Conceptualising housing as infrastructure: a framework for thinking infrastructurally in housing studies

Drawing on new infrastructural scholarship, this paper conceptualises housing as infrastructure, outlining a way forward for housing researchers to draw the concept into their empirical practises. We demonstrate how and why we should research housing as infrastructure, using co-living housing as our empirical touchpoint to develop a framework for infrastructural housing studies. This paper has two parts. First, we identify what it means to conceptualise housing as infrastructure. Infrastructure is: a socio-material system or pattern, relational and generative. Second, we outline some useful vantage points for thinking infrastructurally about housing. We consider affordances, politics and inhabitation as three useful locations to understand the infrastructural work that housing does to order and organise the social world. We suggest thinking infrastructurally about housing can be done by interrogating how the dimensions of infrastructure work to order and organise affordances, politics and inhabitation.