Understanding the Radical Politics of Inhabitation Beyond Dwelling: The Habitability Crisis As Method.

In this presentation, I advance the “habitability crisis” as the method to zoom in on the conflicted intersections of social infrastructures, sociospatial practices, contentious politics, and late-neoliberal capitalist assemblages that further and counter the curated uninhabitability (Simone, 2019) of urban and non-urban spaces within the contemporary context of polycrisis (Morin and Kern, 1999; Tooze, 2022). Here, I follow Mezzadra’s and Neilson’s (2013) understanding of the ‘border as method’ to conceive habitability as an epistemological device that “is at work whenever a distinction between subject and object is established” (p. 16) and that thus informs conceptual questions and methods as it “deals with such instances of tricky conceptual overlapping and confusion through the punctual analysis of concrete” case studies (p. 15). Speaking of the “habitability crisis” (Grazioli, 2024), the first instance of conceptual fuzziness is the definition (and possibly distinction) of things such as dwelling, home, housing, inhabitation and shelter. Aligning with Lancione’s (2023) effort of reading through (and beyond) the bordering entrenched in the politics (and policing) of home/lessness, I conceive the habitability crisis as an instrument to acknowledge both the grand scales of the widespread impossibility to make and inhabit space, and the fine grain of those forms of inhabitation and infrastructure that counter it within and beyond dwelling (and shelter) (Boano and Astolfo, 2021; Lancione and Simone, 2021). In this presentation, I focus on the habitability crisis as a method to understand, and stand with, those grassroots forms of inhabitation, social infrastructures and reproduction, makeshift placemaking, squatting, “bodily precarious politics” (Lancione, 2018) that emerge “in the interstices of home and its foundational lessness” (Lancione, 2023, p.viii), and whose insurgence compose a “liberatory politics of home” (Lancione, 2023) beyond the “binary reading of home and its other” (Lancione, 2023, p. viii), hence beyond the habitability crisis itself.