Remedial Labour and the materialities of housing precarity: Homemaking in informal subdivided units

The global housing crisis has rendered housing insecure and inadequate in sustaining family life and dignified living. Housing precarity is not merely a situation to live in but also to live with, requiring constant negotiation with housing difficulties across spatial, temporal and relational dimensions. Building on years of ethnographic fieldwork, I utilise the literature of materiality to uncover the invisible labour of tenants living in subdivided units in Hong Kong, that is, tiny informal compartments constructed through unauthorised apartment subdivision. I conceptualise this domestic work as remedial labour – the everyday necessary remedy to defective dwellings – in which tenants transform their inadequate space into a habitable home. This exploration illuminates how the state governmentality and housing regime have jointly destabilised individuals’ home experiences and exemplifies the way in which tenants’ everyday labour buffers the societal consequences of the housing crisis and infrastructural failures resulting from market-oriented urban and housing governance.