The neverending house

The self-built homes of Santiago are precarious and ever changing. They are, always and at once, being and becoming

by Consuelo Araos  BIO

Illustrations by Rafael Araos

is assistant professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universidad de los Andes in Chile. Her work focuses on domestic life, kinship and residence, articulating ethnography with phenomenology to examine how, in organising and experiencing domesticity, people take part in the broader process of making the world a home.

Few problems feel more pressing today than housing. Across the world, access to affordable, stable, dignified housing has become one of the defining challenges of our time, in wealthy capitals and struggling peripheries alike. According to UN-Habitat, more than 2.8 billion people – roughly 35 per cent of the global population – lack access to adequate housing. Rents rise faster than wages; ownership recedes as an aspiration for younger generations; entire neighbourhoods are reshaped by speculation and displacement. The question of who gets to live where, and on what terms, sits at the heart of contemporary urban life.

This is not a new problem. In The Housing Question (1872), Friedrich Engels identified it as a structural consequence of industrial capitalism: as workers flooded into cities, the market and the state proved incapable of providing, or unwilling to provide, shelter for all. From that moment, housing became a political question. Over the following century, governments across the developed world came to assume that the solution lay in their hands: through public construction, regulation, subsidy, and the organised machinery of mortgage markets and mass homeownership. Housing was a problem to be solved – technically, bureaucratically and financially. Today, that problem has only deepened: a global crisis of affordability and tenure grips cities across the world, and housing is drawn ever further into the circuits of finance and speculation.

Yet across much of the 20th century, in the rapidly urbanising cities of Latin America, Africa and Asia, the state-led housing paradigm never fully took hold. Cities grew faster than any state or real-estate market could manage. Millions gained access to housing – and to the city itself – not through the formal mechanisms of policy and planning, but by occupying land, building by hand and gradually, generation by generation, turning bare earth into home, in ways that the state variously resisted, tolerated, regularised or actively supported. In countless such cities, self-built houses and neighbourhoods were not an exception to the urban order; they were intrinsic to how the city was made.

The precariousness, informality and lack of top-down planning that characterise access to shelter in the cities of the Global South may well justify seeing them as a failure – a sign of governments’ and societies’ inability to adequately resolve the housing question. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, it is precisely among self-built environments that housing can be seen from an angle rarely present in mainstream debate, and nonetheless fundamental: that any serious attempt to understand how societies provide a place to live must first ask what it means to live somewhere at all, and what role the house itself plays in that. In simple words, that behind every housing problem lies a dwelling problem. Behind the pervasive technical illusion of the house as object, commodity and asset, the building-dwelling bond tends to disappear. By contrast, in self-building, that relationship remains exposed and alive, woven into the life that the house makes possible, and that makes the house possible in return. Two decades of fieldwork in the urban margins of Chile’s capital Santiago have led me to see, in this little-by-little, intergenerational, unfinished way of making one’s own house, an experience of building that has something to teach us about the art of dwelling.

I came to the question of the house long before I had any concepts for it. Victoria worked in my family’s home when I was a child and, for as long as I can remember, I knew her through the story of her own house – a story I first overheard in her conversations with my mother, and which years later, when I began my first fieldwork on domestic life in Santiago, became the first I set out to study, and the one I have returned to ever since. Her house was Victoria’s favourite subject of conversation. Whenever we talked, it would intrude everywhere: in anecdotes, in complaints, in memories, even in the most ordinary exchanges about almost anything.

Victoria was already an older woman when I first interviewed her in 2007, early in what would become ongoing fieldwork on domestic life in Santiago. She had retired some years earlier, after a lifetime as a domestic worker, due to advanced diabetes. Born in a very poor village of seaweed gatherers, Victoria ran away as a child from the foster family her birth mother had placed her with. She barely attended school, and while still an adolescent she joined her life to the man who would become her husband. With him she had six children – the first before she turned 15; the youngest, disabled, already in his 40s – and she became a great-grandmother before 50.

Four generations had lived under Victoria’s roof – by rearranging rooms or by adding new ones in the backyard and on top of the house

If many of the topics we discussed were, for her, a source of complaint – particularly those concerning her health and the everyday tensions among her relatives – Victoria seemed to take a particular, almost contagious pleasure in describing the smallest details of how the house had been built from the moment they arrived, when the plot was ‘nothing but bare earth’, as well as its successive transformations and its ongoing plans, improvements and repairs.

I was struck by her meticulous........

© Aeon