Mobilizing the paradox of the everyday crisis: A cultural geographic perspective on urban crisis research

Abstract

This essay uses the example of the housing affordability crisis, fleshing out how the everyday and its contestations are a fruitful lens in urban crisis research. Due to constant confrontations with the housing affordability crisis – in our streets and neighbourhoods, in the media, in public discourse, in our own homes – there is an everydayness to struggles over affordable and adequate housing, whether we are directly impacted by housing insecurity or not, what I call the paradox of the everyday crisis. Building on this, the essay unfolds two arguments: on the one hand, I believe that we can come to a different and more nuanced understanding of urban crises by applying the lens of the everyday and learning from the cultural artefacts and media we are surrounded by. On the other hand, I argue that we have to confront the very notion of the everyday in order to move beyond a normalized state of (housing) crisis and de-normalize the current condition of perpetual urban crisis. Thus, I contend that a cultural geographic perspective focusing on the everyday could open up a productive space for intervention.

Everyday encounters with the housing affordability crisis

When walking the streets of any US city, signs of the booming real estate economy are everywhere. Construction sites go hand-in-hand with posters that advertise the apartments or town houses that are being built, portraying harmonious homes and communities. These visual reminders of the real estate economy – and particularly the promises of homeownership – are a faithful companion wherever you go in the United States, in booming as well as in shrinking cities. There are innumerable signs and posters that promote new buildings, investment opportunities or open houses. They paint colorful pictures of what a home could ideally look like, as in ‘own the dream’ or ‘write your own story here’, or they aim to nudge passers-by with the benefits of investing into real estate.

Yet, there are just as many (visual) markers of the real estate economy's flawed workings and governments’ failures to take care of their residents’ most immediate housing needs. Homeless encampments have become a constant presence in US cityscapes, and they have been growing in size and number since 2020. In other neighbourhoods, the belongings of evicted families are piled up in front yards, exposing the intimate details of the lives that have been lived here. Besides these material culminations, there are other visual reminders of the housing affordability crisis: people demand housing rights on banners in their front yards, hang signs in street-facing windows, or they paint murals that call for housing justice.

When returning from this imaginary walk through any rent-seeking US city, there is no escaping the situation. The housing affordability crisis is now also a constant in everyday popular culture. It is present when we open the newspaper in the morning, step into our favourite bookstore, scroll through social media or any popular streaming provider. There are, for instance, a number of stand-up comedians who have jokes about the lack of affordable housing in their repertoire. Comedian Andy Haynes jokes about the new generation of 30-somethings that still lives in shared apartments, mostly out of necessity. Alex Edelman asks ‘How is any millennial ever gonna own a home?’, joking about the differences between his parents’ generation buying a home for ‘11 raspberries’ and his generation's inability to afford anything on the market. But apart from poking at everyday issues, some comedians also point to the structural problems. Jamie Wolf, for instance, tells an only superficially funny story about how he was rejected when he applied for affordable housing, criticizing the barriers in accessing housing assistance. Similar systemic criticism can be found in Robert Evans's podcast Behind the Bastard, in which he presents Sam Zell – the former US-American real estate investor – as a true villain, calling him ‘the Elon Musk of real estate’ (episode from 10 November 2022).

The theme of the real estate villain can also be found in film and literature. Popular Netflix shows Gentefied and The Lincoln Lawyer (season 2) both portray the tensions on the LA housing market. The former follows three cousins who try to save their gentrifying neighbourhood, the latter an attorney who defends an anti-gentrification activist in the murder of a real estate mogul. Similar representations can be found in a number of novels that have been published in recent years, many of which specifically focus on gentrification in New York City's Brooklyn. Alyssa Cole's When No One is Watching (2020), for instance, follows the main protagonist's fight to preserve her neighbourhood while uncovering the real estate economy's dark secrets and their deadly consequences. Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson, published in 2023 and an NYT bestseller, portrays the life of a rich Brooklyn family and their involvement in the real estate economy, spinning a mysterious net between a family's history and that of a changing neighbourhood's. Similar trajectories can be found in Naima Coster's Halsey Street (2018), Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch (2022) or Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's On the Rooftop (2022).

The frequency of mentions of the housing affordability crisis shows that something is askew and constantly worth of debate. Put otherwise, the numerous examples above reflect a reality in which housing is a constant topic of concern for all kinds of audiences. While I outlined only a few examples here, the list of everyday encounters with the housing crisis could go on. I am certain that each reader could add a few examples and some of their own experiences. Due to these constant confrontations with the housing crisis – in our streets and neighbourhoods, in the media, in public discourse, in our own homes – there is an everydayness to struggles over affordable and adequate housing, whether we are directly impacted by housing insecurity or not.

Thinking urban crisis with the everyday

Thinking with these various everyday encounters, I approach the subject of the housing affordability crisis, and urban crises more broadly, from a cultural geographic perspective. Crises have – and probably always will be – a motor of cultural production. From this angle, it is not surprising that the housing affordability crisis is now referenced in many of the media and cultural artefacts we consume and is materially and visually shaping our cityscapes. At the same time, this everydayness and the sometimes even banal or silly encounters with the housing affordability crisis run the danger of normalizing the housing crisis’ ramifications rather than critically engaging with them. Following the often cited definition by Koselleck and Richter (2006), a crisis represents a decisive historical moment, a structural transition or an alarming condition. Yet, with regards to the housing affordability crisis, it seems that this ‘alarming condition’ has become the norm rather than the exception. As urban dwellers, we are not only affected materially and emotionally by struggles over affordable housing, but we are also part of a culture in which the housing affordability crisis is ever-present. At least in Western societies, it has become part of our everyday life and might even be considered a marker of our Zeitgeist.

My observations are in line with other scholars’ assessments in which they argue that housing insecurity and the fight for affordable housing have become part of our everyday. Lancione (2019), for instance, describes the urban crisis, referring to the lack of affordable and adequate housing, as our ‘new normal’. Similarly, Harris et al. (2019) speak of ‘a state of “crisis-ordinary”’, building on Lauren Berlant. Such statements depict the perpetual crises the real estate economy is producing – and those assessments were published even before the COVID-19 pandemic increased pressure on the housing market. More broadly, the term cost-of-living-perma-crisis can be found in literature to describe the vicious cycle of poverty related to housing insecurity, cuts in welfare programmes and recent inflation, which causes a growing share of urban residents to be priced-out of housing and other basic (infrastructural) needs (Edmiston et al., 2025; Graham, 2024). Such assessments underline that the housing affordability crisis seems to be everywhere and affecting (almost) everyone and, as I would add, is now also a constant in everyday popular culture.

This essay builds on my qualitative work on housing insecurity in US American cities (Keller, 2024a, 2024b, 2025). I have followed the developments in some major US metropolises for the past 6 years and have often thought about how there is no escaping the real estate economy in its various facets (Keller and Pierce, 2023). Thus, this essay does not only draw on my fieldwork with individuals who are housing insecure, but it also feeds on many of my own experiences and observations as a reader, listener and participant in contemporary popular culture. While this essay is mostly going to focus on the developments in the United States, which is where I have conducted most of my scholarly work, I believe that the same tendencies could be found in many cities and urban societies around the globe – and I have certainly made similar observations in Europe and Latin America.

I would like to see this essay as an open reflection on the multiple cultural facets of the housing affordability crisis and a starting point in thinking about how geographers can employ the everyday as a resource in studying urban crises. In the remainder of this short essay, I take this paradox of the everyday crisis as the point of departure of my argument. Using the example of the housing affordability crisis, I aim to flesh out how the everyday and its contestations are a fruitful lens in urban crisis research. My argument here is two-fold: on the one hand, I believe that we can come to a different and more nuanced understanding of urban crises by applying the lens of the everyday and learning from the cultural artefacts and media we are surrounded by. On the other hand, I argue that we have to confront the very notion of the everyday in order to move beyond a normalized state of (housing) crisis. If urban crisis scholarship aims to not only analyse crises but work on solutions and move the needle towards a ‘state of non-crisis’ (see Beveridge and Davidson in this issue) – and possibly different housing/urban futures – we need to engage the everyday in order to de-normalize the current condition of perpetual urban crisis. Thus, I contend that a cultural geographic perspective focusing on the everyday could open up a productive space for intervention.

Mobilizing the everyday in urban crisis scholarship

In The Geography of the Everyday, Sullivan (2017) describes the everyday as something that is given. When things are given, they are not actively recognized and acknowledged but rather form the backdrop to our daily lives. Similarly, following Scott (2009), one could argue that the everyday is mundane, familiar and unremarkable. This is due to two main characteristics of the everyday: (1) large parts of our everyday are routinized and habitualized. It is constituted through repeated encounters, and over time, new phenomena or actions become part of our ‘natural’ social environment and move into the background. (2) The everyday is often considered private or personal as it is thought of as the things we do at home and with the persons closest to us. Taken together, the everyday makes up large parts of our lives – it is in the way we speak, eat, sleep, love, laugh, work, fight or rest, as well as in the way we create our most immediate environment and stick to our habits. In this sense, the everyday also has a strong spatial dimension as these routinized actions are usually bound to a certain set of places.

As the everyday is taken for granted, we only actively think about it when norms and social conventions of everydayness are broken. In terms of housing and its crises, for instance, a homeless person sleeping in a metro station – intended for transit – is acting outside that which is considered everyday – sleeping in a ‘proper bed’ and in the privacy of a ‘home’. As Sullivan (2017) argues, if people engage in behaviour that is not given, the consequences ‘can be severe or even brutal’ (2). In the case of said homeless person, for instance, they might be criminalized and charged with loitering or vandalism. Hence, while we all partake in the everyday, we do not necessarily share it or access it on equal terms. On the contrary, Lefebvre (1987a) argues that the everyday is ‘the most universal and the most unique condition, the most social and the most individual, the most obvious and the best hidden’ (9). In short, the everyday is not experienced equally.

Scholars conceptualizing the everyday and everydayness, such as Lefebvre, Scott and Sullivan demand that we need more studies that unveil these given social conventions and break with that which usually goes unquestioned. If we take the everyday seriously, we can learn much about the societies we live in. Scott (2009), for instance, argues that we need to study everyday life to come to a more comprehensive understanding of societal structures. They write that ‘[n]one of these large-scale events could occur without there being individual people doing little things in local places’ (1). To them, it is in the everyday that the micro- and the macro-scale come together since the mundanity of everyday life tells us about ‘political interests, ideologies and subtle forms of social control’ (30).

I second Scott's assessment and argue that we can learn much about the housing affordability crisis and the way we treat crises in urban scholarship more broadly if we focus our attention on everyday encounters with crisis. This is in line with a recent special issue by Hilbrandt and Ren (2025) who contend that the pervasiveness of crises puts into question how we produce geographic knowledge and that it challenges us to think differently about our teaching and research praxis. I propose the everyday as a starting point in grappling with these questions and would like to end this essay with four impulses on how to employ the everyday in urban crisis scholarship.

Firstly, in studying urban crises, we usually focus our attention on the material, economic and political consequences, maybe also the emotional implications, but we still treat them as an exception. Crisis scholarship, despite newer terms such as poly-crisis or perma-crisis, operates from the assumption that the phenomenon under study is the exception. But what if we studied crisis not as an exception or a state of emergency but as an everyday condition? Rather than focusing on outstanding case studies and extraordinary examples, let us turn to our everyday to uncover the power geometries that shape our lives and the urban crises we are witnessing. This change in perspective might also reveal that for some their access to urban space, and particularly to housing, has long been a precarious need and shaped by multiple crises. Studying urban crises through the lens of the everyday thus helps us demonstrate the permanence of urban crises and their implications on the ground and could bring us to a more nuanced understanding of how urban dwellers are impacted by crises in their day-to-day.

Secondly, thinking with the everyday implies that, as urbanists, we need to learn to pay attention to artefacts as well as research objects and participants we are not necessarily attuned to and question who we think knows about urban crises. As urban scholars we could start by being more open to studies on everyday popular culture and their recipients. We could learn to incorporate the study of art, literature, music, satire, etc. into our observations of urban change. While there are many publications on the subject matter coming out of the humanities (for publications on gentrification literature, see e.g., Heise, 2022, Peacock, 2019 or Wolting, 2021; and for publications on crisis urbanism, see e.g., Faisst, 2019), there are few urban geographers who engage popular culture and/or the humanities as a resource. Yet, if a subject has become as all-encompassing as, for instance, the housing affordability crisis, it can only be understood in its complexity when it is studied in an interdisciplinary effort, engaging a variety of sources and perspectives. Similarly, thinking of ecological crises, there is a plethora of other-than-human perspectives we could try to incorporate into our engagement with and understanding of urban crises.

Thirdly, and again following Hilbrandt and Ren's (2025) argument, doing urban research in times of crisis also involves critical self-reflection and confronting our own complicity in the global crises we are facing. This might pertain to the ways we communicate and the publics we engage with, but also extends to our research practices and the methods we use. Focusing our attention on the everyday of urban crisis opens up possibilities for a more nuanced engagement with cultural production outside of our own (academic) bubbles and allows us to do research in the near-by and on the small scale. Particularly working with popular culture and media offers the possibility to study and learn from the confinements of our own desk instead of travelling long distances for fieldwork. Relatedly, and thinking on an even smaller scale, taking the everyday seriously can also lead to a more sophisticated treatment of autoethnography and our own (bodily) experience of urban crises. Rather than always turning outwards, we can turn to the archives within us, as has been shown by authors such as Bloch (2022) or Kern (2016, 2022).

Lastly, crises can become a way of life or a Zeitgeist – which makes it almost impossible to critically question and fight them. The omnipresence of crises bears the real danger of making us emotionally blunt to the hardships, injustices and violence we are witnessing in our cityscapes. Some of the crises we are experiencing, such as the housing affordability crisis or the climate crisis, have become so engrained into the fabric of our societies that they are almost naturally picked up on and played with in popular culture. As I have stated elsewhere in the context of the housing affordability crisis, posters, open house notices, murals, reels on social media or book covers constantly pique the mind as a scholar who is studying housing (Keller and Pierce, 2023). Yet, their omnipresence can also be emotionally draining and aggravate fears and feelings of insecurity. Worse, there is also a weariness to this everyday confrontation with crises. It often becomes too much – and there is the temptation of wanting to shut it off and just accept the new status quo. I thus argue that by critically uncovering the everydayness of urban crises, we can move beyond a normalized state of exception. As Lefebvre (1987b) argues in his Critique of Everyday Life, only if we lift the veil of banality, can we make meaningful changes to our everyday. While Lefebvre (1987b) warns that the everyday might become even harder to bear once we see it for what it is, he is convinced that this uneasiness is the necessary stimulus for change. From this perspective, the everyday itself could be a source of inspiration in resisting urban crises’ omnipresence and in working to overcome them. According to Kallianos and Fumanti (2021), ‘everyday life mobilizes action and shapes activist practices’ (1112) as it plays with the tension between the uncommon and the familiar or intimate. The everyday itself then becomes a platform of resistance.