Welcome to the first module of the course on Housing Justice, week one, video one. My name is Dr. Gautam Bhan, and I'm part of the faculty of this course and I'm based at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India. We start off today with the core question of this course, Housing Justice. In order to root ourselves over the next five weeks, we first take apart what it is that we talk about when we talk about housing, this is called to us, because without a framework of thinking about what we mean by housing, we cannot locate the question of housing justice within it. So what is it to talk about housing? The first takeaway that I want to leave you with today, as you start this journey with us, is that housing is not houses, it is not about an object so neatly defined a roof, a wall, a material, construction, square feet. The move from houses to housing represents a fundamental conceptual shift in thinking about what makes housing, and allows us to ask a question of housing justice within it. So in this module, you will see six entry points into the question of housing. We'll argue that housing has to be understood legally, economically, materially, socially, politically, and specially in the interactive dashboard that goes along with this week. Each of these will be presented with additional data points, case studies and stories. And I encourage you to take some time after hearing this framing lecture, to put together your ways to delve into any of these entry points by yourself at your own time. Let's start at the top. What does it mean to think of housing as a legal form? In many countries of the world, housing is not just the question of the production of houses, but is in fact a part of the constitutional and legal framework of what society decides is the shared social contract between citizens and the state. South Africa, for example, has a right to housing in its constitution. India, where I speak to you from, does not have a direct or explicit right to housing in the constitution. But yet, successive legal presidents over decades have argued that the right to housing is part of the fundamentally guaranteed right to life in the Indian constitution. What does it mean to think about housing as a right and an entitlement? At this point, the debate around housing shifts into something justiciable, something that has to be provided for between the state society compact, something that is demanded not as something that could be, but must be. The distinction in the legal frames around housing remind us that all other forms of thinking about housing first begin with this compact, begin with the structure of housing and the debate on whether we approach it through law in the language of rights. Intimately connected to, this is our second entry point. This is the most familiar one to all of you, that housing is an economic form. When we think of housing as an economic form, there are multiple ways in which to read what kind of an economic form it is. On one side, housing is a basic need. It is what the economist, Amartya Sen would call a capability good, an essential part of what you need to be human. In this case, it's very close to the notion of housing is a human right a basic starting point. Many economists also contain housing as a particular kind of public good, not something that can only be understood as my private house or your private house, but something that is defined by externalities and has contributions beyond just to the individual resident of the house. It matters, in other words, to think of housing as a good that must be structured publicly. But on the other hand, there is also just my house. There is housing in a commodity form as an individual private asset, the notion of a home that belongs typically in most of our societies to a particular social unit called the family. So we'll talk later on in these weeks about not taking the idea of the household or the family for granted. When you think about this range of positions, housing as a capability good and a basic need, housing as a public good, and housing as a commodity form where a more familiar logic of property and real estate becomes the language of what you talk about when you talk about housing. We have to remember that these visions of housing are competing against each other. The question of housing justice is centrally embroiled inside these competing visions of what kind of an economic good housing, in fact, is. Next to this is a more familiar form. Again, too many of you who would have come to this course from your training in the social and build sciences of housing as a material form. This is about the house as a unit. It is about what makes the strength of the walls and the floor and the material, how large it is its size. These are debates on what are often called the dwelling unit. The actual structure, much housing policy in the world is actually about delivering this unit. This is a key part of what housing is, but there are two shifts that moving from houses to housing due to even thinking about housing is a material form. The first is that an approach that comes from housing is one that does not confine itself to the unit, but locates the unit in the settlement and the neighborhood and the locality. This is pivotal because it links the individual unit of the house to the collective and settlement scale, access to basic infrastructure and services. It means that when you move from house to housing, you have to shift scale both from the unit to the layout, to a scale that implies an immersion in structures of infrastructure and services, for example, that can only be resolved collectively and community. It's also pivotal to realize that when we think about the materiality of housing, we don't think about it at a single time. In most of the world, but particularly in India, particularly in the global south, particularly in forms of urbanization, housing is not built in an instant. It's actually built over a life, brick by brick, wall by wall, floor by floor, and a house almost represents and captures the life of those who live within it. This idea of housing as time, housing as a process of material improvement, as something that is inseparable from life itself. This notion of incrementality is something we will hold within ourselves when we even talk about the material, the most tangible form of housing. Number four, housing is a social form. When you talk about housing is an economic form, it is very tempting to talk about with a great degree of conceptual clarity, demand, supply, affordability, rent, selling price, wage, but markets are not free in the sense that they are never outside forms of regulation. Markets are influenced and structured by other forces in housing. The example I want to give you in thinking about housing is a social form is the way in which social identity structures of social stratification shape our housing outcomes and constitute even what we call as the housing market. You can think of the most extreme forms of this apartheid South Africa, where social identity declared and determined the housing market in its entirety, specialized forms of housing and allocation by race, but you don't have to work only at this spectrum. Theorists of racial capitalism, for example, will remind you that redlining historically or current practices of rental discrimination imply that race determines where you live within a non apartheid, ostensibly free housing market in the United States. The way cast structures, location in Indian urbanization will again talk about the way social identity determined not just forms of housing, but the structure of the economic market of housing itself. In another way to think about how social identity determines the specialty of our housing. one can even look at cities marked, for example, by conflict, long entrenched conflict, where the division of location, the construction of the market, whether we understand it as segregation or discrimination as differentiation, inclusion or exclusion, all concepts, grappling with the question of saying, how does social identity shape the question of housing? And you can see immediately the echoes of the questions of housing justice that are going to follow. We move next to a quite under appreciated form of thinking about housing, which is to think about housing through the lens of political structure. When you talk about housing is a political form, I'll give you one example that most people immediately identify with. What happens to your citizenship? An essential political question if you don't have a house. And here immediately, the fact of homelessness and what it does to your presence as a citizen, to your ability to have rights, to the ability of the state to see you and accept your rights, to the ability of your fellow citizens to recognize you. What happens in the absence of a home can render a citizen fundamentally without the fullness of their citizenship or even the recognition of their humanity. In many ways, in the Indian context, in everyday life, we call this proof of address and without proof of address. There are multiple parts of our life that are simply not possible. We cannot apply for government identification documents that are the next step to our Social Security rights. We cannot understand and enter into citizenship compacts, we cannot be the subject of policy. Proof of address is a shorthand that reminds us that in many ways, housing is also about an entry into a political conversation with the state and public policy. And homelessness, maybe its most extreme manifestation, but again, in countries of the Global South, where, as I told you earlier, housing is incrementally built, where property is not a self-evident concept. The christian and incremental building of your address is as much a story of development and as much a reminder to us that housing is not just the walls of our home, but the ability for us to actually exist as citizens and roots us in the question of housing as a political form. The final part that we are considering is to scale up and zoom out, go to 10,000 feet and remember that housing is a special form at a different scale than its material unit. If houses are about the unit, housing becomes about how housing fits into the political economy of a larger urban development. This is fundamental because it reminds us that the question of housing in the industrial city is very different from the question of housing in the new information or digital mode of capitalism. The specialty of housing at a scalar of sectoral rebel will remind us, again, that different forms of housing outcomes result from different political economies in different historical conjuncture. And therefore, we must be specific not just about where we asked the housing question, but when we asked the housing question. Think of all these six entry points. Think of them not as discreet entry points, but ones that are fundamentally co-constitutive of each other. Think of them as ways that together shape the way we must ask the housing question, but more importantly, within which we must articulate the question of housing justice. What does it mean for housing justice to be able to think economically, materially, socially, politically, legally, and specially at the same time? How do economic forms of housing undergird their spatial forms? How do material forms respond to the political requirements of housing? How do we begin with housing in a rights framework and without it? These are the questions we will ask as we move on. At this point, armed with these six entry points, I invite you to spend some time on the interactive dashboard to understand each of them a little bit better, and to see particular examples that will illustrate the point of what the conceptual entry point means through an example that you can actually hold onto. I encourage you then to find a way in your own city to visualize what these forms look like, what do they mean, where you are? How can you take this conceptual entry point and root it, in particular urbanisms with which you are familiar. And then when you do that, we meet again in the second lecture of this module, where we will take this framework of housing and ask the tougher question, which is what does housing justice look like when we move from houses to housing? So we'll see you soon.
