In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin and coeditor of Grammars of the Urban Ground, also published by Duke University Press, and Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City.

Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. The Problem of Lessness  1
Part I
1. The Subject at Home  25
2. Expulsion and Extraction  43
Part II
3. Italian Ritornellos  69
4. A Local Violence  99
5. A Global Culture  131
Part III
6. The Micropolitics of Housing Precarity  173
7. Deinstitute, Reinstitute, Institute  195
Conclusion. Beyond Inhabitation  223
Notes  233
Bibliography  257
Index  279