We Have Never Been Private

The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe

Piniara, Ioanna

The publication puts forward the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. It proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatisation not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organisation of housing. Against the neoliberal idea of the institutional autonomy of the private, the thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Methodologically, the thesis deploys a typological study to demystify this pedagogy through selected urban housing schemes in London, Berlin and Athens, marking a geographical and chronological vector of neoliberal advance: from anticipation to severe crisis.