Assembling a ‘kind of’ home in the UK private renting sector

Abstract

Drawing on assemblage-thinking and specific assemblage concepts, this article explores the ways in which young, less affluent people create a sense of home in an unregulated, market-based private renting sector (PRS) that confers reduced tenant agency and frequent, undesired residential mobility. For this context, we propose the concept of ‘home-assembling’ to account for the ontologically, normatively and emotionally different processes involved in constructing a sense of home than those connoted by home-making. Through in-depth telephone interviews and photo elicitation, we explore: the transient, incomplete nature of practices of home personalisation; the destabilising effect of broken things which erodes the sense of home and instils feelings of unworthiness; and processes of de-territorialisation, particularly unwanted real/feared relocation, space sharing and confinement in small rooms. We document that the struggle to continually assemble, de-assemble and re-assemble a sense of home drastically reduces private tenants’ wellbeing through stress, anxiety, depression and alienation. However, we also indicate potential lines of change towards alternative futures not least by the emergence of a tenants’ ‘collective body’ as well as by casting tenants’ housing ill-being as a matter of public concern.