Atmospheres of Waiting: Inhabiting the Temporalities of Housing’s Spatial Subversion

This paper explores the dynamics of inhabitation and everyday struggle through the lens of “atmospheres of waiting”. I use this concept as a way to describe the affective and practical environments inhabited by women in informal co-habitation (aka. allegadas) in overcrowded households in Santiago of Chile while waiting, often for over a decade, for the allocation of housing subsidies. The research examines how these women’s provisional and contested living conditions are shaped by the intersections of gendered vulnerabilities, neoliberal housing policies, and sociotechnical entanglements.

Drawing from ongoing fieldwork, the study foregrounds how these spaces constitute more than sites of dispossession. Instead, they function as zones of generativity and subversion, where engendered subjects negotiate new spatial and temporal configurations, challenging the commodification and standardization typical of urban planning in contexts of neoliberalism. By reimagining what may be considered to be largely uninhabitable, these women create “subaltern” forms of spatial production, organizing everyday struggles and engendering alternative architectures of care, agency, and survival.

Methodologically, the study engages with ethnographic, visual, and architectural tools to capture these everyday practices, focusing on how domestic spaces become terrains of negotiation, subversion, and potentiality. This approach aims to contribute to a broader understanding of inhabitation beyond formal housing frameworks, demonstrating how technical, affective, and material reconfigurations generate new modes of presence in contexts of chronic waiting and exclusion.