Housing as an infrastructure of care

Due to their care responsibilities, single-mothers have special demands on their living space to cope with the load of care-practices such as raising children, housework, paid work, and self-care. The materiality of housing, defined in this research as the housing design and the housing environment, can be regarded as both the setting and a resource for everyday care. Conceptualising housing as an infrastructure of care, therefore, helps understanding how housing systems shape the possibilities of caregiving and receiving in a system that usually makes care an individual responsibility. The aim of this research is to identify the housing materials that either hinder or support single-mothers' capacity to care. It demonstrates how Hamburg's social housing policy influences this to create a link between the material housing demands of single-mothers and local housing policies. In addressing this, this research tries to identify and illustrate why the incorporation of care in the housing sector is essential to ensure adequate housing for women and achieve gender equality. To achieve this, this research follows a single case study approach, gathering substantial qualitative data in a real-life context to analyse the housing materialities experienced by single-mothers as well as the impact of local housing policies on these materialities in the given spatial context of Hamburg in Germany. Ten single-mothers took part in semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions. To comprehend the influence of the policy on their daily-care, the policy documents were analysed based on the operationalisation and semi-structured interviews with the municipality as well as experts on housing and gender were conducted. The research found that even though the local housing policy in Hamburg considers the special housing needs of single-parents, not all single-mothers were able to obtain housing that fits those criteria and supports their capacity to care. Furthermore, due to a lack of social housing distributed over the city, many mothers in this research experienced displacement to move into social housing, leaving them with limited social resources to help them to care. This research suggests therefore aligning the policy targets with the actual implementation through consistent gender-sensitive data collection and a clearer and more transparent definition of the already existing gender-sensitive regulations. Lastly, to avoid displacement or housing conditions hindering the capacity to care, more affordable and social housing needs to exist throughout the whole city.