Building Things with Fictions: What Film Can Tell Us About Housing

BUILDING THINGS WITH FICTIONS:

WHAT FILM CAN TELL US ABOUT HOUSING

Peter King

Reader in Social Thought

Centre for Comparative Housing Research

De Montfort University

The Gateway

Leicester

LE1 9BH

Tel: 0116 257 7431

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Paper presented to Qualiti seminar, Theorising qualitative research: paradigms and methods, Edinburgh University, 15 June 2006
Building things with fictions: what film can tell us about housing

Introduction

Several years ago a colleague and I were discussing the last housing books we had each read. I’m afraid I cannot remember which book my colleague had read, but the last one for me had been Cooper Marcus’ House as a Mirror of Self (1995). This book uses Jungian psychology and art therapy to analyse the relation individuals have with their dwelling. Cooper Marcus looks at why some people are attached to their house, whilst others find it difficult. The book is anecdotal and based on a small number of in-depth interviews in which interviewees were also asked to draw their personal image of home. It was this anecdotal approach that I saw as the book’s principal virtue, in that it gets close to the relationship between dweller and dwelling and shows it to be intensely personal. As I was about to wax lyrical on Cooper Marcus’ book, my colleague interjected with the comment, ‘That’s not a housing book!’

The idea that a book on how we live in our house and how we respond to it, how we attach ourselves to a specific dwelling and deal with loss, love and sharing is not a ‘housing book’ is quite enlightening of the manner in which housing is perceived by housing academics. It is enlightening both in terms of what it says about methods, about what constitutes ‘the literature’, but also about attitudes to what constitutes the field of study we call ‘housing’. In essence what was deemed to be lacking in Cooper Marcus’s book – one of the few books to genuinely get past the front door (King, 2004b) – is any discussion on policy: it is a book about how we live and not about how we make and pay for aggregates of housing. It does not deal with government action, housing agencies and subsidies. Instead Cooper Marcus’s book tries to consider the implications of living quietly, privately in a place where one has chosen to be. This, though, my colleague informed me, was not ‘housing’.

But my colleague’s comment was also a challenge to me, in terms of both content and method. As regards content, were I to accept my colleague’s view I would have to admit that neither of my last two books – Private Dwelling (2004b) and The Common Place (2005) – were also not ‘housing books’ (which is exactly what my colleague has said of them). But if these books are not about housing, what do they deal with? And who are they for, and what purpose can they possibly have? It is in trying to answer these linked questions – and therefore to justify what I’ve being spending my time on – that has led me to question exactly what it is that ‘housing’ is, or could be, or should be. I have come to the conclusion that there are indeed two different subjects here, two distinct areas of study, which may have some common jargon, similar arguments, and even be of some interest to each other: but they are still, regardless of any similarities, different in what they are talking about, what they seek to establish, and, perhaps most importantly, what they mean when they use particular words such as ‘housing’ and ‘homes’[1].

But there is also the issue of method and the legitimacy of using techniques and approaches from beyond the traditional social science corpus. Is it really not acceptable to use Jungian art therapy to consider housing? What does this say about housing as a field of study, and consequently the possibility of development in the future?

What I seek to do in this paper is to discuss some of the issues around the study of housing. I want to outline what are the main approaches in housing research and education and to explain how they have developed. I shall show how this development has led to a limitation of the field of study which is largely based on how housing is defined and described. I then go on to consider an approach to housing which seeks to understand the importance of housing in subjective and personal terms, and how this can be done by using film. I offer an example of this approach and then conclude with some of its problems and limitations.

I should admit that this approach has come about largely by accident: I am a housing academic who happens to have a passion for cinema, and I seem to have found a way of combining my day job with my hobby. However, I would hope that this is not mere convenience. I began to use film because I wished to look at the subjective and the personal. I wanted to understand more about how we use our housing and particularly what we do when we close the door and exclude unwanted others. This, it seems to me, is what we build and maintain houses for, but which we have neglected to study. The main reason for this, of course, is that once the researcher invades the dwelling it stops being private[2]. But this poses the researcher with a considerable problem, and to try to deal with this I have sought to use methods that are more akin to research in the humanities. This paper seeks both to demonstrate and justify this approach.

The nature of housing research

Housing is clearly not an academic discipline. Whilst there has been considerable growth in housing education and research since the 1970s, we cannot talk about housing in the manner we can talk about sociology, economics, geography, etc. Housing does not have its own distinctive methods and concepts and instead has to rely on more established academic disciplines. In this way housing academics tend to approach their interest through their disciplinary specialism, using accepted methods to inform their work.

This is entirely to be expected, but it does pose a problem in that the housing research community is multidisciplinary, and thus academics, if they are to be effective, need to be able to talk to each other. Whilst housing economists can and do converse with each other, this can be unnecessarily limiting, in that they may also wish to work with sociologists or geographers interested in the same housing issue. This situation has had two consequences: first, much housing research tends to be issue-led. In order to communicate the housing research community has developed a terminology and approach based on an understanding of housing phenomena. Second, because of this concern for the issues first, there is a distinct shallowness in the manner in which housing academics engage with their own disciplines. If one wishes to engage with other disciplines this needs to be through areas of commonality and with an agreed jargon that does not exclude others. This does not necessarily mean superficiality, but it does result in a reluctance to engage in key disciplinary debates and to embed housing into disciplines too far for fear of losing contacts with one’s colleagues from other disciplines.

The result of this is that housing research has not engaged with the cutting edge of disciplinary research and has instead concerned itself with a fairly traditional approach to its subject. Kemeny (1992), in his now seminal study of the nature of housing research in relation to social theory, argued that housing studies was confined to a narrow empiricism and, as a result, it has been left behind by advances in social sciences over the last 20-30 years. Kemeny stated that:-

A central problem of much of housing studies is that it retains a myopic and narrow focus on housing policy and housing markets and neglects broader issues. Housing studies is still too isolated from debates and theories in the other social sciences and what is needed now is further integration into these. (p. xv)

His point was that housing researchers needed to engage with concepts and theories that were quite common in disciplines such as sociology, politics and economics, but which had apparently bypasses academic housing studies. In addition, he argued that there were several examples where housing researchers had claimed to have discovered something new, in apparent ignorance of a huge already existing literature on the issue in the mainstream social sciences.

This problem, it seems to me has two sources, one related to the lack of a disciplinary framework, and the other to the institutional development of housing research. As I have stated, because of the multi-disciplinary nature of housing research, the issues lead the research and there has been no development of a specific conceptual or theoretical apparatus of its own. The result is that it tends to use concepts from the mainstream social science disciplines, but often at a superficial level in the rush to get to the issues. In addition, in ensuring that it takes other colleagues from other disciplines along with it, it rarely gets beyond the introductory level and a few key references. One can never take the conceptual apparatus for granted or assume that colleagues will be able to back-fill with the relevant knowledge and theoretical understanding. Thus, for instance, in the last 10 years there have been a number of papers applying social constructionism to housing phenomena, but each of these seems duty bound (or required by reviewers and editors) to offer a straightforward explanation of social constructionism before applying it. More recently, a spate of articles using critical realism has faced the same apparent need. What it is difficult to achieve is the implicit or integrated use of either of these approaches. Their use always remains somewhat provisional and needs constant justification. The result is that it is difficult to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of housing phenomena. Housing research, therefore, is indeed multidisciplinary, but it often only achieves this through a lack of depth.

The second cause of the lack of theoretical development in housing the manner in which housing research and education has developed institutionally (Kemeny, 1992). In the UK housing education has arisen out of the professional requirements of the Chartered Institute of Housing, and many academic programmes are explicitly geared at housing professionals who are funded by their employers. This has clear implications for curriculum development and the agreed knowledge and skills base that underpins housing education. But, additional to this is the manner in which much housing research has been funded and consequently on what and where it is focussed. A considerable amount of research is funded by government departments and agencies, or by bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation or the National Housing Federation, which seek to influence government policy and action. This more than any other factor has created the myopic positivism criticised by Kemeny (1992). Whilst there is undoubtedly now more theoretical housing research being done than 15 years ago, it is also the case that the pressures on housing academics to generate income have also worsened, and this has had an impact on innovation.

Some comments on ‘housing’

As I suggested, there is an agreed sense of what housing is about, and this sense has been formed to a considerable extent by the pressures considered above. In particular, the institutional framework of housing research, where the role of government plays such an important role, has framed the understanding of what housing is. When housing academics talk about ‘housing’, what they tend to mean is ‘housing policy’ (King, 1996). Housing is seen as something formed and controlled through policy discourse. This policy is concerned with the control of aggregates and seeks to impose and maintain standards in which these aggregates can be understood. There are two basic assumptions at work here: first, housing is an aggregated notion, and second it is usually used as a noun to refer to physical entities. Housing is therefore the term used to refer to an aggregation of material objects (King, 1996).

But as Turner (1972, 1976) has stated, housing can be a verb as well as a noun. Instead of seeing the term as being about material entities, it can also be seen as an activity: housing associations house people as well as build houses. Turner’s insight is quite fundamental in terms of how one views housing and research upon it. It stops being merely about things and becomes a concern with processes and relationships. Turner showed this in his work on housing standards and dweller control in Latin America, seeking to demonstrate the importance of the level of dweller control as a key indicator for successful and sustainable housing provision (Turner, 1976).

But there is a further problem with the assumption that housing is an aggregated notion, and this is what has been my main concern in recent years (King, 2004b, 2005). The preoccupation with housing policy means that research effectively ends at the front door. Researchers tend to be concerned with generalities such as numbers built, location, quality and condition, income of residents and so on. But none of these questions get beyond the threshold or consider the specific relation between particular households and their dwellings. What we do not get a sense of in mainstream housing research is the meanings which households attach to their dwellings. There is therefore another key dichotomy as well as that between noun and verb, and this relates to inside or outside. We might alternatively state that this is a dichotomy between the objective and subjective appreciation of housing.

What I have tried to do is develop an approach that can help us to understand the manner in which we use our dwelling and the meanings that develop from this. What strikes me as a key problem here is how one can deal with the private nature of housing without destroying or disrupting what we are looking at. By way of analogy (and only analogy) I would suggest that a type of uncertainty principle is at work here, whereby the observation of this micro level activity alters it and creates new patterns and formations that would not be there were it not for the observation. What I have sought instead is a different approach that relies on observation from the inside itself. In this way we can hope that it is left undisturbed. This involves a subjective description of housing, even if it involves eschewing methods that might help us gain a broader perspective. As Madanipour (2003) has argued, ‘first-person’ or phenomenological accounts will be incomplete, but they are still necessary. They are necessary to complement the equally incomplete third-person or scientific approach, described by Madanipour appropriately enough, as ‘left outside’ (p. 3). First-person narratives, for all their faults, are the only means to get inside the private sphere.