‘My room is the kitchen’: lived experience of home-making, home-unmaking and emerging housing strategies of disadvantaged urban youth in austerity Ireland

Abstract

The current Irish housing crisis shows that the 2008 financial crash lingers on in everyday lives and spaces. As especially poorer populations became increasingly excluded from affordable housing under austerity, it is increasingly felt as a ‘personal crisis’. This paper explores the impacts of austerity on home-(un)making to reveal home as a place where austerity becomes ‘lived’ and ‘felt’. Building on interviews with young people aged 18 to 25 in Cork and Dublin, it focusses on a group eager but unable to leave their parental home. Their experiences illustrate the immediate home-unmaking of austerity and the role of past memories and anticipated futures in home-unmaking under austerity. As future expectations and home-making strategies are adjusted to the austerity context, these reconfigure the facets and spheres through which crisis and austerity are experienced. The becoming-everyday of the financial crisis affects the places and spaces of everyday life, creating an all-encompassing ‘slow crisis’ that alters domestic routines and materialities, creates new forms of living together, and presents new strategies for housing and home-making. Housing and home are critical spheres through which austerity and recession become embedded in the everyday lives of disadvantaged urban youth and shape contemporary life courses in the city-after-austerity.