Housing’s values: Housing as an ethical urbanism

Abstract

Housing’s values are a key topic of public and policy debate, with discussions including the social value of housing in the form of human rights or care, rising property values, value-capture in infrastructure development, Indigenous values of land, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing is valued, not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing but to recognise and engage with the ways various valuations of housing inform a situated and relational politics of value. The analysis is concerned with how people make valuations about housing as well as how these different housing valuations intersect to constitute a politics of housing values. It is a common reduction to associate housing with its economic value and home with social values. Attempts to reconcile these values typically involve proxy valuations to commensurate the social to the economic. However, value pluralists resist such easy reduction of social values to the market, holding that plural values are incommensurable. Our more-than-political economy approach draws on anthropology and moral philosophical theories of value to conceptualise an agonistic politics of housing value. To illustrate this conceptual case, we discuss three regimes of value in Australia, that is, capitalist regimes of real estate value as the dominant value regime, Indigenous cultural values tied to land and housing and care ethics and human rights as housing discourse. These cases highlight the processes of value realisation, not just within these regimes of value, but within and between them, to animate an agonistic tournament of housing’s value. We are interested in the politics within and between these different claims about value and argue the utility of value theory is to show how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to try to show what the value of housing as-an-object is.

Introduction

Value is back in vogue in the humanities and social sciences, returned from its marginalisation in 20th-century positivist-inspired debates that separated facts and values. The discussion of housing and land values is re-emerging as a key topic of public and policy debate too, with discussion of the social value of housing, rising property and land values, the importance of environmental values, value-capture in infrastructure development, Indigenous values of land, or the value of housing for social reproduction and care. Despite the acceptance of plural values in this discursive register, the economic valuation of housing remains dominant, providing the basis for political decision-making in the development and distribution of housing resources. With this in mind, this article engages with the various ways housing is valued, not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing but to recognise and engage with the ways the various valuations of housing inform a situated and relational politics of value. More specifically, this discussion is concerned with how people make valuations about housing and how these different housing valuations intersect to constitute an agonistic politics of housing values.

In the Philosophy of Money, the first move of Simmel (1900) is to put to rest the idea that objects, like houses, have intrinsic value. There are numerous competing theories of intrinsic value, from the idea of intrinsic goodness in one line of moral philosophy tracing back to Aristotle (2000), to Marx (Collins, 2021), to economic theories of intrinsic value in the contemporary fields of commerce and finance. But the ideas of Simmel (1900: 65) still cut to the heart of theories of real estate value. Value is not an inherent property of objects but rather a judgement made about objects by people. As such, a plot of land or a building has no intrinsic value. This is often expressed as real estate price and real estate value are not the same; one is a measurable quantity of, say, money (i.e., as price) while the other is a social relation (i.e., value) (see Burstall, 2020; Christophers, 2018: 332).

If value is a relational judgement, consider what housing politics would look like if we required everyone – from politicians and property developers to home owners and the homeless – to justify, in moral terms, their housing values. Much of the public debate about housing is framed around a discussion about having enough money to buy a house or to pay rent or a mortgage. Reducing the discussion of housing to ‘the market’ is one way to sidestep the moral debate about what housing is for because rent or mortgage payments delimit the discussion. These market valuations are standing in for a more detailed moral debate about housing values and valuations. In other words, any moral questions about housing values and valuations are proxied, in this case, by a reductive reckoning of what developers can sell and what people can afford in a housing market.

It is worth looking behind these proxies because housing values and valuations guide our actions, and our actions have consequences for ourselves and others’ wellbeing. The judgements we make about housing can lead to actions that positively and negatively impact people’s lives, and this can make us rethink our housing values. Thus, our housing values are the product of our interactions and experiences, including the experience of being confronted by different housing value claims and experiences. Our housing values, then, can change in light of our discussions with others about their housing values. In this sense, the concepts of ‘interests’ and ‘values’ are not the same, and yet the politics of housing values is often sidelined by discussion of self-interest or self-interested interest groups. ‘Interest’ is a term that has come to stand in for other thick ethical terms, ¹ such as care or greed. When we engage in a moral discussion about housing values, we bring to the surface moral questions of self-interest, greed, benevolence, care, reciprocity, and so on as the key terms of debate.

Yet, moral terms like care, benevolence, and reciprocity have failed to shift dominant debates about real estate and finance, which are firmly grounded in market discourse. We see this in the ineffectiveness of affordable housing targets in many cities around the world. While many affordable housing targets are underwritten by claims about the social value of housing – for example, housing is a human right or housing is a place of care – through the policy process, the moral terms of the debate are shifted from ‘social’ to ‘market’ rationales, logics and policies (Murphy, 2014). The economic viability of real estate and finance invariably trumps the social and other values of housing in these debates. Thus, we get private finance and real estate market policy levers as the outcome of the politics of housing value, which have limited utility in debates about, say, affordable housing. Our objective here, then, is to think more carefully about these political encounters over social, financial and other housing valuations.

As Brenna Bhandar (2018) notes, the

‘social uses of property (i.e., use that is not solely defined by economic productivity and profit), and the use of property to meet the basic necessities of life, such as shelter, form a part of contemporary struggle to redefine relations of ownership in urban space’ (pp. 34–35).

The values we hold about housing are formulated through reasoned, moral reflection of our housing experiences (Sayer, 2011). These housing valuations are the products of our past, but they are also shaping our actions in the present, and they will come to shape our actions in the future. Making valuations is a continuous part of our daily lives, and valuing housing involves a kind of reasoning about housing; ‘[. . .] we should think of values as ‘sedimented’ valuations that have become attitudes or dispositions, which we come to regard as justified’ (Sayer, 2011: 25).

Social scientists are increasingly engaging with value, values, and evaluation despite lingering fears that we need to resist value judgements for our work to be objective (Sayer, 2017: 469). The marginalisation of studies of value and values in social scientific analysis has its roots in the 20th century hardening of the fact-value distinction (Putnam, 2004; Sayer, 2017, 2011), where values were presented as ‘merely subjective’ and ‘not answering to rational argument’ (Sayer, 2017: 470). A key proposition from the debates about positivism was that rationally received universal notions of social phenomena were the only valid form of knowledge production. In other words, positivism produced rational facts. In these debates, any normative knowledge production, which might offer valuations of social phenomena with space for plurality, were positioned as unscientific, illogical and flawed; these were constructed as subjective values and beyond the realm of rationality. Despite wide-ranging support for dismantling this fact-value distinction in philosophy (MacIntyre, 1998; Putnam, 2004; Williams, 1985), ‘the ideas that facts and values are radically different and should be kept apart [. . .] have proved to be remarkably resilient in social science’ (Sayer, 2017: 469).

This lingering distrust of values does not mean that geographers have not been mobilising value as an analytical frame, both implicitly and explicitly, in their work. As Brett Christophers rightly notes, writing from the perspective of the political economy of the environment, it is not so much that value is back on the agenda, as that work on value theory is now being tackled head-on. This ‘neglect’ has seen new efforts to rethink Marx’s value theory for contemporary economic relations (Robertson and Wainwright, 2013), typically as a way of understanding the abstraction of social values into economic relations of production and exchange (Andueza, 2021; Christophers, 2018; see also Elson, 1979). Beyond political economy, engagements with the normative content of value and values have been bubbling along for the last two decades, in part as a response to the wider normative turn in contemporary social theory (see Barnett, 2014: 151; also see Sayer and Storper, 1997; Smith, 1997, 1999). In line with exhortations for geographers to become more sensitive to the normative in our engagements with place (e.g., Barnett, 2014; Olson and Sayer, 2009; Saville and Hoskins, 2019), to engage beyond the traditional economic (e.g., Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Gibson-Graham, 2006), and to engage with ‘thick ethical concepts’ like justice, wellbeing and care (see Smith, 1999, 2000; also Harvey, 1997), we support the wider critical engagement in geography and the social sciences more generally (see Lake, 2023) with theories of value and values.

Yet, rather than seeing the engagement with value and values in geography as a deficit (e.g., as a subjective blind spot), it might be more appropriate to view the shift to (re)engage with value as an opportunity to bring some conceptual order to the wide-ranging engagements with value and values by geographers and social scientists – a complex intellectual entanglement with economic, more-than-economic, moral, cultural and political relations between people and things, all understood through their relationship to place. The effect of these different disciplinary and sub-disciplinary engagements with value is constitutive of a plural politics of value. In other words, rather than engaging in a reductive exercise to try to find the unitary value of housing or land, we suggest it is more productive to consider how various valuations of housing or land might constitute a politics of value. Attempts by geographers to conceptualise and apply value theories are always ‘ever not quite’ (James, 1912: 321, in Barnes and Sheppard, 2010: 193), which speaks to a persistent plurality of valuations. Yet, there is always the danger of sliding back into intrinsic or unitary value thinking.

It is this assumption of value pluralism, itself derived in our work from Isaiah Berlin’s (2013: 6–14; Berlin et al., 2002) notion that values are incommensurably plural within and between individuals, organisations and cultures, that frames our attempt to engage with the politics of value. Anthropologists have maintained a central focus on the incommensurable characteristics of value in processes of cultural exchange, and we also turn to these theories of value. It is in this spirit that we mobilise a politics-of-value approach that embraces value and values as plural and incommensurable, applying this here to the complex entanglements of housing, home, land and real estate to outline a politics of housing values.

Our plural politics of value, as conceived here, is post-foundational (Marchart, 2007: 2–3) and builds on the work of theorists of agonistic democracy, including William Connelly, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe (see Wenman, 2013), who variously inform an agonistic democratic politics that is open and contested and sensitive to the contingent, relational and emergent nature of values. An agonistic politics of value provides for an embrace of genuine pluralism (Wenman, 2013: 109) that is sensitive to the role of power (Mouffe, 2013) and appeals to agonistic respect across differences as a civic virtue (Connolly, 1991; Wenman, 2013: 109–113).

In the first half of this article, we draw on the work of Arjun Appadurai on regimes of value as a way of leaning-in to a more-than-Marxist account of value pluralism, pointing to Appadurai’s conceptualisation of tournaments of value as one way of understanding processes of value realisation through exchange. ² Recent work in political economy and urban political ecology has stressed the need to better understand Marx’s theorisation of value realisation in markets of exchange to bring Marx up to date with contemporary economic realities (Andueza, 2021; Christophers, 2018; Collins, 2021 also Harvey, 2016). Theorisations of value regimes, from anthropologists like Appadurai (1988) and others, including Graeber (2001) and Turner (2008), provide a means to articulate incommensurable values beyond the economy. Incommensurability, the idea that the value of something cannot be reduced to a common measure, is important to the politics of plural values we are pursuing here. The purpose of this first half of the article is to open the use of regime theories in housing studies beyond articulations of value and power or value and ethico-political values framed in cross-comparative national cultures to provide a critical responsiveness to new articulations of value and values, widely conceived.

In the second half of the article, we apply this thinking to the politics of value in housing through a consideration of a range of different regimes of housing value. Through engagement with land and real estate value (market value as the dominant regime of value), land as a site of culture (Indigenous cultural values) and housing as a site of care and rights (relational ethics/moral values), we outline a contemporary politics of housings’ values built around competing and sometimes incommensurable valuations of housing and home. It is our contention that by better understanding the politics that produce housing and home as proto-ontological values, we might better articulate home as the imagined totality for the realisation of value – as a site of dynamic meaning and a place of normative contest in wider urban relations. The utility of value theories, we argue, is to show how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to show what the value of a house as an object is or might be.

Value pluralism and incommensurable values

Our argument for a politics of value starts from the distinction between value and values. This distinction marks out disciplinary solitudes with intellectual boundaries between economic and moral understandings of value, between quantitative and qualitative, between objective and subjective, between discursive and material and between a singular value and plural values.

Political economic understandings of value are dominated by Marxist value theory. As Christophers (2015) notes, from the perspective of political economy, there remains a distrust of ‘sociological’ theories of value that resist easy commensuration into markets of economic production and exchange. In Frederick Pitts’ recent survey of value in political economy, suitably titled Value, he recognises the need to revive a critical appraisal of value in political economy, claiming that ‘a leap must be made from economic to social theories of value’ (Pitts, 2021: 5).

The tendency in capitalist economies to hollow out the concept of value through a conflation with price, as determined in the market, is ‘anathema to Marx’ (Christophers, 2018: 332). Price is merely a proxy for value as mobilised through the economy. Marx’s value theory understands value as a social form through abstract human-labour relations in production and the qualitative equivalence embedded in the circulation of commodities in relations of exchange (Andueza, 2021: 1105). As Christophers (2018: 333) suggests, Marx’s theory of value is ‘Perhaps [. . .] best thought of as a theory of generalised reduction of social life to equivalence and exchangeability in the commodity form’. A common critique of Marx rests on the limitations of the ‘economistic’ nature of Marxian value theory that reduces different forms of values as social relations to utilitarian notions of use-value (Andueza, 2021: 1106). Point noted, yet we are sympathetic to recent thinking that leans into Marx to attend to scholarly aporias that bring Marxism up to date with the contemporary state of globalised late capitalism (e.g., see, Andueza, 2021, and Christophers, 2018, on the value of nature).

In contrast to the debates in political economy, moral philosophical approaches to values rest on the discussion of moral virtue, the role of good conduct and right action, and mostly ignores value as expressed in economic relations. With an eye to this distinction, between the treatment of value in political economy and moral philosophy, researchers in moral economy attempt to bridge the economic and moral realm, to unsettle the relatively settled understanding of value in political economy inherited from Marx. Writing from this perspective, Andrew Sayer points to the need to critically appraise the normative processes that undergird the economy – its institutions, actions and outcomes (Sayer, 2007). In an essay on moral economy as a critique, he points to the way value as norms play a constitutive role in economic institutions, help explain the seeming irrationalities of social actors and account for the outcomes of economic processes, which need to be held up to reasonable normative valuation based on their consequences for others – both human and non-human. Sayer is critical of the treatment of non-economic values by economists as purely subjective, the product of preferences or interests, pointing instead to the objective nature of moral values, as the basis of meaning and the product of reasoned consideration.

Notwithstanding these guiding disciplinary forays into value theory, our point of departure in this discussion is Appadurai’s anthropological understanding of value. Anthropologists have maintained a central focus on the incommensurable characteristics of value in processes of cultural exchange (Appadurai, 1988; Graeber, 2001; Turner, 2008). Appadurai (1988) refers to this as the reciprocal construction of value, wherein the object and subject ‘are reciprocal agents of each other’s value definition’ (p. 20). Thus, value cannot reside inside the subject or object alone, rather value is a social relation between people and things, or between a person and another person (e.g., love), or between groups of people and groups of things, and so on.

It is widely accepted, argues Appadurai (1988), that capitalism is a complex cultural system and that the value of objects is thoroughly socialised (p. 6, 48); the ‘definitional question is: in what way does its sociality consist?’ (p. 6). Marx, Simmel and Appadurai are all interested in the social relations that produce value, among other things and with different degrees of emphasis. They all place the exchange of economic objects at the centre of their analysis of the social relations that produce value. But, importantly, they each theorise and focus on different aspects of these social relations; this sociality. Marx is interested in how production and labour/commodity relations produce discursive claims about value. Appadurai is interested in what happens to value claims as an object moves across different social or cultural boundaries from one social or cultural group to another. Appadurai calls these socio-cultural spheres regimes of value and the contestation or politics between individuals and groups over objects tournaments of value. ³

Moving beyond these sweeping statements about Marx and Appadurai requires an engagement with the problem of value commensurability and unitary values (i.e., monism or pluralism). In moral philosophy, values are incommensurable when they do not share a common or standard unitary measurement and, therefore, cannot be compared to each other. In this sense, unitary refers to the value of the most foundational unit of a thing (i.e., subject, object, idea). Commensurability is a slippery term. It is used differently by, say, moral philosophers and economists, and it is understood differently within these separate fields of study too (Raz, 1986). For example, some moral philosophers argue that two or more values are incommensurable when they cannot be traded off against each other. Many economists see resolving the problems of value commensurability and determining the unitary value of things (e.g., objects as commodities) as a core disciplinary task, and much time is taken up in their search for a formula to determine value commensurability and/or unitary value (Murphy, 2020; Murray, 2020). Christophers (2018) articulates a case in point, via Marx, when he says,

‘Value is that which makes commodities exchangeable; after all, exchangeability presupposes commensurability, or qualitative equivalence. But if value is therefore “the generalized relation of equivalence [ . . . ] that rules the world” (Mann, 2013: 30–1), what is its particular substance and source? Value’s form, the constituent of its equivalence, is human labour’ (p. 332).

In political philosophy, incommensurability speaks to the ‘absence of a final ground’, or foundation, drawn from a Heideggerian tradition, and as articulated in post-foundational (Marchart, 2007) and agonistic politics (Wenman, 2013).

While Christophers (2018) brackets off what he calls ‘sociological’ (p. 330) theories of value in his analysis, our reading of his core claims is that, much like value in some of its anthropological forms, value theory is concerned with the discursive forms value takes and the social relationships through which value claims are made, rather than finding some objective, unitary or commensurable value per se; ‘value theory can be thought of as theory concerned with explaining the forms value takes and the processes of its creation and circulation’ (emphasis added by the authors from Christophers, 2018: 330). The anthropologists want us to stay with the cultural relations – in the case of Marx, that would be with the social relations of production and labour that produce value – rather than try to use these social relations as a proxy for determining the objective, unitary and commensurable value of something. The reason why we need to stay with the social relations is, put simply, because the relational nature of value means that it is hard to sustain an argument for subjects and objects having objective, unitary values (Murphy, 2020).

Nonetheless, we heed Christophers’ (2018) call not to replace Marx’s (or Simmel’s and others’) value theory with an alternative theory of value but to adapt it and to make it ‘fit for 21st-century purpose’ (p. 332). We do this by returning to what is common to much of this work, and that is a focus on the social processes through which value claims are created and articulated. In fact, Appadurai (1988) labours the point by claiming,

‘in Marx’s own writings, there is the basis for a much broader, more cross-culturally and historically useful approach to commodities, whose spirit is attenuated as soon as he becomes embroiled in the details of his analysis of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism’ (p. 8).

Christophers (2018) argues it is important to understand that ‘Marx works [value] out in a particular context, not in some free-floating, abstract register. That context is the commodity: when Marx discusses value, it is the value of the commodity, whatever that commodity happens to be’ (Christophers, 2018; emphasis by Christopers: 332).

Thus, for us, Marx’s (and others) labour theory of value is useful in as much as it points to the social relations and processes through which value claims are created and articulated. Here, we resist any totalising gesture in Marx’s value theory, instead seeing this as one theoretical modality deployed within a plurality of hegemonic moves that seek to ground society without ever being able to do so (Butler, 1992, in Marchart, 2009: 7). There are two key reasons for staying with and leaving open the social relations that produce value claims. The first is taken from the anthropologists who argue that in the course of the ‘analytic movement’ of linking value to the exchange of products in an economy, the ‘commodities become intricately tied to money, an impersonal market, and exchange value. Even in the simple form of circulation (tied to use value), commodities are related through the commensuration capabilities of money’ (Appadurai, 1988: 8). The second relates to an observation from our own empirical work; when we were analysing the contestation between individuals and groups over the value of real estate through tournaments of value, we found these spaces to be underwritten by value pluralism suffused by complex forms of antagonistic contest and agonistic accommodation (McAuliffe and Rogers, 2018, 2019, 2020). Thus, in the final sections, we briefly discuss a socially expansive notion of housing value pluralism in an agonistic more-than-political economy register.

Housing as an ethical urbanism: ethics of possibility

In this last section, we discuss three regimes of housing value as an agonistic tournament of real estate value to briefly illustrate our conceptual argument to this point. The three regimes of value – that is, capitalist regimes of real estate value as the dominant value regime, Indigenous cultural values tied to land and housing and care ethics and human rights as housing value discourses – highlight the processes of value realisation, not just within these regimes of value but also within and between them, to animate these agonistic tournaments of value.

Our interpretation of agonistic and antagonistic politics is drawn here from the work of Chantal Mouffe (McAuliffe and Rogers, 2018, 2019, 2020). ⁴ A key aim of Mouffe’s pluralist politics is to transform antagonistic positions between enemies into agonistic positions between adversaries to produce a meaningful democratic politics. For Mouffe, antagonism cannot be eliminated from social relations. It is fundamental and persistent and forms the basis of ‘proper political questions’, which always involve decision-making between conflicting alternatives (Mouffe, 2013: 3). Mouffe’s distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ helps to differentiate between the fundamental antagonisms in social relations and what she sees as more productive agonistic engagements. For Mouffe, the political defines the antagonistic dimension that is inherent to all human societies. It takes many forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. However, politics refers to the ‘ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organise human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, since they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’’ (Mouffe, 2013: 2–3). The antagonistic dimension is the political because it is suffused with contestation over plural ideas. Antagonistic contestations between ‘enemies’ are not conducive to the formation of social order, while agonism is more productive due to its commitment to a particular social order as an outcome. ⁵

With respect to housing’s values as a political contest over ideas, it is a common reduction to associate housing with its economic value and home with social values. The political economy of housing has become increasingly sensitive to the presence of social values through proxy valuations, such as those used in financial models (Christophers, 2018; Murphy, 2020). However, value pluralists, for their part, working in and outside political economy, resist such easy reduction of social values to the market, holding that plural values are incommensurable. As noted above, we draw our understanding of value pluralism here from the spirit of Berlin that there are plural and incommensurable values that exist within and between individuals, communities and organisations and that these values are not arbitrary but instead are situated and relational. One way housing theorists are engaging plural values beyond the economic is through the application of regime theories.

At the core of regime theories is a sensitivity to pluralism. Rawls’ social justice approach to liberal democracy provides for what he calls a ‘reasonable pluralism’ in democratic societies through an appeal to an overlapping consensus. This liberal toleration of a plurality of reasonable yet irreconcilable doctrines has inspired critique and embellishment by pluralist thinkers producing different regime theories that variously engage with and beyond justice. Walzer’s spheres of justice challenged Rawls’ overlapping consensus to carve out an appreciation of the incommensurability of different ‘goods’ in society, when broadly conceived. Nussbaum (2003) and Sen (2005), together and separately, have focused on the different fundamental capabilities that underpin a plural polity. In housing studies, welfare regime theories have been influential. There is a steady stream of work in the sub-fields of housing studies looking at real estate and housing values (Ahlfeldt and Mastro, 2012; Del Mistro and Hensher, 2009; Raymond et al., 2016; Smits and Michielin, 2010), with significant conceptual gains developing around theories of value in relation to different housing regimes and societal contexts (Bengtsson, 1995; Fitzpatrick and Stephens, 2014). Fitzpatrick and Stephens (2014: 240) productively take issue with ‘narrow’ conceptualisations of value in housing studies that are ‘bereft of subtlety’.

For our purposes, we start from Appadurai’s post-Marxist analysis of value realisation in commodity exchange through his conceptualisation of regimes of value. Doing so puts us on a path to better understanding how these regimes of value are mobilised in a politics of value. The regime and value theories of the anthropologists provide different analytical purchase and could, we argue, productively augment the somewhat instrumental regime theories of housing and urban scholars. Appadurai’s (1988) theorisation of regimes of value refers to the politics of a set of social relations within the ‘boundaries of specific cultures’, when broadly defined. But rather than create a typology of regimes of power and value as the end goal of the analysis, Appadurai (1988) is interested in the tendency of objects to ‘breach’ or ‘spill beyond’ (p. 57) the boundaries of these different cultural spheres and particularly in what happens to the value of these objects as they move across different regimes or spheres of value. It is in this sense that Appadurai argues there is a politics to the social relations that produce value; that is, there is a politics to the movement of objects within and across the cultural boundaries of different regimes of value. Appadurai (1988) shows through his focus on commodity exchange that societies create specialised arenas for what he calls ‘tournaments of value’ (p. 50). The interrelated ideas of regimes and tournaments of value, then, provide the conceptual tools that we use to progress our understanding of a politics of value.

Market regimes of real estate value have long been the dominant value regime in the politics of housing. Bhandar (2018: 54) notes, ‘what constituted the proper use of land, by proper subjects’ in English common law has been ‘based on a particular cultural and economic ideal of how to live as a rational, productive economic actor’ since Petty and Locke. Thus, capitalist regimes of landed property are a ‘key method of valuing land and people’ (Bhandar, 2018: 51). There is a solid body of recent analysis showing how people make valuations about housing within this real estate regime (Murphy, 2014, 2020; Smith, 2011; Smith et al., 2016). Smith et al. (2016: 82–85) show how housing markets are made by key real estate intermediaries ‘who lubricate the flow of information between buyers and sellers’, especially those actors that ‘attach an “official” value to a property’.

This work looks at the social relations and circuits of information that exist between home owners, home buyers, real estate valuers, mortgage brokers and banks and real estate sales agents, among other actors, to expose how discursive claims about real estate value are formulated and then articulated as unitary value claims; that is, as a claim that real estate has intrinsic value. What looks like a technical, objective and rational calculation of housing market value, and its conversion into housing prices, ‘is in fact an inherently socialized and creative activity’ (Murphy, 2020: 14). Opening the black box of real estate ‘price’ offers a view into the dynamic social relations that organise and animate ‘the networks of people and things that assemble to stage, sell, value and buy residential property’ (Smith, 2011: 248). In line with analyses by Smith (2011: 248–249) and Murphy (2020), price is not the outcome of housing market activity, rather the housing market is constituted through the politics of setting values that justify pricing.

Smith et al. (2006) found the following in the United Kingdom, which rings true in the Australian context too. For many real estate intermediaries and investors, housing markets are about economics rather than people. Housing markets are thought of as intrinsically rational, readily comprehensible and self-regulating and good for balancing supply and demand. But when prices rise or fall too quickly, there is a need to return the market to some ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ state. In fact, this image of the real estate market as an object is widely held among housing professionals, who presume ‘that markets are “things” which are external to people and have an actancy of their own’ (Smith et al. 2006: 86). Thus, under the real estate market-as-object model, ‘the market’ is thought to have an agency of its own, and the aim of real estate valuation is, therefore, to try to get the valuation ‘right’, to uncover the intrinsic value of this object. Real estate intermediaries do not see themselves as affecting real estate values, behaviours or outcomes (p. 85) because the housing market is viewed as independent of them. And yet, professional valuations, market appraisals, bank loans and real estate market comparisons provide a ‘powerful anchor for price negotiations; they contain a foundational statement of what market values mean; they place limits on the loan a lender will extend and they are a way of benchmarking bids’ (Smith et al. 2006: 87).

Discursive terms like the housing market, supply, demand, competition, efficiency, price and value are ‘stylised facts’ that are produced through the performance of real estate markets (Smith et al. 2006: 81). Despite this, the real estate intermediaries seem unaware that they are manufacturing real estate value through their actions. These calculating real estate valuers, to borrow from Callon (1998), who endlessly provide knowledge about real estate value, are part of a profession wherein ‘expertise, credentialism, and high-brow aestheticism [. . .] all play different roles’ (Appadurai, 1988: 54). And they are teaching real estate consumers to be actuarial subjects; people who can be ‘educated to become financially capable, fiscally competent, actuarially aware’ housing consumers (Price and Livsey, 2013: 67). The market regime of real estate value is dominant precisely because of this illusionary politics. Almost every real estate actor in a housing market takes this politics of real estate value for granted. As a result, the real estate and development sector has breathtaking public legitimacy for their value regime, which is reinforced with every new housing valuation, sale, advertisement and bank loan. And all of this discursive support for real estate market values is backed up by the formal legitimacy of private property law.

This illusionary politics constructs a discursive totality within which other valuations are either absorbed through processes of commensuration or dismissed as beyond the (internal) rationality of this dominant regime of value. The externalisation of the internal logic of the market regime of real estate value is further achieved through structural forms of legitimation by state and non-state actors – through systems and practices that provide informal validation and laws and regulations that provide formal legitimacy. For example, as Joe Collins (2021) reminds us, rent ‘is one revenue among a few in economy theory that designates flows of value through society’ (p. 11). Thus, when the ‘price of housing is driven up to a point that a third of the OECD population is forced to rent’ (Collins, 2021: 12), it is not just that finite land is an issue, the way the ownership and use of land is organised is a key driver of rents too.

Collins (2021) and Christophers (2020) provide an explicitly ‘political-economic’ (Christophers’ emphasis, 2020: xxvii) critique of rentier capitalism and value theory. This work does not engage substantively with ‘moral-economic’ critiques of value as we have done here. Yet, Christophers (2020: xxix) notes ‘it is impossible to draw a watertight distinction between political-economic and moral-economic critiques’, and this is precisely the conceptual fissure we are seeking to pry open in this analysis of the politics of housing’s values. We are interested in thinking beyond the political-economic to consider the potential for and politics of solidarity across class and racial differences in the city. And this is not to say that Marxist theory is not useful here. Indeed, there are a suite of scholars who theorise class-based solidarity across an intersectional reading of rent and value, which sits, for example, at the confluence of rentier capitalism and Black Marxism. Indeed, some time ago, Cedric Robinson (1983: 30) showed how a form of ‘racialism’ was foundational to the emergence of white working class consciousness, and racism is foundational to class-based housing politics too.

Class-based housing politics in Australia is further complicated by the settler-colonial logics that organise land, housing, rent and value. The settler-rentier in Australia exists on stolen Aboriginal land, and their settler-rentier land rents are generated through the violent white possessive logics that allow property and housing wealth to accumulate with groups of settlers. Indeed, the history of Australia’s housing values are marked by white supremacy, and contemporary class-based politics can ‘promote colonial-era universalism and wealth redistribution without really accounting for the sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples’ (Bromfield et al., 2022: 1). Before the value of housing was stolen from the white working class – and increasingly the young white middle class – the land that forms the basis of housing’s many values were stolen from the Aboriginal people. These observations are well known in political economy.

The relationships between tenant and rentier are certainly key to understanding working class solidarity. But so too are the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Yet, how do we think about the politics of rent and housing value across class and race and beyond the political-economic? Priyamvada Gopal (2020: 68), for example, traces the long history of what she calls ‘something very like [. . .] transnational working-class solidarity’ between the white working class in the British colonial metropole and the West Indian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century. We are interested in exploring mutual respect and possible political solidarity across class, racial and other forms of difference in relation to the politics of housing’s values in Australia, and settler-colonial land politics is a good entry point.

One successful moment of agonistic Aboriginal politics was securing Aboriginal land rights in Australia, whereby Aboriginal peoples challenged the settler-rentier in Australia who exists on stolen Aboriginal land, as well as their settler-rentier land rents which are generated through the violent white possessive logics that allow property and housing wealth to accumulate with settlers. Yet, the structural settler-colonial rentier and value logics remain. As Francis Markham and Michael Klerck (2022: iii) show, for example, a recently proposed ‘Remote Rent Framework’ for public housing in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia was underwritten by the possessive values of land rent that are central to settler-colonial land regimes. The Remote Rent Framework proposed a key change in the way rent would be valued and thus conceptualised. Far from thinking about the value of Indigenous public housing as a site of shelter, care, rights or reparation, the Remote Rent Framework marked a shift from a rental rebate model for calculating rents – where rents ‘are usually capped at 25% of household income in [. . .] state owned and managed Indigenous housing’ (Markham and Klerck, 2022: 1) – to a flat rate model that resembles the typical market-based settler-rentier model that exists in the wider settler-colonial private land rental system. Markham and Klerck (2022: 1) write, ‘For the first time in any Australian jurisdiction, housing rents will be set at a flat rate of $70 per week per bedroom, regardless of occupancy rates or occupants’ incomes’ (p. 1) for these public dwellings. Thus the

‘abolition of income-based rent setting in remote public housing alone is arguably a form of indirect discrimination and is out of step with current Commonwealth Government moves to terminate a swathe of programs that discriminate against Indigenous residents of remote communities’ (p. iii).

What is key to challenging this settler-rentier system of value is that any ‘fundamental reorder[ing of] racial regimes of ownership will inevitably, as history has demonstrated thus far, emerge from the radical political traditions of the oppressed’ (Bhandar, 2018: 186). Marcia Langton’s agonistic politics has long turned the colonial discourses of real estate value, which are represented discursively by terms such as property, estate, tenure, inherited, transferable, etc., back onto themselves to subtly undermine the arguments inherent to settler-rentier real estate values. Writing in the late 1990s, Langton (2018) argued,

‘property is conceived of by all social participants in the real-estate market primarily as an investment for the accumulation of personal and family wealth. By contrast, unless the “tide of history” has swept away Aboriginal law, Aboriginal people are born with an inchoate, inherited and transferable right to “country”’(p. 71).

This is a good example of what we would call remaining in the agonistic politics of settler-colonial land reform. Langton uses the language and terminology of the market regime of real estate to further the public and political debate about the legitimacy of Aboriginal land rights and Country. Furthermore, reframing the language of the dominant regime of value provides a point of articulation between regimes of value and the opportunity for agonistic forms of mutual respect across differences (see Connolly, 1991, 1999; Wenman, 2013: 109–110). More recently, Langton (2018: 72) used this discursive tactic again, stating, ‘landed estates [are] inherited from their forebears as a matter of custom and according to traditional land tenure laws of each people and society’.

In the last pages of Colonial Lives of Property by Bhandar (2018), she poses a rhetorical question that is pertinent to our inquiry here:

‘Could privileging the social uses of property over the rights of owners effectively redistribute the security and social power usually attached to ownership? If the right to housing and shelter were rendered paramount, rather than placed in opposition to the rights of the private owner, how would this alter the value of private property ownership and ideology of possessive individualism?’ (p. 199)

Bhandar leaves the reader with this question to ponder. But others have sought to unsettle the economic value of housing with statements like, ‘housing is a human right’ or ‘housing is a site of care’, which add a further set of moral or social claims to the tournament of housing’s values. Kotef talks about the collective social value of home as a mutually constitutive site of care and violence. The centrality of the value of home as a site of social and political reproduction and sociality means that

‘we can no longer think of subjectivity, including its liberal model, as reducible to autonomous individualism [. . .] But whereas theories that foreground intersubjectivity tend to emphasize a politics of care and vulnerability, the analysis [in her book] emphasises home as a space of violence and domination. The “individual”, precisely because she is interdependent on the social networks in which she (but usually “he”) is given, emerges as part of a matrix of control and subjugation’ (Kotef, 2020: 75).

Despite the complexity of care and rights as moral philosophical theories, these value claims have achieved a degree of discursive legitimacy in Australian housing politics. Yet the inability to easily commensurate these social and moral claims into the economic valuations of the real estate market regime of value has limited the degree of political engagement. The claim that housing is a human right is an increasingly common discourse in housing politics in Australia. The real estate housing market regime of value is decentered, not through legal legitimation of housing rights per se, but through an appeal to the international legal frameworks of human rights, enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One issue here is that the public and private producers of the real estate economy have the power to ignore the need for a substantive engagement with socio-moral values, beyond a discursive recognition of their contemporary relevance (see Fraser and Honneth, 2003).

Positioning housing as a site of care is a similar case where moral or social value claims are articulated but sidelined by the market regime of real estate value. A key dimension of this work has been to highlight the role of care as an embodied activity in the home – for example, to care for (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This caring for includes activities such as child or elderly care, or gendered housework. The work by Power and Mee (2020) conceptualises housing as an infrastructure of care to show how housing systems ‘pattern social life and identify the values that are selectively coded into infrastructures, (re)producing social difference through use’(p. 485). Understanding housing through a relational ethics of care is a ‘moral practice’ with ‘far reaching implications for the visibility and valuing of relational care work, the making of social policy’ (Power and Mee, 2020: 490) or ‘efforts to revalue social housing as a public asset’ (p. 487).

As a relational philosophy, feminist care ethics shares with Marx a concern about social reproduction. In feminist care ethics terms, this is discussed as the totality of caring for as a verb; what

‘we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40).

Furthermore, by explicitly framing the caring that takes place in the home as an infrastructure of care, Power and Mee extend the internal logics of a regime of value bound to care ethics, towards the morally neutral economic considerations of infrastructure as an ‘essential service’. This can be interpreted as a discursive attempt to foster agonistic respect across regimes of value, as a precursor to a more substantive agonistic politics. The conceptualisation of housing as an infrastructure of care exceeds subjective appeals to moral value claims to engage with the logics of housing as material infrastructure, the provision of which is normatively controlled through the dominant real estate market regime of value.

Advocates of care ethics, human rights and other socio-moral values of housing have had some success in the politics of housing reform in Australia. In Sydney, for example, there is an emerging public conversation about the limits of the real estate market and the role of housing as an infrastructure of care and housing as a right. However, these movements have struggled to develop wider political legitimacy for care ethics or human rights in policy-making. Discussions of the ethics of care and human rights are located within broader political philosophical discussions about Western liberalism and individualism (Kotef, 2020), wherein care in the home and housing rights are positioned by some detractors as private individual concerns for consideration within the private space of the home. Within Western liberal states such as Australia, the ‘cultural valuing of and political promotion of home ownership is a central governmental value and practice’ (Power and Mee, 2020: 497). As Power and Mee note, socio-moral regimes of housing values, such as care ethics and human rights, are still not effective in the politics of housing because they have very little institutional and political legitimacy. The claims that delimit care and rights to individual moral concerns within the private realm work to limit the realisation of care and rights as a substantive consideration within the social and collective landscapes of housing economies and provision. Thus, exposing the dominant capitalist regime of real estate value as a value-laden process that is organised around political power is an important co-requisite project to run alongside the valuing of housing as a site of care or rights.

Conclusion

In this article, we engaged with the various relations through which housing is valued to render more coherent ways these valuations of housing inform a situated and relational politics of value. Moving beyond the reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing as an object, this analysis was concerned with how people make valuations about housing as well as how these different housing valuations intersect to constitute the politics of housing values. It is a common reduction to locate the social values of home within economic valuation regimes of real estate. Yet, as we have shown above, if we take value pluralism seriously, the social values of housing cannot be so readily reduced to the market because the plural values of housing are incommensurable.

Our more-than-political economy approach to housing’s values incorporates anthropology and moral philosophical theories of value to conceptualise an agonistic politics of housing value. In the aforementioned case study, we showed how different housing value regimes intersect, forming the basis for articulating a politics of market, care, Indigenous, and rights-based values. We showed how the politics between these different claims about housing value play out. By better understanding the politics that produce housing and home as proto-ontological values, we aim to better articulate home as a site for the realisation of plural values. The utility of value theory and examining the politics between different value claims is useful because it exposes how value is produced through the politics of plural (competing and convergent) value claims. Attempts to show what the value of an object is often miss the broader, recursive political landscape of value creation through which different claims of value manifest.

The agonistic politics of housing values we presented previously resists closure to a unitary or foundational regime of value. As an expression of agonistic democracy, it exceeds notions of liberal toleration or consensualism inherited from Rawls and Habermas, in favour of a more genuine pluralism, expressed through productive forms of plural recognition and civic contest. As we show, regimes of value form the contingent foundations for plural and incommensurable value claims, with tournaments of value providing the frame for productive contestation. Our post-foundational agonistic politics engages with situated and contextualised regimes of housing value and aspires to have critical responsiveness to emergent housing values. It seeks to inculcate a civic virtue of agonistic respect, alongside sensitivity to power relations that seek to silence, delegitimate, enclose, or co-opt diverse value forms.

Our brief foray into one tournament of value provides insights into the enactment of politics and the discursive and substantive forms such a politics might take. There are, of course, many overlapping and intersecting regimes and tournaments of housing value that we have not engaged with in this discussion (financial, moral, cultural, digital, environmental, and so on). Thus, there is still much conceptual and empirical work to do to understand the applied forms of agonistic politics of housing’s values across different contexts. Some further sites for analysis include the development of neo-Marxist labour theories of value (Spangler, 2019), questions about the way cultural difference is mediated by real estate technologies to product venture capitalist claims about tech value (Maso et al., 2021), or moral questions about the public benefit or value of these urban platform technologies (Barns, 2019).

Furthermore, to state that different technology companies, or governments for that matter, are ‘capturing value’ or ‘extracting value’, or to call for the creation of policy frameworks around ‘value-capture’, slightly misreads the politics and discursive functionality of the social relations that result in these types of value claims. Real estate technology companies like Airbnb use network effects and user interaction to make value claims about their company (Maso et al., 2021), and a closer engagement with value theory suggests that value is not out there ready to be ‘captured’ or ‘extracted’ by policy or businesses, rather value claims are produced through the articulation of these ideas of capturing value (or value-capture) itself; that is, value claims are produced through the social, business or policy exchange of ideas, data and capital. Appadurai (1988: 48) argues that institutionally specific ‘specialised mythologies’ are required to render less visible the social processes that are animating and bringing to market these value claims (Murphy, 2020; Smith, 2011).

There are, then, a plurality of regimes of housing values. In fact, all the regimes of value noted previously are discursivity co-present, unstable and contingent, incommensurable and heavily intertwined with other regimes of value. These regimes of value matter to people (Barnett, 2014; Sayer, 2011). They are situated within particular socio-spatial contexts providing meaning for different audiences (Graeber, 2001). Therefore, these regimes of value hold objective properties that must be taken seriously and cannot be treated merely as subjective preferences or interests. The next step for our research, then, is to investigate the political and developer sides of this housing value politics to determine the possibilities for productive contest and mutually respectful engagement that contribute to an agonistic politics of value.