Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/53205

Title

Of tidy gardens and clean houses: housing officers as agents of social control

Author(s)

Saugeres, Lise

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the theme of institutional geographies by exploring how the prevailing socio-spatial order is recreated and legitimated in the ways in which public rented housing is managed and delivered by housing associations and local authorities in the UK. The public rented sector has been increasingly catering for the most vulnerable sections of the population who are dependent on state benefits and cannot afford any other form of housing. As a result, housing staffs have found themselves having to take on a welfare role which entails controlling and policing social tenants who are seen to be causing disorder in society. This paper shows how a dominant housing management discourse reproduced by policies and staff at both front-line and management levels is that of an emerging 'underclass' promoted by right wing politicians and the media since the 1980s. According to dominant housing management discourse the members of this underclass are disrupting traditional patriarchal and capitalist institutions and values. Tenants' houses and gardens not conforming to culturally and socially acceptable standards of cleanliness and tidiness symbolises tenants' lack of conformity to the prevailing institutional order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing officers and managers, and observations of interviews between staff and tenants in six housing organisations, this paper analyses the ways in which housing organisations seek to control social tenants through the imposition of certain norms of cleanliness over their houses and gardens.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology

Source

Geoforum, Vol. 31, no. 4 (Nov 2000), pp. 587-599

Publication year

2000

Keyword(s)

Cleanliness;  Control;  Discourse;  Gardens;  Houses;  Housing management;  Underclass

Publisher

Pergamon

ISSN

0016-7185

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(00)00025-7

Copyright

Copyright © 2000 Elsevier. All rights reserved.

Peer reviewed