Volume 18, Issue 1, Spring 2021
Joshua Mousie, Gabriel Eisen, Mahaa Mahmood
Pages 123-149
How Do Houses Make the Political Possible?
We develop the concept “political residency” in this essay to highlight both the foundational role of built environments in our political life as well as how access to, and displacement from, built environments is therefore a central feature of political harms and goods. The example of housing and housing displacement is instructive for developing our concept because it is central to most people’s everyday life, yet residential security and stability—having control with other inhabitants over shared, built spaces—is often missing from peoples’ lives, especially those who are most socially and politically vulnerable.