterns
care across three domains: through housing materialities, markets
and governance. First, we identify how housing patterns the
organization of care at a household and social scale. Second, we
attend to the relational politics of care through housing, asking
how care is ordered through housing and to whose benefit.
Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing.
This third direction opens a substantively new approach in hous-
ing scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage
that is constitutive of care. We provoke housing researchers to
ask: is this a housing system that cares?

1. Introduction
Domestic houses are hubs of care practices and relations. These range from the often
intensive and intimate labour of child and elder care to housekeeping and self-care.
The domestic house is also an anchor for community-based caring practices, as, for
instance, neighbours keep an eye on each other’s homes, care for pets and children
and support older neighbours to age in place. Existing analyses show the profound
gendering of domestic care work (Tronto, 1993; Kittay, 1999; Lynch, 2014). There are
also significant bodies of work examining the interpersonal, material, spatial and tem-
poral dynamics of care within the private home, and which foreground how care
practices are shaped, and in turn inform, the socio-material and socio-temporal
dimensions of home (Dyck, 1990; Dyck et al., 2005; Milligan, 2009; Hale et al., 2010;
Twigg, 2000; Blunt & Dowling, 2006; Hayden, 1981, 1986). Collectively these bodies
of work identify the domestic home, firstly, as a central location for care work, and
secondly, as a space and locus of meaning that informs the performance of care.

CONTACT Emma R. Power e.power@westernsydney.edu.au Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney
University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

However, they also point to a broader articulation between care and housing that
remains substantively under conceptualized: the degree to which housing (both indi-
vidual houses/homes and the broader housing system) articulate with care, supporting
or hindering the capacity of households to care. In this article, we propose a new
conceptual framework for understanding these connections, arguing that housing is
an infrastructure of care.
Informed by the recent ‘infrastructural turn’ (Amin, 2014), we conceptualize infra-
structures not as pre-figured objects or necessarily public, capital goods, but as
dynamic patterns that are the foundation of social organization (Star, 1999). We posit
that housing patterns care across three central domains, considering how care is itera-
tively shaped through housing materialities, markets and governance. Understanding
infrastructures as sociotechnical systems, new infrastructural analyses attend to how
infrastructures pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded
into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use. To think housing
this way we ask, firstly, how does housing pattern the organization and practice of
care across scales? Housing as care infrastructure, we argue, dynamically structures
the possibility of care giving and receiving from the individual to the household and
social scale. As housing systems change so to do possibilities for care. Second, we
consider the relational politics of care through housing, considering how housing sys-
tems create difference in care opportunities according to social position. This is to
question how care is ordered through housing, to what effect and to whose benefit.
Third, we consider where and how care is located in housing. We expand beyond
analyses of housing as a location of household care work, to consider the operation
of care in the broader housing system, identifying how care (and neglect) flows
through housing materialities, modes of governance including the work of policy
agents, and housing markets. This opens a substantively new direction in housing
scholarship, identifying housing as a sociomaterial assemblage that is constitutive of
care. We conclude with a provocation, asking how housing might be reworked to be
a more equitable care infrastructure.
Limited knowledge of the articulation between housing and care reflects two sig-
nificant research gaps. First, the absence of housing as a consideration within critical
care research (see for example Cantillon & Lynch, 2016; Kershaw, 2005; Sevenhuijsen,
1998; Tronto, 1993, 2013; Kittay, 1999). While domestic care has been a primary con-
cern within this literature, and the home appears as a container for this work, there
has been little detailed consideration of how housing shapes care practice. Second,
the conceptual split between scholarly studies of housing and home means that care
has not been a concern of most housing research. This schema has seen housing mar-
kets and supply, financial security and housing governance examined within housing
research, while intimate domestic practices, including care, have been a concern of
work on home (Jacobs & Smith, 2008; Smith et al., 2004; Smith, 2005, 2008, are
important exceptions). The framework that we propose in this article seeks to forge
connections between care, housing and home through centring care within an ana-
lysis of the house-as-home.
Limited philosophical and political conceptualizations of the connections between
housing and care also make the caring role of housing less visible. We focus our
 HOUSING STUDIES 3

discussion in this article on traditions in western liberal welfare states such as

Australia, Canada, the US and UK. In these contexts, the privatism of both care and
home is a central, and mutually reinforcing, feature of philosophical and political
thinking. Understandings of care as a private domestic practice have historically sup-
ported the absence of care as a public political concern (Tronto, 2013). The imagined
privatism of home has reinforced this construction, rendering domestic care invisible
within the public political imagination and prioritizing the creation of housing and
housing-connected policy that does not ‘interfere’ in everyday domestic practice. The
privatism of care also supports a connection between care and dependence, with care
conceptualized as the province of the needy and vulnerable. Able-bodied adults are
assumed to meet their needs privately (including through housing choice), while
those who fail to do so are constructed as having failed in their responsibility for
self-care. The marketization of care and housing intersects with these discourses in
significant ways, driving an understanding of care as a market good and informing
growing political emphasis on home as a privatized asset base for funding welfare
needs across the life course (Tronto, 2013; Smith, 2008). The perceived privatism of
care in liberal and neoliberal traditions obscures relational caring practices and the
role of housing systems in care from the political – and research – imagination
(Lynch et al., 2009). It is these connections that are elucidated through our conceptu-
alization of housing as an infrastructure of care.
To conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care involves, ‘making visible
neglected activities we want to see more “valued”’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 12).
At a time when housing and care are being collectively reworked through neoliberal
market logics (Smith, 2005) reconceptualizing housing through an ethic of care is an
effort to make visible, re-vision and re-value the caring possibilities and constraints of
housing, to ask how housing systems enable or constitute a barrier to relational care
within households and understand the ‘divergent modes of valuing care’ that operate
through housing (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 12, and see also Harding et al., 2017).
These are political questions about the ways that care is imagined and patterned
through housing systems.
In the following section, we introduce our infrastructural approach and then hous-
ing as an infrastructure of care. We next re-read existing housing scholarship through
an infrastructural lens whilst identifying new directions for housing research that
emerge through this conceptual focus. We draw the threads of this work together in
Section 3 where we consider the implications of our infrastructural re-reading of
housing and care. We conclude by exploring how housing systems might better sup-
port the work of care.

2. Infrastructural turns
Thinking about housing as an infrastructure has currency in Australia, our research
location, at the moment. Researchers at AHURI (Australian Housing and Urban
Research Institute) are conducting a multi-phase inquiry into whether social housing
should be considered an infrastructure (AHURI, 2018); Jenny Leong, a Greens
Member of the NSW state government recently argued for the need for ‘a shift in
4 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

thinking’, ‘which would see public housing treated as an infrastructure investment

much like public hospitals and transport’ (Razaghi, 2018); and prominent economist
Saul Eslake gave a presentation in June 2018 on housing as an economic infrastruc-
ture. The attention paid to the notion of housing as an infrastructure is a result of
increasing concern among many commentators about a housing crisis in Australia,
with falling rates of home ownership, increasing housing stress, particularly for low-
income households in the private rental market, and rising rates of homelessness.
According to Berlant,
at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch
has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition,
a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. (Berlant,
2016, p. 393)

Calls to consider housing as an infrastructure turn on efforts to revalue social

housing as a public asset.
To think about housing as an infrastructure is, perhaps, controversial. As
Graham & Marvin (2001) observe, infrastructure has normatively been reserved as
a descriptive for networks that ‘integrate’ urban spaces. Transport networks, water
and electrical grids, telephone networks and streets that ‘bind cities, regions and
nations into functioning geographical or political wholes’ (Graham & Marvin, 2001,
p. 8) are differentiated from ‘point-specific urban services like shops, banks, education
and housing’ (p. 9) in understanding infrastructure. More recently, researchers have
differentiated between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure. The former servicing economic
needs, while the latter – libraries, schools, theatres, museums, parks and so on –
support the ‘health, education and cultural standards of the population’. (Fourie,
2006, p. 531). Binding these forms of infrastructure is their public utility as ‘capital
goods’ that have ‘some public use’. (Fourie, 2006, p. 531). Recent examples operation-
alizing these understandings of infrastructure include Marshall & Cowell (2016) and
O’Brien & Pike (2019). It is this conceptualization of infrastructure – a public, capital
investment with a claimed public benefit – that appears to underpin the recent calls
in Australia to think about housing as infrastructure.
Our work in this article is allied with what Amin (2014) terms the ‘infrastructural
turn’. This turn is characterized by understanding infrastructures as sociotechnical
tools and systems that organize and pattern the possibilities of urban social life
including, we add, care (Amin, 2014, p. 138). New infrastructural analyses question
how infrastructures co-constitute urban social life, making it clear that sociality
is ‘never reducible to the purely human alone’ (p. 138). They also attend to the mul-
tiple social, cultural, corporate, and so on, interests that are selectively and politically
encoded into the functioning of infrastructures, (re)producing social difference as
they are incorporated into everyday routine. Infrastructures include:
physical and immaterial elements, usually intended to operate in the background, and
[that] is intended to facilitate living and activity: in some cases, for the well-being of a
population public good, social demand, in others, the profitable activity of businesses.
What this framing makes clear is that the interest in infrastructure applies not only to
technology or to literal immaterialized objects; it also includes a sense of systems,
management, and energy, as well as planning and design—hence, discourse, symbols,
 HOUSING STUDIES 5

and, arguably even affect. In many situations, these systems provide the structures on
which sociality hangs (Wilson, 2016, p. 273–274).
Berlant (2016, p. 393) emphasizes this (re)productive work, arguing that:
infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living
mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food
chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms, all the systems that link
ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation. (Berlant, 2016)
These new conceptualizations which see infrastructures as dynamic patterns under-
pinning the organization of social life are the starting point of our conceptualization
of housing as an infrastructure of care. We draw particular inspiration from three
lines of recent infrastructural inquiry.
First, there is growing interest in how infrastructures continuously structure social
life (Latham & Wood, 2015). The dynamic patterning of social form brings a for-
ward-looking temporality to these analyses. Epistemologically this requires a focus on
world making, on what infrastructural forms do in context and in relation to specific
sets of actors and practices. As Star (1999, p. 380) argues, ‘infrastructure is a funda-
mentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized
practices’. Here, Star (1999) differentiates the cook for whom water systems are infra-
structures that support the production of dinner, from the plumber for whom water
systems might be an object of repair. At the same time, Star is concerned with the
practices that infrastructures make possible. Some objects fail as infrastructures if
they are too difficult to use or integrate into existing practices and/or are not suffi-
ciently appealing to transform practice. Others become invisible as they integrate
more fully into the background of everyday life.
Second, there is growing interest in the relational politics of infrastructural doings,
of how infrastructures both order and create difference. Recent works consider, for
instance, how infrastructures both enable and limit activity according to social position
and modes of inhabitation (Latham & Wood, 2015; Star, 1999). While infrastructures
may enable some, they constitute a barrier for others. As Amin (2014, p. 139) argues,
these differences and divisions are [ … ] scripted into the workings of infrastructure: the
rules and tariffs of supply, the socio-spatial decisions of providers, the selectivity scripted
into software calculations of allocation [ … ].
Difference is intentionally and incidentally scripted through the normative production
of dominant infrastructural forms, further marginalizing bodies and practices that dif-
fer from the norm. Infrastructures incorporate social concerns and ways of doing in
their structures whilst also giving shape to social organization. Difference in access,
use and adaptability are the foundation of the politics of infrastructure, opening con-
sideration of how practices and infrastructures are iteratively negotiated.
Third, there is growing attention to infrastructures as sociomaterial systems that
can exceed human control, exerting diverse pressures on human bodies, identity,
activity and affect in expected and unexpected ways (e.g. Amin, 2014; Bissell, 2014).
They are systems that require care through maintenance and whose breakdown can
significantly rework social organization (e.g. Kaika, 2004; Bennett, 2010). At the same
time, infrastructures never simply determine social practice. Instead, individuals and
6 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

groups can find space within infrastructures that were designed for different purposes
or with exclusion in mind (Latham & Wood, 2015). This can involve accommodation
to or adaptation of infrastructural forms as well as prompting the emergence of new
practices and politics as infrastructures are reimagined and reinvented (Amin, 2014;
Meehan, 2014). In Meehan (2014), householders experimentally invent household-
scale infrastructures to regain control over water capture and supply, while in Amin
(2014, p. 156) informal infrastructural development not only meets the needs of those
shut out of dominant modes of supply, but also reduces the power of the powerful
‘by adding more modes of organization and action into the political arena’.
Infrastructures are thus not simply enabling or limiting but can also become sites for
political contest and change.

2.1. Infrastructures of care

Our contribution in this article is to build on the infrastructural turn to theorize
housing as an infrastructure of care. Infrastructures of care are the infrastructural
forms that pattern the organization of care within society, ‘the more or less embedded
“tracks” on which care may run, shaping and being shaped by actors along the way’
(Danholt & Langstrup, 2012, p. 515). Our focus on housing is grounded in feminist
care ethics and related efforts to excavate the ‘infrastructures of everyday life’, the
‘material and socio-cultural support structures’ that enable the accomplishment of
daily domestic routines (Gilroy & Booth, 1999, p. 309). To make visible, these infra-
structures is a political move that entails recognizing the importance of care. As
Gilroy & Booth (1999) argue, these sorts of infrastructures have long been excluded
from infrastructural studies.
Grounded in feminist care ethics, we understand care as:
a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair
our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies,
our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-
sustaining web. (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40)
These ethics foreground care as a relational practice, recognizing that care is cen-
tral to human existence and vital to the maintenance of life. As Puig de la Bellacasa
(2017, p. 156) argues,
for humans – and many other beings – to be alive, or endure, something, somebody,
must be taking care, somewhere. One might reject care in a situation – but not
absolutely, without disappearing.
Our interest is how housing systems organize the possibilities of care giving and
receiving at a household and social scale.
We start then with the necessity of care and with the understanding that although
people require different degrees of care at different times and in different places,
everyone is involved in the giving and receiving of care across the life course
(Tronto, 1993). We recognize, however, that care entails diverse practices and feel-
ings. It can be connected with ‘“feel good” or “nice feelings”’ but is not reducible to
these (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 147). Indeed, at times care involves feelings of
disgust and repulsion and can entail violence and oppression for both carer and cared
 HOUSING STUDIES 7

for (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Raghuram et al., 2009; Robinson, 2001). Questions of
power and difference are therefore central to analyses of care.
Our second starting point is to recognize that care is a relational process, an activ-
ity and moral practice or disposition that involves ‘reaching out to something other
than the self’ (Tronto, 1993, p. 102) and which drives action rooted in ‘the concerns
and needs of the other’ (Tronto, 1993, p. 105). It is a feature of interpersonal rela-
tions as well as set of practices and ethics that can operate within institutions and
through social policy (Haylett, 2003; Kershaw, 2005; Sevenhuijsen, 2003; White, 2000)
Care is not just necessary, it is a practice that holds people in relations of inter-
dependence across the life course. The relational nature of care is, however, invisible
within hegemonic liberal and neoliberal philosophies. Neo/liberal care philosophies
instead understand care as a private practice for which autonomous and rational indi-
viduals are responsible and capable. These understandings have far reaching implica-
tions for the visibility and valuing of relational care work, the making of social policy
and organization of social welfare, as we explore later. Our third starting point is to
recognize care as a sociomaterial practice that takes place in conjunction with actors
that are not always human. These actors shape the nature of care relations and, in
short, make care possible (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Power, 2019). From these start-
ing points, we argue that care motivated housing analyses must consider the organ-
ization of housing and care: the forms of care that are sustained through the
organization of housing as well as what forms of housing are valued and sustained
through particular acts of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).
Infrastructural analyses and care ethics come together in this article to support
three central lines of investigation. First, to bring infrastructural studies to bear on
questions of care is to ask how infrastructural forms shape the possibility of care,
supporting or inhibiting the relational interdependence that is the foundation of
human life. We build here from recognition that care is given, received and made
possible in conjunction with nonhuman actors. Danholt & Langstrup’s (2012) infra-
structural analysis, for example, shows how medical care is advanced with an assem-
blage of actors including medications, medical aids, doctors, telephones and
pharmacies. Their work is concerned with how the ‘ongoing enactment’ of these
medical infrastructures enables ‘caring spaces and caring selves’ as well as giving rise,
at times, to neglect (p. 516). We draw also on analyses that demonstrate how objects
shape caring potential and practice. Waitt & Harada (2016), for instance, describe
how the culturally privatized space of the family car shapes the enactment of family
caring, while Clement & Waitt (2017, 2018) describe the emergence of a ‘mother
child pram assemblage’ that enables mobile mothering. We attend to housing as a
sociomaterial system that patterns the possibility of care, considering how housing
materialities, markets and governance organize care giving and receiving. In doing
this we work across conceptualizations of housing and home, moving beyond a separ-
ation that has characterized much housing research (Jacobs & Smith, 2008).
Second, we ask how care circulates through infrastructures and how care is trans-
lated through housing as an infrastructure of care. This line of enquiry brings two
developments in care thinking to bear on infrastructural analyses. It moves, first,
beyond an emphasis on interpersonal practices of care taking place within households
8 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

to recognize care as an ethic that can be incorporated into professional practice

(Askew, 2009) and shape institutional practices including policy making (Sevenhuijsen,
2003). It entails recognition that care can inform ‘“caring” public policy’, which sup-
ports the development of ‘institutional context[s] that facilitate the work of care’
(White, 2000, p. 1). It picks up, second, recent interest in the ways that care circulates
through the material world. Care, like neglect, circulates ‘not necessarily morally or
intentionally, [but] in an embodied way, or simply embedded in the world, environ-
ments, infrastructures that have been marked by that care.’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017,
p. 121). Together these integrated lines of care analyses raise questions about how care
(and neglect) flows through housing systems. This is to ask questions about the care
functions of housing itself: of how care informs the constitution of housing systems as
well as the ways that care flows, intentionally and unintentionally, through housing
materialities, markets and governance (e.g. see Power & Bergan, 2018, on the integra-
tion of relational and neoliberal care ethics in social housing).
Third, and imbricated across the first two lines of enquiry, we consider the rela-
tional politics of care infrastructures. Infrastructures differentiate access along lines of
social difference and ‘relations foster care for some things rather or more than for
others’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 166). This entails questioning how housing
materialities, markets and governance shape and differentiate the giving and receiving
of care: of who is imagined as care giver and receiver and the conditions under which
care is given and received. Differences in access to care along the lines of race, class,
gender and age deserve further attention as we discuss below.
To conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care is not to assert a naturalized
or simple relationship between housing and care or to assume that domestic care is
done well. It is instead to recognize that in the western liberal welfare states there are
cultural, practical and political connections between housing and care. Domestic
housing is the normative site of essential everyday care work and it can be culturally
and practically difficult to meet many basic care needs in the absence of housing. We
are motivated by the expanded analytical and political possibilities for understanding
housing and home that come from making visible the caring and infrastructural
capacities of housing. Such an analysis, we argue, sheds new light on the failures of
the housing system to provide environments appropriate for care and opens the pos-
sibilities for new directions in housing policy.

3. Housing as an infrastructure of care

In the remainder of the article, we bring an infrastructural lens to existing work on
housing, home and care, identifying how housing materialities, markets and govern-
ance pattern the organization of care. We attend also to the relational politics of care
through housing and identify directions for future research.

3.1. Materialities
More than a container within which people live and practice care, housing actively
shapes inhabitance (Dowling & Power, 2012; Miller, 2002). Housing size, design,
 HOUSING STUDIES 9

layout and fabrication inform how housing is lived by its residents and, we argue, the
performance of housing as an infrastructure of care. The works we re-vision through
our infrastructural lens in this section contribute an understanding of how housing
materialities pattern the giving and receiving of care. They also raise broader ques-
tions about the care work of housing, foregrounding housing materialities as agents
that shape possibilities for care along lines of social difference.
The spatial and gendered politics of domestic care are materially consolidated in
the construction of home as a private, self-contained space. The replication of laun-
dries and kitchens across individual homes is an ‘embedded track’ of housing infra-
structure that reinforces care as a household scale activity. These design practices
expand temporal demands on women’s time and are a material foundation of the
gendered privatism of care (Hayden, 1986). However, housing does not determine
care practice. As infrastructural studies show, there is need to understand how people
use and find space within infrastructures designed for different purposes (e.g. Latham
& Wood, 2015). Dwelling in home entails processes of accommodation with the
housing structure, as residents adapt their home to suit their needs and alter their
practices to suit their accommodation (Miller, 2002). Domestic care practices require
similar negotiations with material infrastructures that are more or less supportive of
household needs. These practices speak to the emergent politics of domestic care and
the potential for householders to remake dominant orders of privatized, gendered
caring through reworking housing.
Studies of housing as an infrastructure of care can illuminate how care is negoti-
ated within normative housing design. While framed in very different ways, the work
of path breaking feminist housing researchers such as Ruth Madigan, Moira Munro,
Susan Smith (Madigan et al., 1990) and Sophie Watson (1988) alerted researchers to
some ways that housing patterns care. For example, Watson (1988, p. 24–25)
identified the implications of housing design for women’s domestic caring labours:
Although the sexual division of labour is embodied in the design of housing, this does
not imply that housing suits women’s needs in their domestic role as housewife and
mother. Women, particularly black women, rarely have a say in the design process and
represent a small minority of architects and planners. Yet it is women who bear the
brunt of high-rise flats, estates with no safe play areas for children, noise, vandalism and
inadequate access to local services and transport. Cramped kitchens, thin walls, dark and
dangerous alleyways and stairways and other consequences of low-cost or ill-thought out
construction make domestic labour and childcare more difficult and time-consuming.
More recently Dowling (2008), considers the inhabitation of opened planned
design, an infrastructure for ‘practical living’ that placed modern housewives and
familial caring at the centre of post-war domestic housing (Lloyd & Johnson, 2004).
Mothers in Dowling’s (2008) research experienced open planned housing
ambivalently. While many valued how open planned design organized everyday care,
such as the capacity to supervise children while undertaking housework, for others it
provoked concern. These women re-worked the house, moving furniture, for
instance, to enclose children and mess. Through on-the-go adaptations women nego-
tiated mothering identities and practices, adapting normative care infrastructures to
household needs.
10 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

Related work, more overtly focused on care, explores the embodied inhabitation of
housing in contexts of disability and ageing. For people with disability, normative
housing design can be a care barrier. Imrie’s (2004) participants found self-care and
care for others challenging and undermining of self and identity because normative
housing design failed to match bodily needs or facilitate the autonomy and control
associated with home and social identities like mothering. Similarly ageing bodies and
design may not align, reducing the capacity to self-care in later life (Milligan, 2009).
While some can accommodate care within housing, for others the normative infra-
structural patterning of housing is disabling. As Star (1999, p. 380) argues, ‘One per-
son’s infrastructure is another’s [ … ] difficulty’.
Alternative housing design may foster different caring patterns. Hayden (1981,
1986) identifies experimental housing that has (or may have) fostered communal
childcare and domestic work, from materialist feminist designs of the 1800s to
Kaserville, an industrial town supporting women’s work during World War II
through on-site childcare, cooked food services and public transport. Crabtree (2006,
p. 720–721) similarly describes the materialities of provisioning in ecohousing, with
more communal, meeting, economic and sustainability spaces thus,
The focus is primarily on more community-oriented and supporting living
arrangements balancing household and community life through physical and
social mechanisms.
Such designs provide an infrastructure for alternative patterns of everyday living
(Gilroy & Booth, 1999) and, we argue, care. However, despite collectivising caring,
these designs often do not transform the gendering of care with women continuing
to assume the bulk of everyday domestic labour (Hayden, 1981). Further, such
designs typically have only marginal uptake. This raises questions about the multiple
intersecting cultural and practical infrastructures within and beyond housing that
hold these caring relations in place. The predominance of individual housing units
reflects the broader cultural belief in the privatism of care and home, whilst also
intersecting with the beliefs and practices of volume house builders, amongst
other facets.
The material dimensions of housing as a care infrastructure require further
research to draw out the agency and care work of housing. We suggest four interre-
lated directions.
First, insights might be drawn from research that identifies building inhabitance
as a sociomaterial achievement patterned through building materialities (Jacobs
et al., 2007). Of relevance are the affordances of housing materials, both individually
and as assembled within a house. As Kraftl & Adey (2008, p. 214) explain,
the capacity of a building to allow inhabitation to take place—and to create meaningful
effects—constantly emerges through ongoing, dynamic encounters between buildings;
their constituent elements; and spaces, inhabitants, visitors, design, ergonomics,
workers, planners, cleaners, technicians, materials, performances, events, emotions,
affects, and more.
Research might explore how housing designs, spaces and materials iteratively shape
the performance of care. For instance, apartment design and materiality shape parent-
ing (Kerr et al., 2018) and neighbouring relations (Power, 2015), while Penfold
 HOUSING STUDIES 11

(2017) shows that dominant housing inhibits the caring practices of older Indigenous
people, including self-care, care for kin and care for country, and explores an
innovative program to build tiny houses that better supports the caring labours of
these elders.
Second, connections between materiality and affect demand consideration. Kraftl
& Adey (2008), for instance, explore the ability of a building to generate feelings of
welcome. Power (2009a, 2009b) similarly shows how the materiality and design of
housing can prompt (and undermine) feelings of being at home, while Lees & Baxter
(2011) show how the design of a council owned unit block is generative of one
residents’ feelings of fear. Inspired by these works, care-focused research might
explore the extent to which housing feels ‘caring’, or inspires a sense of care or of
being cared for (see also Mee, 2009).
Third, housing, like other infrastructures, requires care, including maintenance
and repair (Graham & Marvin, 2001). The care that some buildings and materials
inspire, and the processes and timescales across which these designs and materials
hold together or degrade (Power, 2009b) are important here. These processes
inform the rhythms of house care and integrity of the housing structure. There are
likely intersections with tenure and class through, for instance, the capacity of less
affluent households to maintain housing, landlord maintenance and capitalization
in (dis)advantaged areas and decisions by some private renters to withhold repair
requests to avoid the perceived risk of rent increases or eviction in jurisdictions
where rental controls are weak (and see Young 2012 on intersections with race in
US cities). Failures to care for housing are likely to have long-term negative
impacts on property quality, with implications for tenants’ health and well-being
(Bond et al., 2012; Hiscock et al., 2003) and landlord investment values. This is
likely, more broadly, to impair the performance of housing as an infrastructure of
care. Degraded housing is likely to impoverish domestic care, constituting pockets
of caring inequality across the city and intersects with broader political projects of
public housing renewal and urban regeneration (Darcy & Rogers, 2016; Jacobs
et al., 2007).
These research directions can build knowledge of how housing performs as a care
infrastructure. More broadly, however, they raise questions about the locus of care
within housing. First, care can be identified in the work of householders maintaining,
continuing and repairing human life. Housing as a care infrastructure patterns the
possibilities of this care, assembling, sustaining and limiting the ways that care can be
performed. Householders accommodate to these infrastructural constraints, reworking
domestic caring and housing as they perform domestic care. Second, and a substan-
tive contribution of this article, housing materialities play a constitutive and genera-
tive role in the performance of care raising questions about the care work of
domestic housing. In the examples here, the agential capacity of housing within care
practices begins to come into view, care work and affects emerging as outcomes of
the assembling of human householders and housing materialities imbricated in
reproductive labour. This generates questions about how care flows in and through
housing materialities. We build these ideas across the following discussions of hous-
ing markets and governance.
12 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

3.2. Markets
In the contemporary liberal welfare states that are our focus, privatized housing mar-
kets are the predominant way that individuals are imagined to secure housing. These
markets are an important dimension of how housing performs as a care infrastruc-
ture, patterning care giving and receiving across the lifecourse. In this section, we
consider housing markets first as a distributive mechanism for housing, considering
the impact of housing affordability on domestic care; we then reflect on the role of
market imaginaries.
Our overarching concern is with housing markets as a means of access to housing.
First, practical intersections between housing affordability and care need attention.
One dimension is how housing costs create social difference in care access across the
city through shaping and constraining choice of residential location. Lower income
earners have less ability to choose localities that are well serviced, for instance, or
where familial care networks are located. Less affluent areas also often have less access
to public and market-based care such as doctors and other health specialists (see for
example, Law et al., 2005; Pearce et al., 2006). Housing affordability has particular
resonance for households embarking on home ownership or servicing market-based
rents. There are intersections between housing affordability and housing governance,
age and other markers of difference such as race. For instance, renter mobility is typ-
ically higher in nations where renting is not the norm and investor values (such as
the right to buy and sell housing when the time is right) are protected in legislation
(Easthope, 2014). Renters facing forced moves at times of declining housing afford-
ability are at risk of having to move outside of established neighbourhood and kin
networks, with ramifications for those who are dependent on neighbourhood care
networks, such as older people ageing in place (Wiles et al., 2012). The intersection
of caring experiences with housing affordability and tenure has received little atten-
tion and deserves further research.
A second domain is the interconnection between housing costs and capacity to
afford care resources, for example, quality food and electricity. Households facing
high housing costs are often forced to compromise in self-care expenditure. Morris
(2009), for instance, shows retirees living in private rental housing restricting activ-
ities that are valuable for mental health (e.g. socializing with friends) and physical
health [e.g. limiting intake of fresh, nutritious foods, and limiting their use of heating,
see also Waitt et al. (2016)] to afford rent. There are also differences amongst home-
owners, those with precarious ownership status, facing rising interest rates or declin-
ing housing value, more likely to face financial pressures with implications for care.
Some research identifies lower mental well-being amongst this group (Smith et al.,
2017). Income indexed (non-market) housing, on the other hand, can bring care ben-
efits. Mee (2009) shows that the affordability of public housing contributes to its
value as a space to care, both for others in the neighbourhood and within the house-
hold. In her research ‘the affordability of public housing was crucial to a household’s
capacity to access and pay for other types of goods and services and thus expanded
the caring possibilities within the household’. (2009, p. 846).
A third domain interconnects housing affordability, paid work and caring cap-
acity. The degree, type and location of paid work required to service housing
 HOUSING STUDIES 13

interconnects with responsibilities for home-based caring. Low income households

face reduced choice in housing. At the same time, high cost housing markets can
increase the necessity for individuals to work longer hours, multiple jobs, or to
require multiple income earners within a household, reducing the capacity of indi-
viduals and households to meet domestic care responsibilities. While higher
income households or those in affordable housing may have capacity to outsource
care tasks (e.g. cleaning or childcare), lower income households or those with
higher housing expenses relative to income are more likely to work longer hours
or depend on local caring networks, such as friends or family members. There are
significant intersections here with gender and ethnicity. Women (Watson, 1988)
and ethnically marginalized groups (Haylett, 2003; Kershaw, 2005) are structurally
more likely to be in lower income professions and to be responsible for the bulk
of domestic caring labour, with implications for the type and location of paid
work that they take on.
The housing market is also a powerful imaginary shaping the organization of
domestic care. In the homeowner states that are the focus of this article, housing is
increasingly imagined through a market lens as an individual responsibility, invest-
ment and asset. The economic dimensions of housing as an investment class are
increasingly central to political framings of home ownership as a citizen responsibility
(Smith, 2005). The discourse of market neutrality, of a level playing field negotiated
by rational market actors, is a powerful dimension of market imaginaries that makes
invisible the ways that housing investments are supported through sympathetic gov-
ernment policies to develop a care infrastructure that better supports the affluent
(Jacobs, 2015; Tronto, 2013). For the affluent, housing markets shape housing as a
care infrastructure in multiple ways, enabling access to housing that meets household
care needs as well as opening the potential to secure multiple housing assets that
resource inter-generational care and care in later life. These dynamics bring the care
needs and practices of housing investors and tenants into tension. In a recent inter-
vention in this journal Nethercote (2018, p. 18) examines how parents negotiate
investor subjectivities ‘in anticipation of the housing welfare needs of their family’,
variously intensifying or stifling investor tendencies.
Market practices and imaginaries are important dimensions of the infrastructural
patterning of care through housing. However, they also speak to our broader concern
with the care work of housing: of where care is located and how it circulates through
housing. These are questions about the ordering of markets, of tenure and the various
material, locational and economic benefits that housing brings. It is difficult, however,
to discuss housing economies and care without considering the intersection with
housing governance. We continue this discussion in the next section.

3.3. Governance
Housing governance is a third element of how housing performs as a care infrastruc-
ture. Housing governance can be thought through two interrelated frames. First,
housing and related policies and management practices that structure property rights
and entitlements and the possibilities of inhabitance across tenure. Housing
14 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

governance can also be conceptualized through Foucauldian notions of governmental-

ity, interrogating the governance of housing and home, and citizen responsibilities in
relation to housing in contemporary welfare states. Each of these modes of govern-
ance constitutes an infrastructural form that profoundly shapes possibilities for care.
In liberal welfare states, the cultural valuing and political promotion of home own-
ership is a central governmental value and practice. Home ownership is promoted as
a way of securing the needs of one’s self and family, as well as contributing to the
national good by reducing demands on state expenditure (Smith, 2008; Power,
2017a). Renting, by contrast, is typically understood as a short-term or transitional
tenure and those renting long-term as having failed in their responsibilities (Gurney,
1999; Power, 2017a; Smith, 2008). State promotion of home ownership includes a
combination of political discourses and policies that make housing investment a
desirable, rewarding and ‘rational’ option (e.g. Gurney, 1999; Jacobs, 2015; Smith,
2008). These shape the foundational possibilities of housing as an infrastructure of
care. In Australia these have included first home owner subsidies, preferential treat-
ment for owner occupation in pension tests, and tax breaks for investor landlords
(Berry, 1999), and in Britain ‘right to buy’ policies, and regulatory changes that have
freed up housing equity alongside the advent of more flexible mortgage products
(Balchin, 1996; Smith, 2008). Housing purchase is also promoted through rental legis-
lation that favours investor priorities (e.g. supporting short tenancies of 6–12 months
and favouring the right of landlords to buy and sell housing when the time is right
over the right of tenants to a secure home, see Balchin, 1996; Bate, 2017;
Easthope, 2014).
Different tenures afford different opportunities for care. In the states that are the
focus of our discussion, emphasis has long been on the economic benefits of the
owned home as a pillar of the welfare system. Home ownership is politically and
popularly associated with asset accumulation and income ‘smoothing’ across the life
course (Malpass, 2008; Yates & Bradbury, 2010); benefits that support caring capacity
for some, but are not available to those in private and public rental. For instance, and
though not explicitly concerned with care, Morris (2016) shows that mortgage-free
home ownership underpins a better quality retirement in Australia, including the cap-
acity to afford utilities, social activities and nutritious food. Smith (2005, p. 13) simi-
larly identifies the ‘welfare content of housing wealth’, conceptualizing housing as a
means of spreading income across the life course and resource that can be tapped to
fund care in later life. Market position intersects with the care affordances of tenure
in important ways. Tenure ‘churners’ and those exiting home ownership experience
wellbeing deficits that suggest a declining capacity to sustain individual and house-
hold care needs (Smith et al., 2017). On the hand, higher income renters have greater
capacity to extract caring value from the private rental market, for example, choose
housing locations and designs that better suit household need.
The growing significance of neoliberally informed policy practice is expanding connec-
tions between private housing markets and care. The parallel marketization of care and
financialization of housing are driving an understanding of care as a market good and
informing growing emphasis on housing as a privatized asset base for funding welfare
needs (Doling & Ronald, 2010). These practices are part of a broader individualization of
 HOUSING STUDIES 15

risk (Rose, 1999, p. 158–160; Dean, 2010, p. 194–195). In the case of housing, home own-
ership is reworked as a financial investment through which individuals can take responsi-
bility for life-long care needs. As the investment value of housing becomes embedded in
broader policies, integrating with pension entitlements, for instance, tenure increasingly
gives shape to later life care opportunities. Home owners and owners of higher value
housing are significantly advantaged, while lower income renters and home owners with
limited equity face reduced choice (Power, 2017a).
Property rights and entitlements also shape the capacity for care in more-than-eco-
nomic ways. Easterlow & Smith (2004), Smith et al. (2004) and Smith (2005) are
exceptional in their overt attention to these dynamics as they operate through home
ownership. Their work with households that have recognized health needs (disability
and ill health) shows that members of this group ‘look to housing markets as a route
to wellbeing’ (Easterlow & Smith, 2004, p. 1000) ‘making homeownership into some-
thing which is not just a way of spending and accumulating wealth but also a means
of preserving and promoting health’. (Easterlow & Smith, 2004, p. 1003). Home own-
ers had greater scope to locate near health-relevant resources and adjust housing to
meet caring needs. Public and private rental tenants face different challenges, requir-
ing negotiation with landlords to ensure housing that supports resident flourishing.
The Grenfell Tower fire is a striking example of a failure of housing governance, as a
key part of an infrastructure of care, to achieve housing with a life sustaining material
form. The inquiry into the Grenfell disaster revealed that fire-proof cladding was
rejected due to its cost. A newspaper report at the time argued that ‘The survivors’
group Grenfell United described the development as heartbreaking. ‘It is more news
that tells us our loved ones would be alive today if different decisions had been taken
and if the people in charge had put safety first’, said Sandra Ruiz, ‘who lost her niece
in the fire’. (Booth, 2018).
There is scope for expansion of research examining the infrastructural work of
housing governance systems. This work can drive moves toward a housing system
that more equitably patterns domestic care.
First, housing research could consider how housing materialities imbricate with
housing governance and markets with implications for care. There is need for cross-
tenure research, exploring the caring practices and opportunities of households in
owner occupied housing, private and public rental. In Australia, for instance, private
rental legislation typically does not require landlords to agree to property modifica-
tions necessary to the needs of a person with disability or ageing body, even when
tenant funded. In contrast, households living in owner occupied housing have more
control over housing form and functionality, dependent on household economic
security. In a context of growing housing unaffordability and growth in renting across
western liberal welfare states, housing tenure and market position are likely to shape
possibilities for care through intersections with housing materiality.
Second, there is little knowledge of the care-connected non-economic benefits or
constraints of the owned home (with the exception of Smith et al.’s work, above) or
the care affordances of non-ownership tenures. While much research has explored
the ontological security (which is important in both caring for the self and being able
to plan for the long term care of household members) provided by home ownership
16 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

(e.g. Dupuis & Thorns, 1998; Hiscock et al., 2001, 2003; Kearns et al., 2000) and to a
lesser extent social housing (Mee, 2007), such research has rarely considered how
ontological security impacts on the efficacy of housing as an infrastructure of care.
Indeed for some households, private rental may fulfil caring needs more than an
owned home despite lower levels of ontological security (see Easthope, 2014). For
instance, when employment is precarious or mobile private rental may be more prac-
tical and less economically risky (Dufty-Jones, 2012). There has also been little atten-
tion to the caring affordances of social housing, though there is some evidence (Mee,
2009; Morris, 2016) that this tenure may benefit lower income households in provid-
ing ‘a place to care’ (Mee, 2009). Private rental properties represent a dual space of
care, interconnecting the caring needs of investor landlords and resident tenants; a
space where the security of the former may undermine the latter’s access to
secure tenancy.
Third, ‘everyday’ care is a remaining gap, everyday practices of care outside of age-
ing, disability and ill-health having received little attention. Research might draw out
the interconnection between family care dynamics that were a staple of earlier femin-
ist research, and practices of housing governance. For example, in Australia, strata
legislation (which governs inhabitance and neighbouring in apartment buildings) typ-
ically requires that adults are co-present with children in shared spaces such as corri-
dors and gardens. In addition to limiting children’s autonomy, this also places
demands on parental supervision (Kerr et al., 2018). A further example is care for
domestic companion animals such as dogs and cats, which face restrictions in some
tenure forms and multi-unit dwellings (Power, 2017b, 2018). Extant questions sur-
round how responsibilities to pets shape housing mobility pathways, for instance, in
and out of homelessness, social and private rental (this is the focus of Emma Power’s
funded current research).

4. Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we have brought the infrastructural turn together with feminist care
ethics to conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care. At the same time, we
have identified opportunities for further research, particularly concerning the more-
than-human materialities and affective intersections with care and the intersecting
performance of markets and housing governance mechanisms across tenure. We
opened our article with three substantive concerns which we now address in turn.
First, we have argued that to conceptualize housing as an infrastructure of care is
to ask how housing patterns the giving and receiving of care. We have identified that
housing both supports and inhibits the relational interdependence that is the founda-
tion of life and argued that housing systems organize the possibilities of care at a
household and social scale across three central domains: housing materialities, mar-
kets and governance. Second, we have identified how this patterning operates along
lines of social difference, shaping care opportunity by gender, class, race and so on.
To do this is to attend to intersections between the politics of care and the produc-
tion of housing systems; it is to highlight the ways that neo\liberal care ethics are
 HOUSING STUDIES 17

iteratively reworking the constitution of housing systems and to raise questions about
the possibility of housing that more equitably supports the necessary work of care.
Our third concern has been conceptualizing where and how care is located in
housing, interrogating how care circulates through housing as a care infrastructure.
This is a substantive contribution of this work and offers a new agenda for housing
research. The examples we have discussed point to two ways of understanding hous-
ing as a locus of care. The first, consistent with existing feminist analyses, values
housing as a location within which domestic care is performed. We have re-worked
this scholarship through an infrastructural analysis. The second direction concerns
the care work of housing itself. Our analysis here is provoked through an engagement
with care scholarship that identifies the practice of care in institutions and social
policy as well as through new feminist care literatures that identify care as a
sociomaterial relation and consider the ways that care flows through a more-than-
human world.
Care, we argue, is located not just in the domestic work of householders living and
sustaining life within housing. Rather, care is threaded through the housing system,
through the practices and modes of organization that sustain the work of household
care. In our infrastructural analysis of housing markets and governance, for instance,
we identified tenure specific policy practices and landlord – tenant dynamics that
organize possibilities for domestic care. We further pointed to the ways that market
imaginaries and related governing practices give shape to the ways that care can be
practiced within housing and housing organized for care. Conceptually housing stud-
ies can move from this vantage toward a care analysis of housing systems, to consider
the care work practiced within different domains of housing. Such work expands
from care research that identifies care as ‘a set of practices and ethics that can operate
within institutions and through social policy’ (Haylett, 2003; Kershaw, 2005;
Sevenhuijsen, 2003; White, 2000). It might expand Smith’s analysis of housing, mar-
kets and care to speculate on possibilities for more caring housing markets, or to
questions of housing governance, asking how housing might be better governed to
support a flourishing of human life and domestic care. What market settings and
governance processes intersect with the care opportunities of householders and how
might these be reworked to sustain the necessary work of care? How might ‘good’
care be supported in housing and what does ‘good’ mean in this context? Attention
might similarly turn to the work of housing actors: of housing providers and land-
lords in the social and market sectors, for instance, and to the care ethics that inform,
or might inform, their work. This is work that we have begun separately elsewhere
(see Mee, 2009 and Power and Bergan, 2018). This expands the scope of care analyses
within housing to identify the practice and ethic of care in housing policy and policy
making, the work of housing investors and landlords and in housing itself.
Alternatively, attention might turn to the sociomaterial objects that populate the
housing system, raising questions about the ways that care flows and translates
through this necessarily more-than-human world. We are informed particularly by
Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, p. 121) illumination of the ways that care circulates ‘in
an embodied way, or simply embedded in the world, environments, infrastructures
that have been marked by [.] care’ and with Power’s (2019) recent call for attention
18 E. R. POWER AND K. J. MEE

to the ways that housing cares-with residents. For housing studies, this work raises
questions about the ways that care flows, intentionally and unintentionally, through
housing and other infrastructures. For instance, how does care translate through the
object and practice of leases and other contracts and compacts that structure housing
relations and to what extent do the caring intentions that structure these objects
remain immutable or become mutable across time and space? How does care trans-
late and move through the materialities of housing itself? How might care for prop-
erty and tenants translate through the work of landlords and what is the space of
neglect? The Grenfell Tower inquiry is beginning to bring light to how a breakdown
of care in the spaces of governance and the ethics of markets can translate and flow
through the materialities of housing, allowing the circulation of agencies that are
deleterious to care and incompatible with life. These are questions that Emma Power
has begun to consider elsewhere (Power 2019).
Housing provides multiple different tracks that shape possibilities for care through
housing materialities, markets and governance. Care operates through these domains
through multiple practices and across scale. These infrastructural lines of conceptual-
ization and inquiry build through existing scholarship on housing and care to open
substantively new directions for housing scholarship. They offer to develop a more
comprehensive understanding of the social value and role of housing and provide a
discourse and heuristic to counter the growing and near exclusive political focus on
home ownership as a pathway to care. They do this through making visible the mul-
tiple ways that housing performs as a care infrastructure. From this vantage, the
notion of housing as a care infrastructure might provide a powerful turning point for
imagining different futures for housing reform. For instance, they open space to con-
sider how reforms might better support a flourishing of human life and how the
work of relational caring might be translated and cohered through the housing sys-
tem over time. We provoke housing researchers to ask: is this a housing system
that cares?

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
Emma’s work in this article was supported by an Australian Research Council, Discovery Early
Career Researcher Award (DECRA), DE150100861.

Notes on contributors
Emma Power is a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia. Kathleen
Mee is an Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

ORCID
Emma R. Power http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5204-322X
 HOUSING STUDIES 19

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