Dismantling the oppressive binaries of home(lessness)

For a Liberatory Politics of Home, published by Duke University Press, is a dense and intellectually expansive book that destabilises dominant understandings of home and homelessness, offering significant contributions to geography, urban studies, feminist and queer theory, and development studies. Central to the book's conceptual architecture is the semantic coupling of home and homelessness as home(less) – a move that conveys the author's central contention that the two are ‘the matter of the same’ (p. 9). This pairing upends the common assumption that home and homelessness lie on a continuum, or that they constitute discrete opposites; instead, they are shown to be mutually constitutive categories reproduced through the operations of racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, nationalism, the financialisation of housing and settlercolonialism. The ‘impossible impossibility of home’ becomes the book's philosophical centre: home is simultaneously indispensable and structurally unattainable for many. The author sharply argues that lessness – the organised production of scarcity, exclusion and dispossession – underpins contemporary understandings of home at every scale. As the book asserts with uncompromising clarity: home is not a solution to anything; home is the problem.

My reading of the book is closely shaped by my own research, which takes home as an epistemic and analytical category for understanding how pavement dwelling and street living communities – and those variously labelled ‘homeless’ or ‘shelterless’ – live, produce and defend home under conditions of profound precarity. Over the years, I have deliberately used the term unhoused as an epistemological tool rather than as an index of deficit, precisely to unsettle the normative categories through which home and housing are imagined within policy and urban scholarship. In this sense, the book's explicit positioning within the ‘camp’ (in the words of the author) – its refusal of the normative home – feels especially compelling. This review thus speaks from the points at which the book's conceptual claims intersect with, extend, or challenge my own engagements with non-dominant forms of urban inhabitation.

The book's framing of home as a colonial project is among its most important interventions, and something that resonates with critical geographical, anthropological and sociological scholarship on home, housing and homelessness. Home is approached not merely as a physical structure or affective ideal, but as a site and ideology deeply entangled with global histories of extraction and expulsion. The contemporary ideal of home, the author argues, rests upon layers of historical neglect and dispossession – from imperial land appropriation to financialised housing markets. Home operates as an affect, a political economy and a cultural paradigm that normalises exclusion while producing homelessness as its necessary counterpart. The violence of home lies in what cultures deem ‘homely’: the stability, warmth and belonging associated with home emerge from practices that render others placeless, surplus or abject. Drawing on thinkers including Verónica Gago (2020), the book critiques strands of feminist politics that inadvertently reinforce heteronormative logics of homeliness even as they expand who can inhabit them.

These ideas resonate closely with my own work on pavement dwelling communities in India and on non-dominant forms of urban living elsewhere (Banerjee et al., 2025). Pavement dwellers frequently refer to their dwelling spaces as ghar , articulating belonging through maintenance, care and improvisation despite constant threats from authorities, exposure to traffic, monsoon floods, extreme heat and routine sanitisation drives. Their homemaking – building and sustaining structures from discarded materials, cooking, caring for children and animals, forging social relations, generating livelihood – occurs amid relentless uncertainty. Their practices unsettle developmental policy discourses in India and elsewhere, which routinely treat home as synonymous with formal housing and the street as a site of deficiency. The book's argument that we must attend to how people inhabit space, rather than prescribing what counts as home, aligns deeply with these urban realities in much of the world. A persistent tension in my work has been demonstrating that the street is not the source of homelessness; rather, eviction, displacement and the withdrawal of basic urban infrastructures produce homelessness. This is why I have resisted attaching the language of ‘lessness’ to informal homemaking – many forms of inhabitation dismissed as ‘lesser’ are, in fact, vibrant and meaningful.

The book offers a powerful critique of the kinds of home that racial capitalism, ecofascism, heteropatriarchy and financialisation produce. Home emerges as a violent formation, one that coerces, disciplines and excludes. Yet this critique also gives rise to a set of generative tensions. While the author's refusal of home is compelling as a political stance, it does not fully resonate with the experiences of those who fight to maintain certain forms of home under precarious conditions. As Iris Marion Young argues, despite its oppressive histories, home can carry ‘critical liberating potential’ because it expresses deeply human values (2005: 2). Like Young, I hesitate to dismiss the idea of home entirely. In many contexts, home is not defined by physical walls but by acts of care, community and mutual support. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) notes that in the context of displacement, people often long for an imagined or idealised home left behind – a sensibility that remains politically significant even when the material home no longer exists. My own research across India reveals that people continually create home in spaces officially deemed unhomely (Banerjee, 2023). Popular, elite and developmental framings may label such spaces as ‘homelessness’, but the everyday practices of decorating pavement dwellings, preparing meals, rearing children and animals, resisting municipal eviction, sustaining livelihoods and nurturing social ties all demonstrate homemaking albeit under duress. The book acknowledges such practices as forms of ‘autonomous praxis’ (p. 217) that persist globally, yet leaves open the question of what to do when people wish to return to, or hold on to, a version of home.

A major contribution of the book is its theorisation of homelessness as something produced through the bordering of the hegemonic home. Homelessness is framed as a lack only when measured against the normative ideal of home – an ideal produced through extractive, racialised and patriarchal political economies. Three strands of argument on the management of poverty illustrated through homelessness interventions, strongly echo my research in India and beyond.

First, the book offers a compelling critique of the homelessness industry. Official responses – shelters, charity, humanitarian aid, social work – do not simply alleviate homelessness; they also reproduce it. The industry reinforces the borders of home by framing homelessness as pathology, deficiency, stigma and moral failure. Both religious acts of salvation and secular charitable practices rely on gendered, heteronormative and racialised scripts of pity, discipline and worthiness. Drawing on Ananya Roy's (2019) work on spatial banishment, the book shows how charity operates as a disciplinary and extractive force that disciplines both bodies and behaviours. Emergency shelters, often extolled as humane interventions, can in practice produce displacement, surveillance and instability. The street, by contrast, can offer forms of continuity.

Second, the book foregrounds the politics of refusal. The vignette of a middle-aged woman refusing expired butter in a Turin soup kitchen becomes emblematic of what the author calls ‘expulsive subjectification’ (p. 110). Her refusal is interpreted in the book as a form of agency, self-defence and resistance against the desensitised charity industry. This resonates with refusals I have witnessed: rejecting unpalatable food during COVID-19 relief distribution (Banerjee et al., 2026); refusing distant resettlement housing (Banerjee, 2023); objecting to the label ‘homeless’. These refusals disrupt the expectation that interventions for the poor must be accepted without question. When they are not, the poor are cast as ungrateful, deviant and undeserving – a dynamic the book traces with theoretical and ethnographic clarity. Constructions of deserving/undeserving poor and the subsequent treatment of poverty are deeply embedded in developmental and humanitarian work (as seen through the account of an interaction between a ‘homeless’ man Mr Hillman and the police officer Larry DePrimo in Chapter 5).

Third, the book demonstrates how crises intensify the bordering of home. COVID-19 made the tyranny of home unmistakable globally. In Western contexts, home became a site of security, containment and moral responsibility. My research in India, Kenya, Bangladesh and Australia – as in many other geographical contexts, reveals – dominant, housing-centric definitions of home structured public-health responses. Institutional shelters were framed as the best alternative to home, while those on the streets were construed as public threats requiring control. My research during the pandemic found that evictions and violent sanitisation increased dramatically, revealing how the hegemonic home becomes a border to be defended during crises.

The book's concluding question – whether universal provision of housing could address homelessness – yields an uncompromising ′no′. Even Housing First, though more progressive than charity-based models, applies a dominant logic of homing. Housing becomes a technical fix rather than a political re-imagination. The author instead calls for ‘the ideological and material praxis of redoing homing’ (p. 163), grounded in a liberatory stance that opens space for ‘non-normative dwelling’ (p. 170). Housing precarity becomes a starting point to forge new forms of home, not a condition to be eradicated. The book advocates limiting policy interventions that foreclose the productive capacities of precarious dwelling. Emancipation is located in queer praxis, Black feminist organising, community action and housing justice movements within and beyond the academy. The state, the author argues, holds responsibility for banning the financialisation of housing, nationalising banks, limiting property accumulation and embedding an ethic of critical learning about the violence of home.

Drawing on the book, one can understand street dwelling as a form of liberatory homemaking aligned with radical deinstitutionalisation. Yet these ideas raise a continuing tension: what if unhoused people desire conventional home? In a world marked by widening inequality, mass displacement and urbicide, aspirations for home cannot be dismissed simply because the dominant home is violent. The book's analysis, grounded in a Western empiric of home, does not always translate neatly to contexts like India, where homemaking occurs precisely in conditions labelled as homelessness. State, market and community actors often intersect less through opposition than through shifting assemblages of negotiation, coercion and exception.

The author's reflexive attention to their own positionality, including their reflections on marriage, mortgage and the contradictions of academic life, lends depth to the work. Yet it also raises questions about what it means, within the conditions of global precarity, to advocate not going back home. For those of us embedded within the academy and international development institutions – themselves implicated in housing precarity – how do we respond to those who seek immediate forms of home? This question is not a shortcoming of the book; rather, it is a persistent and generative tension in my own work.

For a Liberatory Politics of Home arrived at a pivotal moment in my scholarly and policy engagements: as I completed a major UN-Habitat report on 50 years of global housing policy and co-led a project on epistemes of non-dominant inhabitation. The book compelled me to re-examine the home/homelessness binary and the limits of policy commitments to ‘adequate housing for all’. If universal housing provision is not the answer, incremental possibilities remain: resisting evictions, supporting community organisations working with the unhoused, and centring anti-financialisation in global housing debates, particularly in advancing the recommendations of UN Special Rapporteurs. These gestures, while insufficient as solutions, may nevertheless constitute meaningful pathways toward easing the harms of housing precarity while allowing us to keep open the political question of what a genuinely liberatory home could be. In refusing reformism and insisting that home itself is the problem, the book forces a deep reconsideration of fundamental concepts that structure modern life. It is a timely, provocative and necessary intervention – one that will shape debates about home, homelessness and housing justice for years to come.

What the book also opens up – although indirectly – is a space to interrogate the temporalities through which home and homelessness are governed. In many policy and scholarly framings, home is imagined as a stabilising endstate, while homelessness is treated as a temporary aberration that must be rapidly corrected. Yet the ethnographic realities I have encountered suggest that homemaking is often episodic, discontinuous, seasonally reconfigured, and negotiated through rhythms of labour, care and conflict. Such temporalities exceed both the permanence promised by the modern bourgeois home and the crisis-driven temporariness through which homelessness is categorised. In cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Nairobi, for example, families routinely shift between pavement dwelling, rented rooms, kin-based living, night shelters and street corners depending on work cycles, weather patterns, municipal violence and familial obligations. These circulations complicate any singular rendering of what home is or ought to be. The book gestures toward such multiplicities through its attention to ‘non-normative dwelling’, yet the temporal dynamics of such dwelling remain an important site for further work. If home(lessness) is co-produced, then its temporalities – its interruptions, returns, anticipations and improvisations – are equally central to imagining a liberatory politics of home.