Editors’ Introduction: The Emotions of Housing in a Time of Crisis

The global housing system is facing a polycrisis as it contends with the multiplicity of an ageing population, the demands of climate change, migration driven population flows, and a protracted cost of living crisis. Yet even within a crisis context, and the widening of housing inequalities this brings, people continue to ‘make home’. Understanding these processes and experiences requires an empirical and epistemological focus on emotions. Emotions are a key dimension of human experience, providing the empirical foundations for analytical insight, concepts and theories. By bringing valuable lived experience insights into how people ‘feel home’ in diverse and challenging housing contexts this special issue augments previous debates in this field. With five contributions using diverse theories, this special issue illuminates how the study of housing is imbued with emotion. Drawing on research across different housing tenures, national contexts and life course stages it shines a spotlight on the relational nature of housing, how power operates at different spatial scales, and how the meaning of home is constructed by residents in different contexts. Overall, this special issue strives to link lived experience at the micro-level to the wider structural shifts we are witnessing in the housing system globally.