Law, Concepts,
Possibilities
Jessie Hohmann
A human right to housing
represents the law's most direct and overt protection of housing and home.
Unlike other human rights, through which the home incidentally receives
protection and attention, the right to housing raises housing itself to the
position of primary importance. However, the meaning, content, scope and even
existence of a right to housing raise vexed questions.
Drawing on insights from
disciplines including law, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and
geography, this book is both a contribution to the state of knowledge on the
right to housing, and an entry into the broader human rights debate. It
addresses profound questions on the role of human rights in belonging and
citizenship, the formation of identity, the perpetuation of forms of social
organisation and, ultimately, of the relationship between the individual and
the state. The book addresses the legal, theoretical and conceptual issues,
providing a deep analysis of the right to housing within and beyond human
rights law. Structured in three parts, the book outlines the right to housing
in international law and in key national legal systems; examines the most
important concepts of housing: space, privacy and identity and, finally, looks
at the potential of the right to alleviate human misery, marginalisation and
deprivation.
The book represents a
major contribution to the scholarship on an under-studied and ill-defined
right. In terms of content, it provides a much needed exploration of the right
to housing. In approach it offers a new framework for argument within which the
right to housing, as well as other under-theorised and contested rights, can be
reconsidered, reconnecting human rights with the social conditions of their
violation, and hence with the reasons for their existence.