Permeable Housing and Intersecting Infrastructures

Abstract

At their most elemental, houses regulate relations between internal and external environments, providing a carapace for soft tissue residents from water, atmospheres, and vermin. But houses not only shelter bodies, they mimic them, with their exoskeletons less box than living membrane: permeable, porous, pervious, and absorbent. Arterial pipes, wires, and cable networks intersect with housing to distribute water, energy, and waste; while matter penetrates the house itself, searching out cracks, refusing expulsion, and exposing bodies to diseases and reactants. Repair and maintenance regimes stave off this entropy, both for housing and the municipal infrastructures that make houses functional, safe, and enduring. Such attention, as with the geographies of infrastructural provisioning, are matters of both bureaucratic banality and major public conflict.

This open panel is a collaboration between the Housing for Health Incubator and the Blue House Civic Studio, comparing and contrasting examples from Australia, the Louisiana Gulf Coast, and like environments. It asks: what infrastructures are required, and what work is needed to maintain them, to make housing habitable? What can STS insights on past, present, and future housing and infrastructural challenges (such as water supply and management) offer? What innovations are required to face these challenges – in architecture, urban design, governance, and community-engagement – and what battles are being fought to implement proven methods against neglect, erratic attention, and abandonment? Panel organizers welcome contributions drawing connections between the permeability of housing and water, waste, energy, paper, transport, and other infrastructures, attuned to questions of infrastructural inequality.

See: http://www.hfhincubator.org; http://thebluehousenola.com

Chairs

• Aron Chang, The Blue House Civic Studio

• Gilad Meron, The Blue House Civic Studio

Individual Presentations

• The Climate-Ready Home: Thinking Through Landscapes of Vulnerability and Care in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Alison Kenner, Drexel University

• Situated Bodies and Toxic Certainty: How Mothers Think Comparatively About Risk(s) - Paola Villegas, Northwestern University

• Healthy Climate Needs a Service: Maintaining HVAC Infrastructures in Times of Transition - Moritz F Fürst, Université de Lausanne; Alain Bovet, Institute of Geography and Sustainability

• Mold Cultures - Liam Grealy, University of Sydney

• Friend and Foe: Relating Water and Housing through the Lens of Extractivism - Tess Lea, University of Sydney

Session Organizer

• Liam Grealy, University of Sydney