Basic rights have become attached to housing. How then, can the growing number of people who must do without housing realise basic needs and protections? Anthropologist Luisa T. Schneider investigates this fundamental challenge of our time.
While more and more people do not have an apartment, we have created a society that links social needs and, with them, basic and human rights, to housing. Schneider: “Think, for example, of privacy and intimacy, which are basic rights in human rights law and domestic law. These rights encompass domestic, family and private life, our inner, emotional and sexual life, and presuppose that private and public spheres are separated by the walls of an apartment. Or think of the premises that go hand in hand with the term domestic violence, of the impossibility of adequately enforcing restraining orders in public or protecting people from violence there.”
“Think of how you cannot take your clothes off in public to wash yourself, how you should not have sex in public nor sleep there. Or think of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the contact restrictions take household members as a yardstick and measures often rely on the possibility for people to withdraw into apartments, to work, study and live from there,” Schneider explains. Hence housing is not only necessary for decent living standards but key to enable legal protection, safety, belonging and wellbeing.
The urgent questions that present themselves and which the research of Schneider answers are, in her own words: “What happens when one has no home of one’s own, no walls to create the conditions that allow intimacy to be lived? How can houseless individuals live in privacy and intimacy? What does home, security and protection mean to them? Are they taking steps to claim their rights and are they seeking state protection and if not, what alternative mechanisms do they develop?”