In this provocative exploration, Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone examine housing not as shelter or asset but as an operation shaping desires, bodies, and possibilities of urban life. Drawing on experiences from Jakarta to Naples, Bucharest to Dakar, Lancione and Simone reveal how the “thing of the house” works as a magnetic field, promising belonging while simultaneously producing forms of captivity and violence. Through three key operations—spacing, seeing, and surfacing—they unpack how housing interrupts and rearranges life under racial capitalism, creating subjects who must constantly negotiate between habitation and its annihilation. Beyond Inhabitation challenges conventional housing studies by centering the house itself as an active force that mediates between the intimate and structural, the ordinary and catastrophic. By attending to how people at the thresholds of dispossession hold onto housing’s promise despite its failures, the authors illuminate the edges where new forms of collective life might emerge—beyond the current fold of habitation, toward more liberatory futures.

Michele Lancione is Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin.

AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow Emeritus at the University of Sheffield’s Urban Institute.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. The Affective and the Political  25
2. Spacing  46
3. Seeing  75
4. Surfacing  106
5. Edging  131
Conclusion  160
Bibliography  173
Index