The right to housing? The antinomies of social housing between public and private

What is social housing, is it a right or a property? Is it guaranteed for all by welfare state or non-governmental organizations or a commodity in capitalist production and market relations? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, housing is a human right for ‘a standard for living.’ Nowadays referred next to ‘adequate housing,’ ‘the right to housing’ refers to specific groups of society such as ‘women, children, slum-dwellers, homeless, disabled, displaced, migrants, and indigenous’ as denoted by the UN Habitat for human rights. Either defined in relation to ‘the standard of living’ by mass housing of the Fordist welfare state or to ‘the quality of life’ by ‘the right to buy’ discourse of the post-Fordist neoliberal state, ‘the right to housing’ represents the antinomy of social housing oscillating between public and private entity. It is a means of realizing the eidos of both collective and individual, therewithal of building the wall or the cave to shelter and to evict, or to imprison. Referred as an umbrella term for producing collective habitation for specific groups in need of adequate housing, social housing is inclusive of diverse terminology in terms of political, socio-economic and institutional tools as well as of procedural approaches in building design and construction typologies and of shareholders in production. These terms vary as affordable housing, public housing, self-help housing, core housing, cooperative housing, co-housing, low-income housing, low-cost housing, and so on. Informal housing or self-provisional housing also participate in this sub-terminology of social housing developed as informal responses to housing demand by the poor. However, all the above classifications related to form and content, assessable and evaluable not only to spatial and functional but also social and cultural criteria, do not figure out the critical core in social housing as a field of space production. Through a Platonic reading of space, social housing signifies a dialogue between form and content. Through a Marxist reading of space production, social housing reifies the eidos, thus is a commodity. Superposing both readings on a material ground, social housing dialectically denotes both public and private property due to provision, distribution, use and maintenance of resources and people on land through settlement and eviction processes reproducing itself anew. As long as the notion of dwelling is tied to the land dominated by production and market relations, housing embodies the notion of property as a field of policy, planning and design by searching for equilibrium between land value and population control. It is a ‘right’ neutralizing the tension between accumulation by dispossession and need for shelter as well as a ‘commodity’ fatting up housing industry, thus is a means of reconciliation and of restraint at the same time. Social housing has occupied an urgent field of architecture and urbanism since the Industrial Revolution. It was a ‘space of harmony’ for ‘emancipation’ of the working class in tune with the Fordist everyday life, but rather is a ‘conflict space’ in the post-Fordist age intermingled with the search for forms and tools of common land and home ownership against the rise of poverty and shortage of resources in different geographies. At this specific moment, this paper aims at a critical analysis on the antinomies of social housing by digging Fordist and post-Fordist discourses and practices on social housing and by unravelling the networks between institutions and actors as well as environment and people in housing production. With reference to the praxis of social housing in the last century oscillating between settlement and eviction practices, it suggests a materialist and dialectic re-definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ for social housing.