What’s Inhabitable? Revisiting a Key Housing Concept in Vancouver

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Housing.

Abstract

In this paper I argue that sociologists should return to investigating inhabitability as a key concept of practical and theoretical interest. To lay the ground work for this investigation, I ask three questions: 1) What aspects of inhabitability as a concept are important to define? 2) How do these aspects get defined (to the extent they are defined at all) in existing measures of inhabitability? 3) How do they get defined by people in their everyday lives? I offer lessons in this regard from a case study of my attempts to assess whether Vancouver remains inhabitable for anyone who isn’t ridiculously wealthy. My findings are that four aspects of inhabitability are particularly important to conceptualize in coming up with a working definition. The working definitions explicit or implicit in most measurements occupy only a narrow portion of possible conceptualizations. By contrast, in their everyday lives, people define inhabitability across the full range of possible conceptualizations.

Author

• Nathanael T. Lauster, University of British Columbia