The relevance of the concepts of affordance and behavior setting for housing research

The housing field has been characterized as the set of relationships involved in the demand, supply, distribution and price of housing. Although many conceptual frameworks have been used to describe and understand this set of relationships, most of these approaches lack a convincing focus on the actors in the housing system, particularly the inhabitants of dwellings. One perspective that tries to overcome these shortcomings is the pathways approach to studying housing in which the subjective nature of meanings held by households is at the centre of the analysis. But choosing the household as the basic unit of analysis confronts this approach with a problem, because the highlighting of subjective and psychological aspects of dwelling would make it more natural to use the individual as the basic unit of analysis. In this paper a dwelling is conceptualized as a locale for certain social practices of the household in the course of a day, it is the place where the routine activities and interactions of the different members of the household take place and intersect, while the locale’s settings are also used to constitute meaning to the interactions and to the individual activities and behaviors of the household members. This conceptualization of a dwelling inevitably leads to the household being opened up, because both the household and the individual household members play a part in it. Conceptually, this is where the notions of affordance and behavior setting come into play. Both concepts emphasize the mutuality of people and their environment. Affordances focus on individual-environment relations, while behavior settings conceptualize collective-environment relations. Since both types of relations appear in housing, both concepts are needed for studying housing. But the concepts of affordance and behavior setting are also intimately related, because specific affordances are often embedded in particular settings. In the case of contemporary dwellings these are settings subdivided into several sub-locales that zone time-space in relation to social practices and individual activities and that provide context to both household and individual practices and behaviors. So the notions of affordance and behavior setting make it possible to conceptually relate the extra-individual level of the household to the individual level of the household member. In the paper this framework will be further elaborated