Housing Studies, Social Class and
Being Towards Dwelling
John Flint
CRESR, Sheffield Hallam University
Housing Studies Association Conference
University of York 14-16 April 2010
Outline
• Allen and Webb's critiques
• Housing Research and Working-Class
Communities
• A Critique of Relational Frameworks of
Housing Consumptions
• Conclusions
Introduction
"We are always willing to make a saint or a
prophet of the educated man who goes into
cottages to give a little kindly advice to the
uneducated. But the medieval saint or prophet
was an uneducated man who walked into grand
houses to give a bit of advice to the educated."
C.K. Chesterton, 1905 (quoted in Collins, 2004:
277)
Allen and Webb's Critiques
• Allen (2008a;2008b; 2009; 2010a); Webb (2010)
• Methodological superiority, based on systematic
methods, claim for special status and dismissal
of residents and 'local' knowledge
• Spurious claims and underestimating resident
opposition
• No fundamental critique and based on rational scientific identification of public interest
• Grounded in academics' middle-class habitus,
orientation to housing and own lifestyles
Housing Research and WorkingClass Voices
• Need for authenticity and legitimisation of
marginalised voices (Allen, 2008b: 180; Watt,
2008: 206; Slater, 2006: 749; Martin,2005:
67/86; McCormack, 2009: 410)
• Studies are a record of the psychology of wealth
and culture brought into contact with poverty
(Chesterton, 1905, quoted in Collins, 2004: 77)
• Schemes of understanding which are not those
of residents themselves (Bourdieu, 1984: 373;
Charlesworth, 200: 203)
• A phenomenological gap (Martin, 2005: 77)
Interviews
• Social sciences ask questions that are
different to the questions (or lack of
questions) of residents (Allen, 2009: 66)
• Habitus based on habituation and
embodied technique, not cognition
(Charlesworth, 200: 295)
• Interviews based on reflexivity and
'reasoned reasons' (Adams, 2006: 515;
Callaghan, 2005; Allen, 2009: 66)
Silence and Inarticulacy? 1
"I'm afraid that's too big a question."
"Don't know, really I don't."
"Oh God, I'm no good at answering questions."
Mass-Observation Study of Working Class
Housing in the 1940s (quoted in Kynaston, 2008:
40-46)
Silence and Inarticulacy? 2
"I don't even know how to answer that question"
"I've got no knowledge of what those estates are like, to
me they're just estates, I couldn’t compare them"
"I wouldnae say people think about areas in a general
way like that, they're no…people dunnae sit and think
about what's actually around them, I wouldnae even
have thought about it myself if you hadnae asked me if
you know what I mean…It's not even an interest until you
actually said that to me, it's never been an interest
to me."
Joseph Rowntree Foundation Study (2007-2010)
Explaining the Gap
• Middle-class habitus of academics? (Skeggs,
2004: 54; Charlesworth, 2000: 149; Allen,
2008b: 182)
• Social science violates meaning and corrupts
phenomena (Allen, 2009: 55; Charlesworth,
2000; 184)
• Dismissal of anything that is opaque to social
science, but we cannot open up dwelling
without destroying it (King, 2008: 12)
• Projects of 'retrieving the irretrievable' (Reay,
2005: 912)
Filling the Gap?
Academics, along with urban elites "are the
only element in the city's life that sees the
city as a whole …while to Little Sicily or the
world of furnished rooms the city is merely
part of the landscape."
Zorbaugh (1929: 274; on Chicago)
• The issue of muteness, silence and inarticulacy
(Charlesworth, 2000: 2-6)
• Academics involved in an exercise of 'naming
the world' (McCormack, 2009: 396)
Relational Frameworks of Housing
Consumption
• The need to understand working-class being
towards dwelling on its own terms and not in
relation to middle-class consumption
practices (Allen, 2008a 6/195; 2008b: 182)
• Importance of class and studies of middleclass being towards dwelling (Savage et al.,
2005; Butler and Robson, 2003; Savage,
2010)
Middle-Class Being Towards
Dwelling?
• Unimportance of socially cohesive
neighbourhoods; construction of a distinctive
lifestyle; attachment to symbolic meanings
(Savage, 2010; Savage et al., 2005; Martin,
2005)
• Middle-class play housing market to defend and
secure a class position (Allen, 2008a: 101)
• Middle-class mobilise various forms of resource
to decipher correct position for them to take and
secure it (Allen, 2008a: 7)
The Juxtaposition
Such middle-class being in the world is
contrasted with the immediacy and utility of
a working class experience occurring in the
'thick of everyday lives' and orientated to the
practical necessities that govern life and its
economy of housing consumption
(Charlesworth, Allen, 2008a: 8/ 73; Martin,
2005: 77; Oliver and O'Reilly, 2010: 53).
A Partial 'Naming of the World?'
• A misunderstanding of many middle-class
individuals' 'being-in the-world' towards housing
• Underestimates the sense of immediacy and
practicality in housing practices, which are often
characterised by the necessity of responding to
changing circumstances, the focus on the utility of
housing, in terms of size, amenities, location to
family and work and connection to home and
neighbourhood, rather than its symbolic or
aesthetic value or sense of positioning in a space
of positions (Flint et al., 2009).
The Middle-Class 'Project of the
Self' (Giddens, 1990)? 1
• Over-estimates the sense of distance,
freedom, possibilities, wellbeing and
knowledge for many middle-class households
whose experience of housing, and
particularly moving home, is often one of
anxiety, urgency, limited resources, and in
some cases, crisis.
• The concept of the mobile, sovereign
individual is largely a myth (Shields, 2008:
716)
The Middle-Class 'Project of the
Self?' 2
"The middle-class intelligensia assume that its beingtowards-lifestyle is characteristic of the late modern subject
per se when, in fact it is particular to the social and
economic circumstances in which such a devotion to
lifestyle can be reflexively accomplished"
(Allen, 2008b: 182)
"Knowledge derived from social capital ties and
connections allows them [middle-class individuals] to
exactly pick out where they want to live within a middle
class 'project of the self' which…implies possession of a
world that consists of an infinite series of possibilities"
(Allen, 2008a: 65).
The Academic Habitus
• The attachment to the symbolic meanings of
a place is a preoccupation of an elite or
academic 'being in the world' (Martin, 2005:
85)
• It is academics who conceptualise social
classes as occupying 'positions in a space of
positions' (Allen, 2009: 73)
• It is an academic, rather than necessarily a
middle-class, habitus that operates at a
distance
Why?
• Lack of studies of middle-class identities
• Weak empirical underpinnings of comparative
studies
• Focus on middle-class activity in housing market,
juxtaposed to working-class 'in situ' dwelling
• Positions in space of positions more relevant for
those without a home (allocation and homeless
policies)
• Immigration and anti-social behaviour: a
phenomenological gap for critical gentrification
research?
A Second Consequence of the
Relational Framework
• Symbolic violence and hegemony (Allen,
2008a: 89)
• Submerged consciousness and adhesion
to the oppressor (McCormack, 2009)
• The domination of the dominated that
encourages working-class people to have
what they do not have, do not want and
cannot afford (Allen, 2010a: 27)
The Limits of Symbolic Violence 1
• Many working class households do not aspire
to this dominant ideal at all (Allen, 2010a: 27)
• Rejection of owner-occupation (Flint et al.,
2009)
• High levels of satisfaction and ontological
security (De Decker and Pannecouke, 2004;
Mee, 2007)
• Community opposition to HMR and stock
transfer
The Limits of Symbolic Violence 2
• Focus on absences, failures and injuries
(Strangleman, 2008: 17; Callaghan, 2005)
• Focus on visible sites of interaction (education, urban
policy) in the work of Bourdieu etc.
• Transposed so that class 'troubles the soul and preys
on the psyche' (Reay, 2005: 924)
• But working class lives often viewed as unproblematic
(Stenning, 2008:10)
• Importance of other drivers of orientation towards
dwelling (family, community etc.).
• Landscape (physical, social or psychological) is not
solely made in the image of capital or elite power
(Martin, 2005: 68)
Conclusions 1
• Important contribution of Allen and Webb
• Greater awareness of partiality of 'expert
knowledge' (Webb, 2010: 2) and need to
make explicit this phenomenological gap
(Allen, 2008b: 180)
• Misunderstanding primarily arises from an
academic- scientific habitus and the very act
of undertaking social science rather than the
alleged middle-class position of academics.
Conclusions 2
• What is required is an approach which
recognises, and is not afraid of, nuance
and contradictions in accounts of social
class (Stenning, 2008: 17)
• Critical researchers are involved in a
process of 'naming the world'
• Afford equal recognition to the knowledge
claims made by others (Allen, 2010b: 6)
Conclusions 3
• Working-class being towards dwelling needs
to be understood on its own terms
• But a relational framework that juxtaposes a
working-class experience of housing with an
overly simplified account of middle-class
practices misunderstands many individuals'
orientation to their home and neighbourhood.
• Overstating the extent to which symbolic
violence or the hegemony of dominant
narratives is actually achieved within workingclass communities.
Conclusions 4
• Presenting a particular working class being
towards dwelling is a crucial project in its own
right
• As Davidson (2008: 2402) suggests, nuanced
or limited accounts do not diminish the
importance of articulating the experience of
particular sections of different social classes,
or preclude analysis of the injustice of social
processes or particular housing policy
interventions. In fact, quite the contrary.
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