IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/chosxx/v38y2023i9p1642-1661.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From squat to cottage: materiality, informal ownership, and the politics of unspotted homes

Author

Listed:
  • Petr Vašát

Abstract

‘Homeless’ people are usually considered as citizens without property. The absence of ownership, especially in terms of housing, co-creates the very idea of homelessness in current societies. Despite this fact, ‘homeless’ citizens negotiate and experience their property, things, or the shelter in which they dwell. This paper sheds light on how this property is negotiated and experienced and how it influences home-making. It does so by drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the city of Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Based on the intra-urban comparison of informal dwelling in two abandoned buildings – a former railway station tower and an allotment cottage – the paper conceptualize the unspotted home and argues that it arises from the assemblage of socio-materiality, meanings, and various dimensions of politics, where the politics of home-ownership has an important position. While informal ownership here is related to power asymmetry within home-making, paradoxically, it also brings about more complex informal citizenship and the potential for political action.

Suggested Citation

  • Petr Vašát, 2023. "From squat to cottage: materiality, informal ownership, and the politics of unspotted homes," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(9), pages 1642-1661, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:38:y:2023:i:9:p:1642-1661
    DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1966393
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02673037.2021.1966393
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/02673037.2021.1966393?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:38:y:2023:i:9:p:1642-1661. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/chos20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.