Abstract
The final chapter weaves together the various threads that pervade this book: trust, home, housing insecurity, and activism. Home as a space of trust does not lose its significance in the face of the housing crisis; rather, its potential and significance are underlined. The analysis reveals not only the pitfalls of the current housing system and the hardships of people on the ground, but also the strong sense of belonging people continue to feel and home’s potential for current activism around the housing question. This chapter thus aims to strike a hopeful chord, showing that while the home has become unsettled, it remains a central building block of urban society. Things are thus more complicated than to simply attest a loss of home and trust in times of the US housing crisis. Rather, the final chapter highlights the ambivalence of home and trust. When analyzing people’s housing biographies, home is simultaneously about trust and distrust, about belonging and displacement, about rootedness and venturing into the future. Having extrapolated the significance of home, this chapter then concludes in a call for a universal right to housing as part and parcel of the right to the city.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I will use the term right to housing in this context; however, similar political demands can also be found under slightly different headings such as “the right to stay put” (Newman and Wyly 2006), “the right to community” (Hubbard and Lees 2018), and “the right not to be displaced” (Morel et al. 2012; Stavropoulou and Lee 1996).
References
Blunt A, Sheringham O (2018) Home-city geographies: Urban dwelling and mobility. Prog Hum Geogr 43(5):815–834
Blunt A et al (2021) The living of time: Entangled temporalities of home and the city. Trans Inst Br Geogr 46:149–162
Brenner N et al (ed) (2012) Cities for people, not for profit: Critical urban theory and the right to the city. Routledge, London
Desmond M (2016) Evicted. Poverty and profit in the American City. Penguin, London
Edelman (2021) Edelman Trust Barometer 2021. https://www.edelman.de/research/edelman-trust-barometer-2021. Accessed 22 Mar 2021
Gago V (2017) Neoliberalism from below: Popular pragmatics and baroque economies. Duke University Press, Durham
Gibbons A (2017) A place to call home. In: Verso Editors (ed) The right to the city: a Verso report. Verso, London, pp 42–54
Harvey D (2003) The right to the city. Int J Urban Reg Res 27:939–941
Harvey D (2012) Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. Verso, London
Holm A (2014) Das Recht auf Stadt in umkämpften Räumen. Zur gesellschaftlichen Reichweite lokaler Proteste. In: Gestring N et al (eds) Stadt und soziale Bewegungen. Springer, Wiesbaden, pp 43–62
Hubbard P, Lees L (2018) The right to community? City 22(1):8–25
Lefebvre H (2014) Die Revolution der Städte. CEP Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg
Lefebvre H (2016 [1968]) Das Recht auf Stadt. Edition Nautilius, Hamburg
Madden D, Marcuse P (2016) In defense of housing. Verso, London and New York City
Marcuse P (2012) Whose right(s) to what city? In: Benner N et al (ed) Cities for people, not for profit. Critical urban theory and the right to the city. Routledge, London, pp 24–41
McCabe BJ (2016) No place like home: Wealth, community, and the politics of homeownership. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Merrifield A (2014) The new urban question. Pluto Press, London
Merrifield A (2017) Fifty years on: The right to the city. In: Verso Editors (ed) The right to the city: a Verso report. Verso, London, pp 15–29
Mitchell D (2003) The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford Press, New York City
Morel M et al (2012) The history and status of the right not to be displaced. Forced Migr Rev 5–7
Muñoz S (2018) Urban precarity and home: There is no right to the city. Ann Am Assoc Geogr 108(2):370–379
National Opinion Research Center (NORC) (2021) General Social Survey (GSS). https://gss.norc.org/. Accessed 22 Mar 2021
Newman K, Wyly EK (2006) The right to stay put, revisited: Gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City. Urban Stud 43:23–57
Purcell M (2002) Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal 58:99–108
Rolnik R (2014) Place, inhabitance and citizenship: The right to housing and the right to the city in the contemporary urban world. Int J Hous Policy 14(3):293–300
Rolnik R (2019) Urban warfare: Housing under the empire of finance. Verso, London and New York City
Rosen E (2020) The voucher promise. “Section 8” and the fate of an American neighborhood. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Ross LM, Squires GD (2011) The personal costs of subprime lending and the foreclosure crisis: A matter of trust, insecurity, and institutional deception. Soc Sci Q 92(1):140–163
Schmid C (2012) Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city, and the new metropolitan mainstream. In: Benner N et al (ed) Cities for people, not for profit: Critical urban theory and the right to the city. Routledge, London, pp 42–62
Stavropoulou M, Lee LT (1996) The question of a right not to be displaced. Proc Ann Meet (Am Soc Int Law) 90:549–558
Stein S (2019) Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. Verso, London and New York City
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keller, J. (2024). Home, Trust, and the Right to the City: Concluding Remarks. In: The US Housing Crisis. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57758-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57758-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-57757-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-57758-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)