Domesticating Homes S. Ureta

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SEBASTIAN URETA IS ALECTURER AT iNSTITUTO DLSOClOLOGfA, I>c:)NTinCfAUNIVERSIDAD C A T 6 L [ C A D E 'CHILE . HE OBTAINED A PHD INMEDIA AND COMM UNICATIONS

AT THE LONtXiN SCHOOLO F ECONO MICS WITH THETHESIS "MACHINES FORilVmG IN:COMMUNICATiONTEC HN OLO GIES AND EiVERYDAYLIFE IN TIME OF URBANTR AN S FORM AT!ON"'( 2006).HIS BES M RC H EXI LOHES THECONN ECTIONS AMOK:.; TOPICSOF TECHNOLOGY. LVEBYDAV

SEBASTIAN URETADOMESTICATINGHOMES: MATERIALJTRANSFORMATIONAND DECORATIONAMONf LOW-COME FAMILIES INSANTIAGO, CHILEABSTRACT This ar tic le st ud ie s theprocess of appropr ia t ion of n ew h o mesin a housing es ta t e by low-incomein h ab i t an t s of Santiag o, Chi le . Basedon m ate rial collected durin g fieldwork,i t show s how this appropria t ion is aba lan ce b etw een two contrast ing forces. |On the one hand, the dwellers seek toexpress thtpirihdividuali ty through thepersonal iza t ion of thei r l iv ing sp ac es . OiIhe other hand, the modernist archi tectuiof the estates mater ial izes the i d eas oi


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in ur ba n a re as . In this context families use twomain str a tegie s to ad ap t to their new dw ell ings:the ma teria l t ransformation of home s pa ces an dtheir deco ration. The first is related to the se ar chfor security and comfort in their new homes; thesecond to self-expression and normalization.In general, I conclude that these practices docontribute to the domestication of their newhom es, a l though the im persona l architec ture ofthe estate still constitutes a limit to their quality ofme.KEYWORDS: Homes, Housing estates, Architecture, Appropriation,Normalization

INTRODUCTION

> EI sueno de la casa propia [ the dream of home owner-ship] is a common phrase, used in popuiar and com-mercial language al ike, that refers to the fact that owninga home in contemporary Chilean society is one of the main goatsfor individuals and famii ies, a key way to demonstrate a famiiy'ssuccesses (or fai lures). Through home ownership, a person canmaterial ize al l the other processes of integration and improvementin their living conditions that they have experienced over the years.The home represents the ult imate project, the fuif i l iment of theirdreams and expectations about a better future, and in order toacquire it they are will ing to make many sacrifices and take on awide range of costs.

In this article I wiit study how the purchase of new homes by agroup of low-inccme famii ies in Santiago, Chiie, is oniy the startof a process of home-making that entai ls much more than themere iegai ownership of a property. Through the study of two part-icuiar practices, the material transformation of home space anddeco ration, I wil l expiore the way tha t these fa m il ies' dom esticationof their homes is a process that tries to balance their identity andself-expression with their growing integration into Chilean society,always in relation to ideas of policy makers and deveiopers,

^ expressed in the architecture of the es tates , about how iow-income popuiations shouid l ive in urban areas .y i wil i f irst review the main ideas about the proces s of home-^ making, especiai ly in relation to housing policies for low-income2 popu lations. Secondly, i wii l study empirical ly how thes e fam il iesX have changed the material configurations of their new homes to


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION AND DECORATION AMONG LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN SANTIAGO, CHILE

about the tensions between identity and uniformity that l ie behindeveryday living in housing estates iike the one studied here.DOMESTICATING HOMES, DOMESTICATING PEOPLEAmong the iow-income population in a deveioping society like Chilethe word "home" has diverse meanings. It is not only the piacewhere individuals can find sheiter and protection from both naturaland social threats (Kaika 2004), but also, given their relativeexciusion from the labor market, formal education, and from urbaniife in gen erai, it is the place in which a cen tral pa rt oft he ir everydayroutine takes place (Rodriguez and Sungranyes 2005). But homesand the objects that f i l l them represent much more than a shelteror the piace of everyday routines.

Aiong with i ts functional character, in contemporary societieshome is also the receptacle of muit ipie meanings and aspirations.Especiai iy today, when tradit ions and other inherited and com-munitarian elements are weaker than ever before, "home owner-ship offers individuals a means through which they can attain asense of 'ontological security' in their everyday iives" (Dupuis andThorns 19 98 : 25). In our societies, the home "owes its cuitural andemotional power to its capacity to separate itseif ideologically fromthe public spaces of everyday life ... which encourage functionaitransient behaviour, and produce a peculiar mix of alienation andiiberating self-assurance" (Moran 2004: 608). So we have to seethe home as "a highly complex system of ordered relations withplace that orientates us in space, in t ime and in society" (Keliet2 0 0 3 : 90) .

But the meanings of home for low-income populations "simult-aneously has broader dimensions which relate to issues of identity,economic and social posit ions" (Keliet and Moore 2003: 127). Thereason for this is that in many urban societies throughout the w orld"property-owning is a virtualiy compu lsory definition of cit izens hip"(Moran 2004: 618). In contemporary cit ies, to be a proper memberof society is becoming increasingiy connected to being the Iegaiowner of certain kind of housing. Especiaiiy after the crisis in thewelfare state and the privatization of housing poiicies (such as theones conducted by the government of Margaret Thatcher in theUK), to be the owner of a house increasingiy appears as the keyindicator of the improvem ent in the iiving con ditions of iow-income populations.

This is aiso true in the case under study in this art icie , given the fact that "from the 19 40 s the dom inant idea of Chiiean society is that the right of housing , and to educa tion and hea lth, ought to be guaranteed by the state for that group of the population who ,


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privatization of sociai housing programs, simiiar to the ones in theUK, were app iied.

But own ership is ju st one stage of a much m ore complex pro-cess of home-making that can be defined as:

An act ive process in which most people are permanent lyengaged, it is a reflective, developing relation ship between anindividuai and key domestic piaces. This process is shapedand heightened by deveiopmental. personali ty, and demo-graphic factors, as well as by the goals and purposes thatinf iuence human behaviour and endeavour (Riviln and Moore2 0 0 1 : 3 2 9 ) .

Home is no t oniy a material entity. It is also a m atter of dream s andexpectations. In some sense the definit ive home does not exist atal l , i t is l ike a horizon for famiiy actions, aiways a lit t ie bit furtheraway. There are aiways changes to be made, things to buy, newaddit ions to incorporate. The home is never sett ied, is never stabie,but a f lux of past and future changes. As Daniei Miller ( 2 0 0 1 : 9)recognized, "both the home and its attendant materiai culture canbe central to the practices that make people mobile and able toreconf igure their relat ionships and indeed themseives in tandemwith the changes that take piace in the contexts within which theylive."Especiai iy for iow-income popuiat ions, homes represent thekey indicator of achievem ents, but they aiso fun ct ion , with ai ltheir current problems and iimitations, as a sign of what is left todo, as an indicator of this socioeconomic group's st il i- incompletesocial inclusion. For example, in the weli-documented case ofhome appropriation among iow-income populations in South Africa(Ngwane 2 0 0 3; Ross 2 0 0 5; Spiegei et al. 1 99 6), i t has been shownthat "domestic consolidation practices are diaiecticaiiy shaped bymaterial circumstance, ideas of housing, and culturally shaped con-vent ions regarding ideai kin reiat ions" (Ross 2005: 24). For thesereasons "the household never quite attained the status of a unit,but merely existed as a site of struggle over an imagined form ofthe household" {Ngwane 2003: 688). This example shows us howfor iow-income populations "the appropriation of the home is not

yj a sub stitut ive or vicarious activity but a materiai objec tif ication ofg certain social resources available in the con struction of house hoidP ident i ty" (Miller 1 98 8: 36 9).g But this process of approp riation of new hom es by their own ersw is only one facet of the gene ral proce ss of ada ptation to a newo living environmen t that 1 will study here. From another point of view* the arrival at their new home s also implies the sta rt of a certa in


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION A ND DECORATION A MO NG LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN SANTIAGO. CHILE

In this sens e, social housing estates can be seen as ep itomizingthe public understanding of a "modern everyday life" for low-incomepopulations. From the very beginning one of the aims of housingpolicies was no t only to improve the living con ditions of poor fam iliesand individuals but also to integrate them into a way of life in whichresiding in a proper home with modern facilities appeared to be thenorm, even something compulsory, for modern urban l i fe.

From this point of view, social housing estates appear to be theway that low-income individuals could become ful l members of acity as owners of homes located in a fully urbanized environmentin which the "modern" nuclear family, in contrast to the tradit ionalextended one, can l ive together. Housing estates can be seen,first and foremost, as the imposit ion of certain rationali t ies abouthow everyday life should be lived in contemporary society, ratherthan an opportunity for participation or social inclusion perse. Inthese sett lements "architecture proposes a complete fracture withprevious m odels, stating the need for a com promise with m odernityand the futur e" (Funari and Zarankin 20 0 2: 3 4 -5 ). These "m achinesfor living in " (Le Corbusier 1 975 ) look to produce an unprecedented"normalization" of the everyday l ives of these famil ies in terms ofwhat authorit ies, policy makers, and urban planners believe is the"normal" {meaning "decent," "hygienic." etc.) way that low-incomepopulations should live in the city.

This connection between social housing policies and normaliza-tion of low-income populations has been found in several cou ntries.For example, at the very beginning of the nation state of Israel"Zionism borrowed from the various strands of modernism thedesire to subvert the n orm s, value s, and aes thetics of tradit ionallyaccepted categories, in an effort to establish a new social agenda"(Kallus and Law Yone 2002: 769). In these efforts, the provisionof public housing for the arriving population played a key role inthe transmission of these modernist values because "the designof private space ... enables penetration into the personal spacethat belongs to the family, and enables control of i ts most intimateaspects" (pp. 772-3). Something similar happened in South Africawhere "urban planners and community and local leaders al ikeenvisaged urban planning as a means to curb 'disorderly" andunconventional social relations , epitomized by the organic forms ofshantytowns" (Ross 2005: 27). This view produced a "disjuncturebetween the planne rs' idealised mode l of 'suburban bl iss ' and the actual l ived reality of this low-income hous ing sc hem e" (Robins 2 0 0 2 : 5 1 1 -1 2 ) .

One key point to ma ke here is tha t we have to be very careful in seeing these mod ernist agenda only as a hidden impo sit ion from the


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regarding housing and family life were already deeply internalizedby the members of these families before they came to the estate.Whether this internalization is a result of former policies from thestate or acquired through other processes (media exposure, per-sona! observation, etc.), the consequence is that we have to bevery careful in making assumptions about the role of the housingestate, and through it of the state, in the acquisition of valuesabout what is meant to be a "normal" inhabitant of contemporarySantiago.

In this context, this article aims to show, through the studyof two specific practices related to the adaptation to their newhomesmaterial transformation and decorationhow this processof home-making serves as a platform to "materialize" many of thesocial processes of change that these families have experiencedover the last few years. Beyond conceptions of the home as an"extended self" (Belk 2001) or as a mere reflection of the "socialworlds" of their inhabitants (Malkawi and Al-Qudah 2003), I wantto show here how homes are constructed as material and symbolicspaces that try to balance, not without conflict, the idea of homesas a "stage" (Goffman 1990), in which the individuality of theirmembers is displayed and they come to perceive their new homesas the base from which they can be integrated into the lifestyle oflow-income populations in urban areas.

FIELDWORK AND METHODSThe research on which this article is based was conducted duringten months in 2004 in an urban location in the city of Santiago,Chile. More specifically the study focused on twenty low-incomefamilies, inhabitants of a social housing estate called TucapelJimenez 11. The estate is located on the western edge of theborough of Renca, in the northwestern limit of the city of Santiago.It was built by a private housing company on behalf of the ChileanHousing and Urbanism Service (SERVIU) of the government of Chileand it has been inhabited since June 2002. The housing estate iscomposed of 876 flats arranged in groups of three-story, 0-shapedbuildings with an average of twenty-four flats each.

This estate is an interesting site for research because it isa representative example of the virtues and defects of Chile's

J 3 revolutionary social housing policy ofthe last few decades. Betweeng 1980 and 2000, around 173,000 social housing units were builtg in Santiago alone (Tironi 2003: 35), with this program provingo especially successful in an area that historically was the main prob-S lem of housing programs in the developing world: the provision ofa c housing for the population with the lowest income (Rojas 2001;


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION AND DECORATION AMONG LOW-INCOME FAMIUES IN SANTIAGO, CHILE

housing estate (Tironi 20 03 : 37). Therefore, mo st of the populationin crit ical need, who used to l ive in shantytowns on the outskirtsof the city, now live in these housing units, having access for thefirst t ime to decent housing and basic services such as drains andtap water.

But this new living situation also gives rise to the appearance ofnew problems, associated with the development of a new kind ofsocial exclusion that h as been called a "new urban poverty" (Bengoa1 9 9 5 ; Raczynski and Serrano 1999; Tironi 2003; Wilson 1997). Inhousing terms, the issue to be tackled changes from the problemof "/OS sin techo" (those without a roof or home) or the traditionallack of decent housing for the poor in developing countries, tothe problem of "/os con techo" (Rodriguez and Sungranyes 2005)or the problem of low-income groups who already have a house,com mon ly provided by the pub lic so cial hous ing program s, but stil lhave crit ical housing problems. Ducci (1997) identif ies three mainnegative effects of Chile's current social housing policy:

The fas t transform ation of the new housing esta tes intoghettos, isoiated from the rest ofthe city.

The bad quality and size oft he houses and the impos sibi l ityof introducing changes in the houses.

The diss olu t ion of t radi t ion al social network s andsolidarit ies.As a result of this "the res idents in these housing estate s are gen-erally people who are unsatisfied with the quality of their everydayl i fe" (Rodriguez and Sungranyes 2 0 05 : 14). According to a housingsatisfaction survey (iNVi 2002), 45 percent of them say that theywant to move to another place, but they cannot "because they arepoor and there are no other housing aiternatives" (Rodriguez andSungranyes 2005).

The negative impacts of the current policies in sociai housingcan be found not oniy in relation to the population that alreadylives on one of the housing estates, but also in the structure ofthe city itself. As the private developers of these housing projectslook for the cheapes t land on which to build , the e state s tend to belocated on the periphery of the city (Tironi 2 00 3) , contributing to theenlargement of the urban area (Ducci 19 98) and to the increase in the level of spatial and socioeconom ic segregation of the city (Sabatini 20 03 ).

The twenty fam ilies under study, haif of whom cam e from shantytown and haif from other l iving situa tions , can be aiso characterized mostly as young adult couples (average age of thirty-five years) that


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and only 68 percent had finished secondary education. For thisreason the majority work in the primary sector (as security pers-onnel , taxi drivers, blue-collar workers, etc.) and the levels ofintegration of women into the formal labor market is stil l very low.Only in two fam il ies did both parents have permanen t job s.

In terms of methods, the research was based primari ly on threeseries of in-depth interviews in their homes with all the adult mem-bers o ft h e twenty famii ies s electe d, talking about their l ife in thehousing esta te, especially in term s of their ad aptation to the ir newliving space (at the time of the fieldwork they have only been livingthere for a year and a half) and their use of media technologies inthis process. This material was compiimented with more generalinformation about the housing estate and the i iving condit ions oflow-income populations in Santiago, in order to set a general frame-work for the anaiysis.TRANSFORMING HOMESI f there is something that characterized the former l iving environ-ments of these famil ies i t was their do-it-yourself nature. Due tocom plete deregulation and informality of shantytowns thes e fa mil iesused to "establish identit ies, perpetuate social norms and mediatecomm unity through architecture," which was a form of "consp icuouscons um ption" (Colloredo-Mansfeld 1 99 4: 845 ). tn these houses"the exterior is the representation of the current state of affairs inthe household and the plans for the future" (Klaufus 2000: 353).The external appearance of their homes was the preferred spaceto express their aesthetic ideas and obtain some distinction fromtheir surrounding sociai context (Holston 1991).

But the fact that their homes were usually made of lightweightmateriais and on land not owned by them affected heavily the trans-cendence and meaning of them. Their houses were always fragileand temporary, not at all close to the idea of home that everyonehas in mind.For most of these famii ies, the movement to the housing estatetransforms them for the f irst t ime in legal owners of a properand private home away from their extended networks of relativesand friends. Now they can start to transform the f lats into theirideai homes and, in doing so, reflect through it their personalit iesand ways of being to themselves and to their surrounding socialenvironment.

Victor (32). his wife ines (30), and their three children usedto live with Ines's parents in a shantytown in the borough of LaPintana,the poorest borough of the city. They arrived at the housingesta te in June 20 02 and . though the distance from her relatives


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION AND DECORATION AMONG LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN SANTIAGO. CHUE

When we knew about the house we were happy, everyonewas happy because finally we will have our own house andour i i fe changed, because you become more responsiblewith what is yours, even the children with their bedroom,they can do whatever they i ike with it, they disorder andorder it, because it's for them, it's not like there [their pasthouse] , because [there] if you clean something, you have toclean everything... [When we arrived] we put this division [apar tition on the living], we made the division of the kitchenand in the chiidren's bedroo m, three division s. What we neednow is protections and nothing more, the other things wil lbe done in the future, we want to put ceramics, but my wifedoe sn't want to because the fioor is sti l l good, we also wantto paint, with a brighter color.

The arrival at their new flat represents for Victor's family an op-portunity to s tart ag ain, to take a new space and transform it intotheirs . He has already made some changes and some others areon the way. Among them we can distinguish two main areas ofstructural transform ation perceived by him, aiong with many othe rs:protection against external threats and the search for more l ivingspace.

In relation with the first one. commonly the first area of materialt ransformation after the fami i ies' arr ival at the estate was thesearch for "autonomy" (Kaika 2004) from social threats. As theirnew houses already offered shelter from natural elements suchas rain or cold, the main task was to secure them against sociaithreats, such as robberies or violence. Protection against thesekinds of threats is historicaiiy central for low-income popuiations.As recognized by Richard Freeman, "persons from disadvantagedor low income groups are over-represented among the victims ofcr ime" (1999 : 3533) .

For example Joanna (50). a married mother of three, toid us inone interview:[the ho using esta te is] not very good , there is too muchdelinquency, f ights, they drink alcohol and then the fightsstart. Here you can see a lot of things. Actually yesterdaythey wanted to rape a little child, the police arrived ... I saidthat there , on the shan tytow n. i t was nicer because I had everything closed and our piece of land was big and my daughter didn 't go out. I l ived relaxed because I knew tha t it was sa fe, but not here. Here I do n't have security. With my son Jonathan [1 5] , I 'm worried that he's going to start taking drugs or a lc oh ol . . .


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hsky in term s of cr ime, her percept ion is the op pos ite: the housingestate is perceived as the more dangerous area. But, as we cansee from the second haif of the qu ota tion, this perception is n otrelated to the housing estate itself, but mainly to her probiems indelimitating cleariy a space of privacy between the home sphereand the environment. Probably the public areas of the shantytownwere perceived as dangerous, or even more dangerous, than thepublic areas of the housing estate; but the fact that she couldestabl ish a clear demarcat ion between this environment and herhome area meant the whole space was perceived as safer.

This perception of r isk and vulnerability is especially related toone specif ic change introdu ced by the mo veme nt to the h ousin gestate: the explicit focus on nuclear families as users of the f iats.Before coming to the housing estate, most of these individualsused to live in ciose proximity, if not in the sa me hou se, with m em-bers of their extended famil ies. In the housing estate, given thesize of the f lats, they are forced to live as nuclear families withthe concomitant weakening of their extended sociai networks ofsupport and protect ion, making them feei especiai iy exposed andvulnera ble. As Edith, who used to iive in the h ouse of her mothe r inthe borough of San Bernardo, said:

We aiways wanted to have our own f lat, for our chiidren. soin this aspect I 'm happy. What I don't i ike is that my whoiefamiiy is faraway, my mother, my other son, the father of mygrandchiidren and my daughter, the one that is single; theyare st i i l there and i t is not the same when something badhappens, because i used to be right there (Edith, 49 years).

This perception of r isk meant that one of the f irst priorit ies of thesefamil ies in terms of mater ial t ransformat ion of their homes wasto secure the home space against unwanted intrusions f rom theoutside, as can be seen in Figures 1 and 1.

Figure 1Balcony protection


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION AND DECORATION AMONG LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN SANTIAGO. CHILE

Figure 2W indow pro tec t ion

Each home approaches security in a different way. Even in themost basic home transformations, such as window or balconydefenses, we can see di f ferences that express much about thepeople who l ive in these houses. In both f igures, beyond thefunctionali ty of the protection devices, we can see some sort ofpersonai design. Both were products of DIY and show how. in theirmo st basic form , home transform ations are never mereiy func tionaibut aiso express the individuaiity of each famiiy. In addition, we cansee the attempts by famiiy members to "natural ize" their protec-tions with piants and flowers in order to, possibiy, hide the reaimeaning of them, make them iook l ike a some sort of garden andnot objects that show their fear of being the object of an attackor robbery. These aesthetic eiements of externai protection, alongwith some decorative elements in home extensions, show us howexpression through architecture, especiai iy characteristic of Latin-American shantytowns (Coiioredo-iVIansfeid 1994; Hoiston 1991;Kiaufus 2000), has not compieteiy disappeared in the housingesta te, aithough its reievance has dim inished greatiy.

The second type of transform ation related to eniarging the i ivingspace. Most famii ies. even the ones who came from overcrowdeddweiiings, complained that they do not have enough space to livecomfortably. Marieta (45), for exampie, used to iive with her partnerRicardo and their two chiidren in a shantytown iocated in the sameborough. She has been iiving in the housing estate for more thana year now and she seems to be quite happy with her flat, her onlycriticism being the iack of space in it.

[This] is too sm ail. I wouid i ike to be in a spacious piace . .. Iwouid iike to have more things but i can't because they can'tfit here, it 's very smail! even though we are only four peopie,i ask myseif how peopie with five chiidren couid iive here;


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Figure 3Extending living space

As Mariela recognizes, her situat ion in with regard to space is com-paratively good. On average the famiiies under study have almostf ive m emb ers (4 .9) and they have to iive in 36 square meters dividedinto a i iving and dinin g room , a kitchen, a toi iet , and two bedrooms.This mean s that the f lats are commonly quite overcrowded spac es,not very different from the piaces where these famii ies used tolive, a situat ion that generates a variety of probiems, f rom lack ofprivacy (iJreta 2006) to the generai reduction in the quaiity of iifeof the inhabitants of these housing estates throughout the country(Ducci 1997; Rodriguez and Sungranyes 20 0 5; Tironi 2 00 3).

The search for more living space is the m ain way inwhich famii iesactiveiy iook to be more comfortabie in their current houses andi t takes many different forms. One is simply the extension of thei iv ing space outside the house. As we can see in Figure 3. thissearch can take the radicai form of an extension tha t goes outsidethe buiiding, without considering any consequences, either sociai(the problem that they can have with their neighbors) or aesthet ic( the disresp ect of the architecture or design of the buiiding).

Figure 4. a photo taken in the house of Teresa (36) and Nicoias(39), provides a good example of the other common strategy thatfamii ies use to deal with the iack of space: the redistr ibution (oreven the eiiminat ion) of the or iginai home part i t ions. When anextension is not possibie, many famii ies decide to simpiy removeor redistr ibute the originai part it ions to adapt them to the needs offamily members, in the case of Teresa and Nicolas, their f iat wasquite smali for them and their f ive chiidren, so they decided simpiyto remove the waii that separated the kitchen from the i iv ing/diningroom in order to have more space availabie and, in the near future ,


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Figure 4Teresa and Nicolas' diningroom QJid kitchen

create more space: to throw away or strict iy i imit the amount offurniture that f i i is the house. Cristian (38) and his wife Andrea(40) used to live with their four chiidren in a smaii rented house inRenca, in which she aiso worke d. When they arrived at the housinges tate they were forced to ieave or rent out som e of their beiongingsbecause they did not f i t in their new home, a decision that evenforced Andrea to start working outside the home.

When we jus t arrived here . .. we didn't know how to orderanything, nothing f i t ted here ... we were forced to ieavefurniture there, we had some bookshelves and we ieft them,we had another sofa, we ieft i t , we had a space in whichwe worked, 5 meters by 5 meters, there we had tabies andsewing machines. We have to rent them, there is no spacehere. For this reason my wife has to go out to work, she usedto work here, she worked at home for aimost ten years.

This situation of throwing out and/or controi l ing the stock of furni-ture and home goods is especiaiiy difficuit for iow-income groupscomp ared to more aff iuent ones. Due to "con sum er restrict ion sthat severely l imit their consumption options" (Hii i 2002: 288) theirabii i ty to participate In contemporary consumer culture is quitelow. For this reason, goods are highiy appreciated and, in a cuitureof reiative materiai poverty, "most of their beiongings. whetherfurniture, wali deco rations, or eiectronic a pparatus , are milesto nesmarking events In their l ives" (Klaufus 2000: 350). Furniture anddecoration carry special meanings, they represent their past, theirstories, successes, and fai iures and to leave them behind is. insom e se nse , to ieave behind a part of their own story.

These examples show us how highly valued is the availabilityof more space. Famii ies are wii l ing to make many sacrif ices and


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This Struggle for space is motivated by a diversity of factorsbut central ly by the demand for individual spaces, a demand thatcon stitutes In i tself the third great need of the fam il ies under studyin relation to their home spaces. This demand, without exception,assumes one specif ic form: the need for a gendered space for thechildren. Originally, the fiats came with only two bedrooms, one forthe parents and one for the children, without c ontem plating clearlyany space for building another bedroom. This distribution forcesthe parents to put al i the chiidren in one bedroom, without anyseparation of age and/or gender.

Jonathan and Rosa had three chi ldren, two boys (Javier and Eiias)and one girl, Nayaret. As she was ten years old and about to enterher teenage years, Jonathan perceived that the most urgent needin terms of space was another bedroom to ai low him to separateNayaret from her brothers.

Another bedroom, this is the space we need, another bedroomfor the girl, because there are two boys and one giri, so thisspace would be for the girl, she's start ing to need her ownspace, more intimacy, she needs a more private space, likeany other chiid she needs her intimacy, that's what I think, tomake another bedroom , to make the other two [bedroo ms ]smailer and make one bedroom just for her.

In a social context in which many oft h e eidest ch i idren were enter-ing their teen ye ars, this situation appears a major obstacle formany parents. Some famiiies had already buiit an extra bedroom atthe t ime of the interviews and some others were pianning to do itas soon as they had some money and/or t ime available to do so.IVlany parents, as Jonathan did, thought that the lack of space forone more room in the original pians of the housing estate is oneof the centrai probiems of i ts design, an opinion that is shared byinhabitants of different housing estates ail over the country (INVi2 0 0 2 ) .

This iast aspect shows how unclear, and even contradictory, arethe "norm aiizing" ideas behind housing poiicy and p lanning in Chiie.On the one han d, they recognized the nuclear famiiy as the preferredfamiiiar type to live in housing estates and encouraged it through

J 3 smali fiats in which oniy famiiies with few members can iive. On thep other han d, the lack of a third room (or even the space to buiid one)g me ans tha t parents cannot provide the mo st eleme ntary privacyu tha t is perceived as norma i for children of nuciear fam iiies . Even in the cas es in which the se ideas were quite ciear (sucha c as in terms of the size of the f iat or the minimal house parti t ions)


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makers had in relation to the characteristics of "normal" housingfor low-income populations. This situation is similar to what Amorimand Loureiro (2001) found in their study of the transformationsmade by neighbors of a housing estate In the city of Recife, Brazil.

It is supposed that a block of f lats is less changeable thanis an individual house. The transformation process imposedby inhabitants to the original housing structure, however,shows tha t this is not always true, mainly when som e rules ofcommunal living are not taken into account. It also challengesprofessional congruence in i ts roots, because it often takesan opposite direction of the explicit regulatory factors thatinfluence both, the design and the use ofth e built environm ent.In fact, this transformation process reverses some priorit iesof professional design, emphasising individual desires, or aparticuiar spatial culture (p. 2).

Therefore, beyond the l im its im posed by the spatial s tructure, whenthey are able to do it the members of these famil ies appropriatetheir new homes by transforming them in accordance to theirprevious ideas or needs.

However, transformations are always partial. Especially in a con-text of low income, the resources involved in the transformationsof home space are very l imited. As happened with Cristian andAndrea, in many cases neighbors are also forced to accept someof the l imitations imposed by the f lats and to adapt to the type oflife that they are supposed to live there. In doing this they have tolook for other ways to domesticate these spaces within the l imitsimposed by their builders . Among these tac tics, one appeared in ai lthe homes under study: decoration.DECORATING HOMESFrom a common sense point of view, we might think that taste andaesthe tics are unimportant to these fam il ies. Due to their situationof re lat ive scarci ty and precariousness, taste could appear assomething secondary, not relevant in their everyday l ives. Thesepeople have such serious and urgent needs that any interest inrefinements appears supe rfluous and m eaningless . What they needare things, i t does not matter how they look or i f they f ind thembeautiful or not. From this viewpoint, low-income popuiations havewould find it difficult to develop an aesthetic judgment because, dueto their urgent needs, they are always embedded in the "content"of things, their "value of use" in Marx's terms, rather than in theiraesthetic "ta ste " or "mean ing." In this con text the only aesthetic


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But in the last few decades a new approach to material cultureand aesthetics has chailenged this presumption (Appadurai 1987;Dant 1999: Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Miller 1987). Fromthis perspective, one of the more salient aspects of contempor-ary society is the "aestheticization of everyday life" (Featherstone1991) or the fact that "more and more elements of reality are beingaestheticaiiy mantied, and reality as a whoie is coming to countincreasingiy as an aesthetic construction for us" (Weisch 1996:1, cited in De ia Fuente 2000; 235). In contemporary societies,aesthetic judgments are aiways embedded in considerations aboutthe goods and services we purchase, use and/or dream about.

in this context in relation to the aesthetic judgments of iow-income popuiations we have to abandon "a deficit model in whichthe working class is simply treated as an absence, i.e. lacking bothcultural and economic capital and therefore incapable of makingdistinctions, unlike the case of the dominant classes" (Watt 20 06 :778). The radical separation between everyday life and aestheticsthat a concept like "the choice of the necessary" comprises canonly be true for groups in urgent, and commonly temporary, stateof need (like survivors of a natural disaster, migrants or refugeesof war). Beyond this specific situation "there is no merit in reducingworking-class taste to the rack of functional necessity where ithas. by definition, no aesthetic distinction" (Holston 1991: 460).Even for people with the iowest incomes, such as the homeiesspopulation (Keliet and Moore 2003), certain degrees of aestheticjudgment aiways form a part of their everyday iives.Especiaiiy for peopie who iive in conditions of modern urbanpoverty, like the famiiies under study here (Bengoa 1995;Raczynski and Serrano 1999), their participation in contemporarysociety aiways involves a growing centrality of aesthetic judgm ent.This aesthetic judgment starts from the very beginning of their lifein their new homes with their perceptions of the housing estate

as beautiful or ugly and lies behind most of their judgments andopinion about their current everyday lives.Among these elements decoration appears as one of the keyareas in which the members of these families can show theiraesthetic conceptions and, in doing so. express their individuality.Especiaiiy since their move to the housing estate, decoration oftheir homes becomes the centrai area of aesthetic expression,repiacing the use of exterior architecture of their homes as a formof distinction, in an environment of fiats and buiidings of identicaishapes and s izes, at least originaliy. famiiy members are forced toconcentrate their aesthetic expression and judgment on the interiorareas of their homes, to transform them into unique spaces that


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Figure 5Ines an d Victor's living room

express their own tastes and ideas in order to transform theirhomes into unique places, in ines and Victor's iiving room (Figure5) and Mariela's dining area (Figure 6) we can note the presence ofa mixture of a very diverse array of material eiements.

in this diversity we can identify four major kinds of eiementsthat form the decoration ofthe homes under study. First, there arepieces of furniture l ike sofas and dining tabies, commonly made ofiow-quaiity materiais (such as fake leather, cheap tapestry, etc.),in imitation of furniture of groups with higher incomes. Second,there are aiways communication technoiogies, especiai iy in theform of teievision sets and hi-f i equipment. Not uncommoniy thesetechnoiogies were quite new and expensive, establishing a ciearcontrast with the rest of the materiai cuiture of the home. Third,there are various strictly decorative items l ike tablecioths, smallstatues, and posters, usuaily bought in the weekiy market or re-ceived in the form of gifts from famiiy and friends. Finaliy, thereare a number of mementos of family history, for exampie pictures,dipiomas, handcrafts made by the chiidren, etc., dispiayed on thewaiis and spread over tabies and sheives in the pubiic areas ofthese homes.

Figure 6Mariela's dining ar ea


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However, as can be seen in both images, these elements arenot randomly posit ioned. There is always a certain order, certainmeaning, in the way material objects are arranged in the home.Above ai i . this rat ionale is aimed at making som ething "un iqu e"or distinctive, even in the cases where most of the elements aremass-produced commodities, in this sense our f indings are quitesimi iar to what James Hoiston (1991) found among working classpopulation in Brazi l , where:

The kind of kaleidoscopic combinat ions that character izethe "ru st ic m odern hou se" are motivated by a strategicconversion of commodit ies into personai ized signs, refash-ioned to remove them from the context of the mass marketby invest ing them with non-commodity vaiues, nameiy, thepersonal competence, knowledge, and or iginai i ty of theirusers (p. 461).

This particular order is a way to escap e uniformity, to resist the im-posit ion of a standardized way to decorate low-income homes. Ashappened in the preceding section in relation to the transformationof the f lats, in decoration we can see another way in which thesefamil ies actively resist the uniform "normalization" logic that l iesbehind the consumption of mass-produced commodit ies by low-income populations. In this case "their solution is to turn the copyinto an original by developing a unique mode of art iculating, ratherthan m erely repe ating, the standard set of mass produce d ob jectsand styles they use" (Holston 1 9 9 1 : 46 1).

This role of art i facts, especiai iy purely decorative ones, in therepresentation of the identity of the famil ies is quite clear when weexamine in detai l any statement about decorat ion and the orderof the home. For exampie in Jessica's (30). a married housewife,mother of two, evaluation of the l iving room of her house:

For me it 's always been important to develop, to l ive wel l ,even in my econom ic s itua tion . Between having too many andtoo few things I prefer to have ju st on e b eautiful pain ting. Ialways try, with the money that I save, to buy bea utifui thingsfor the house, maybe not so much furniture or other things,but beautifui things, i i ike people to come and find my housebeaut i fu l , and that they say "this is very beautifui." but ...i put this painting and my husband put these pictures andruined it ai i , but good enough ... i l ike to have it beautifui.

As we can clearly note, the "bea uty" of the things in her Iiving room


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MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION AND DECORA TION AM ONG LOW-INCOME FAMILIES IN SANTIAG O. CHILE

At the same time, there is one central aspect of the aestheticatt i tude of these groups that appears cleariy in this sh ort statem ent:how diff icuit i t is to buy new commodities, especiai iy decorativeones, i t iso bv iou sfr om the very beginning that these fam ii ies havevery few monetary resources to acquire pureiy decorative items orto choose c om mo dities not oniy for their price but also bec ause theyare bea utifui. They cannot develop an aes thetic vaiuation of "new"commodities, or at ieast not as frequentiy as more aff iuent groupsdo. In these circum stanc es, they are forced to develop repiacementaesthet ic judgments. In the case under study, these judgmentstook two main forms: the aesthetic vaiuation of cieanliness andthe constant reiocation of goods.

First, cleanliness and order in the house is commonly perceivedas having an aesthetic vaiue. As Cataiina (42) said in one inter-view, "a house that is not ordered to me is ugly, it 's iike you don'tcare about anything." For most of the individuais under study,especial ly the w om en, to have their houses clean and ordered insome sense replaces the lack of new or expensive commodities.As Patricia, a married, 30-year-old mother of five, told us in one ofthe interviews:

I think that you can be poor but with dignity. To be poor doesnot m ean to be dirty or not in order. No. for m e to be clean isimportant. It does not matter if you don't have good things ortoo many things, but if they are clean, everything is all right.

As we can note, the valuation of order and cleanliness goes a lotfurther than its mere aesthetic value. For them order is beauty, butat the sam e time it is a sign of normality. Therefore , bes ides beauty,cleanliness and the order of things at home represent a source of"ontological security" (Giddens 1991). It even has a moral value.a demonstration of the dignity or decency of low-income famil ies(Martinez 1 996 ) summ arized by Patricia's ph rase, "you can be poorbut with dignity."

The second strategy commonly used is to give some aestheticvalue to the relocation of commodities in home spaces, a similarpractice to what Garvey (2001) found in her study of Norwegianhomes. In the cases under study, this relocation usually meansthe movem ent and rearrangement o ft h e already available stock of things in new ways. Isabel (24), for exam ple, was a ma rried house - wife, mother of two, who did not receive any regular income. Asher hus ban d, Ca rlos, only received quite low wag es, buying goods for decorative reasons does not appear to be pos sible. In these circu m stan ces , she opted to change continually the posit ion of


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We like to change [the distribution of things], because it isthe same as if you dress in the same way al l the t ime. So ifthe house is beautiful, after some time it becomes boring,you get bored of the same color or distribution, [you haveto] change it, it 's the same as if you dress the same way forthree days, your clothes will be dirty, but if you change themyou change a little and you feel better.

If noveity cannot be reached through new things, then a fictlonainoveity is created through the redistribution of the avaiiabie stockof things in different parts ofthe house, in some cases this tacticeven led to hiding some com mo dities for some time and t hen , aftera period, interchanging them for others , in order to m ake them iookstrange, to give them a new charac tertha t forces a re-domes ticationinto the current materiai cuiture ofthe househoid.

Aiong with the public areas of the living and dining rooms, thereis another centrai area of aesthetic concern: the bedrooms. Thesespaces commoniy are the only ones in which we can find somekind of individual expression, especiaiiy from the chiidren. Chiidrenin generai do not have very much of a roie in the pubiic aestheticsof the house. This is because their parents do not reaily take inconsideration their aesthetic judgments but aiso, and centrai iy,because children in general do not reaiiy care about it. They couldhave opinions and judgments about the aesthetic of these spaces,but they saw them as their parents' space.

However, they do not have the s am e attitud e to their own sp ac es.As we can see in Figures 7 and 8, the children activeiy use theirbedrooms as a space of seif-expression and identity.

in Figure 7 we can se e the bedroom of Francisco (1 2). son of Alan(48) and Edith (49). As the iast remaining chiid in the housethecoupie has two other children who are married and living on theirownFrancisco has a great degree of freedom in terms of thedecoration of the bedroom because he is the only one that usesit .

Figure 7Francisco's bedroom decoration


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He decorates it the way he likes, he has a T-shirt of CoioCoio [a Chiiean footbali ciub] hung on the wail, he has somefigures, some pictures stuck to the wail, he arranges hisenvironment the way he i ikes, i don't say anything to him,becausehedidn't have this freedom when we were i iving withmy stepmother, then [now] he has the freedom to arrange hisspace the way he likes. The only thing that i force him to dois to keep it ordered, nothing more (Edith).

But the freedom that Francisco has is qu ite unusuai in the generaicontext of the fam ii ies under study. As we described already, mo stofthe chiidren have to share their space with their sibl ings, makingthis process of sei f-expression through decorat ion much moredifficuit.

This is the case with Mercedes (15). the daughter of Edith andDavid, who shares her bedroom with her brother Guil iermo (11)and her sister Nataiie (4). As can be seen in Figure 8. her avaiiabiepersonai space is much smailer than Francisco's (just one cornerof the bedroom) and it is in continuai com petit ion w ith the space ofher brother and sister. i

For me its important that each one of us has our space,because I say that the bedroom is the personai space, theliving/dining room is the space of when we are aii together,for that i wouid realiy iike to have my own space ... becausethere you can make and unmake without having anyonetel i ing you "no, this looks bad" or "this iooks ugly;" then if Ihad my own spa ce I would have it the way that I wan t, 1 wouldlike to paint it another color, a lemon green or a pastel green(Mercedes).

As described eari ier, the demands for personai space for theirchi idren are at the center of current famiiy dynamics and asp irations .These exampies show us how these demands are not oniy relatedto the pare nts' perception oft he need for a gendered space but alsoto the chiidren's need for spaces of freedom and self-expression.in a demographic context iike the one under study, in which manyfamilies have children at pre-teen stage. It can be reasonable toexpect that in a short t ime this demand {and the problem causedby their inability to complete fulfi l i it) would be at the center ofthefamiiy dynamics and confi icts.

Therefore, in the process of decorating their homes we cansee an alternative strategy to appropriate their new l iving spaces.In most of the cases, decoration is used to fuif i l i two successive

Figure 8Mercedes' bedroom decoration


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those Who do not usually express themselves in public activit ies orspaces, l ike women or chi ldren.CONCLUSIONSWhat are the consequences of all these diverse processes of trans-formation of home spaces and their decoration in the general viewand meaning of homes? In mater ial terms, as can be seen in thefigures in this art icle, home environments tend to look like a patch-work, a mixture of very diverse objects located in spaces that arebeco ming increasingly different. In this s en se, home sp ace s canbe seen above all as places of identity and self-expression by themembers of these famil ies.

But at the same time this diversity is l imited by two main "norm-al izing" force s: the state and the market. On the one ha nd, thestate through the provision of f lats and a housing estate that looksexactly like any other new flats or housing estates in the country,explicit ly tr ies to domesticate this population in a certain way oflife suited to low-income populations in urban areas. On the otherhand, mass-produced co mm odit ies bought in the market l im it theway in which these famil ies can obtain dist inct ion, in Bourdieu'sterm s, through their con sump tion pract ices, giving a certain degreeof uniformity to the internal spaces of their homes.

As a result of both dynamics, I agree with the conclusion ofKallus and Law Yone in their study of housing policy in Israel in theFift ies for whom

Following Lefebvre (1974) the pubiic housing project can beseen as the concurrent outcome of three processes: theformal representation of space by the State, the off icial prac-t ice that takes place in the space, and the perceptions of thespace b ycit ize ns, including their daily activit ies . The dialecticalrelat ionship among these forces produces a concrete spacesuch as the one described here (Kallus and Law Yone 2002:773 ) .

But to say that the state (and the market, through commodit ies)is an actor in the development of the space known as TucapalJimenez II does not imply that its role in this process is the sameas the people who actually l ive there . As we saw in this a rt icle , bothmaterial changes and decoration strategies can be seen as stepstowards a progressive appropriation of their new home spaces. Inthis sense we can see both practices as "activit ies through whichthey attempt (with variable degrees of success) to render what isinevitably met as alienating when received through the distr ibutive


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less adapted their material environment in order to make it moresimiiar to the "ideal liome" that they had in tineir minds when theyfirst arrived there, a space that is commonly quite different fromthe original ideas of authorities and urban planners about how theiiving areas of these famii ies shouid be.

Although the attempt to normalize low-income areas throughsocial housing has been relatively successful in Chile, at least morethan in other developing societies where "the 'formal' suburb ...seems to have reverted back to i ts original 'unruiy' state" {Robins2 0 0 2 : 51 2) . the case under study shows the persistence of severalproblems regarding the adaptation of these famil ies to the estate.In order to minimize these situations in the future, poiicy makersand practit ioners have to take into account the fact that " 'targetpopuiations* are indeed 'mo ving targ ets ' that do not easiiy conformto the homogeneous and standardised suburban housing modeisthat [they] have inherited" {Robins 2002: 543). The low-incomeurban population is not an amorphous group of individuals withidentical housing needs and de ma nds. As seen here, there are asmany perceptions and uses of home space as people inhabit ingt hem. Obviously, in devising sociai housing policies it is impossibleto take into consideration al l individuai dema nds and spec if ications,but in order to develop housing projects that better respond to thisdiversity previous research with the potentiai beneficiaries of theprojects is needed in order to, at least, identify and address themajor needs in relation to their future homes.^

NOTES1. Named after Tucapei Jimenez {1921-82), a union leader assas-

sinated by Pinochet's intel l igence agency {DINA) members in1 9 8 2 .

2 . A good exampie of th is approach is "Proyecto Eiem ental"(http://www.elementalchlle.cl/). a research and policy init iativethat iooks, using the sam e "m arket and policy con dit ions " asother social housing projects, to "think, design and build betterneighbourhoods, housing and the nec essary urban infrastructureto promote social deveiopment and overcome the circie ofpoverty and inequity of our cit ies" {from the website, accessedAugust 14, 2007).

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Documents

Domesticating Homes S. Ureta