Bringing new ideas to housing research

This article examines how internally displaced persons from the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh negotiate the distinction between house and home in Yerevan, Armenia, through a study that draws on 30 narrative interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023. The study explores participants'' movement across three dominant post-displacement housing setting: collective housing, co-residing with family, and rental housing. It examines how participants’ experiences are shaped by the distinct conditions of entry, legitimate use, and temporal security afforded by each setting, rather than treating these settings as mere “options” that differ only in comfort and quality. By bringing together phenomenological ideas of home and materialist ideas of housing, the research develops a conceptual model of home-making that is grounded in practice and shaped by the interrelationship between housing settings, appropriation, and futurity. The research demonstrates that ‘not feeling at home’ is a practice that participants undertake in response to revocability in housing settings, and that participants'' actions of cleaning, repairing, and organising a space and the establishing of routines are all done amidst considerations/expectations of disruption. The research identifies distinct temporalities in institutional, relational, and market settings and demonstrates how constraints on spatial appropriation generate non-investment in a sense of home, even in housing that is materially sufficient. The research concludes with a discussion of the implications for housing policy that is grounded in a realist understanding of how to enable home-making, and how this requires moving beyond merely providing housing towards focusing on how to reduce revocability and to enable legitimate forms of appropriation that are modest and inexpensive.