Housing’s values: Housing as an ethical urbanism

Abstract

Housing’s values are a key topic of public and policy debate, with discussions including the social value of housing in the form of human rights or care, rising property values, value-capture in infrastructure development, Indigenous values of land, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing is valued, not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing but to recognise and engage with the ways various valuations of housing inform a situated and relational politics of value. The analysis is concerned with how people make valuations about housing as well as how these different housing valuations intersect to constitute a politics of housing values. It is a common reduction to associate housing with its economic value and home with social values. Attempts to reconcile these values typically involve proxy valuations to commensurate the social to the economic. However, value pluralists resist such easy reduction of social values to the market, holding that plural values are incommensurable. Our more-than-political economy approach draws on anthropology and moral philosophical theories of value to conceptualise an agonistic politics of housing value. To illustrate this conceptual case, we discuss three regimes of value in Australia, that is, capitalist regimes of real estate value as the dominant value regime, Indigenous cultural values tied to land and housing and care ethics and human rights as housing discourse. These cases highlight the processes of value realisation, not just within these regimes of value, but within and between them, to animate an agonistic tournament of housing’s value. We are interested in the politics within and between these different claims about value and argue the utility of value theory is to show how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to try to show what the value of housing as-an-object is.