Feeling at Home:Transforming the Politics of Housing

Feeling At Home makes a compelling political case for something housing movements seem to forget: more homes, even very affordable ones, will not dismantle a fundamentally harmful and exploitative system. Gotby points toward a new horizon where housing can be a means of radically reshaping family, care, and society.

In the best traditions of Marxism and feminism, Alva Gotby insists on asking far better questions. The result is this sophisticated, humane and exciting book.Feeling at Homeis a multi-point perspective that reveals everything that ‘home’ means, and - more importantly - ought to mean. It makes the radical seem obvious, and the impossible seem essential

An important focus on the complex and multi-layered nature of home and the housing question, and why we still need to fight for it.

In her riveting new book, formidable scholar and organiser Alva Gotby tackles the personal and social calamities created by our continuing housing crisis. With elegant precision, Gotby shows how we can and must help restore the hope and vision necessary for the collective struggle for better homes for all, eliminating the widespread sense of powerlessness generated by housing precarity and instability. Feeling at Home is an essential resource for winning that struggle.

An important contribution to debates around social reproduction, care, the family and home. In this set of essays Alva Gotby sets new horizons for the housing justice movement, laying out terrain for discussion – and struggle.

Alva Gotby’s short, passionate, and incisive book forces us to see how the current housing crisis is exacerbated by idealized patriarchal and capitalist notions of domesticity that link private home ownership with personal success. Instead of simply calling on the state to provide more public housing, Gotby demands that we interrogate our very definition of the domestic. By breaking down the artificial boundaries that demarcate the public from the private, expanding our definition of the family, and reimagining the ways we mark successful adulthood, Gotby argues that we need bold new visions of architecture and urban planning as we endeavor to build more caring, connected, and contented societies.

Calmly radical ... [Feeling at Home] is a worthy handbook for those looking to, as the book’s subtitle says, “transform the politics of housing”.

Readers interested in housing policy as well as the housing crisis more generally will find much to ponder.

Gotby’s book is a welcome and much-needed intervention

The stratagems in this book put rational logic and utopia back in the mix

Shows how we can and must help restore the hope and vision necessary for the collective struggle for better homes for all