Vulnerable Housing: Margins, Belongings and the Politics of Home

This session focuses on the marginal conditions through which home, security, and belonging are produced and experienced—and what it might mean to approach these conditions with genuine compassion, rather than mere functionality. Bringing together perspectives on displacement, social housing, and housing at the margins, the discussion considers how housing systems shape everyday life for those navigating precarity, exclusion, or limited domestic autonomy. Central to this is a critical examination of resilience: when architectural thinking asks vulnerable people to adapt, exercise agency, or self-advocate, who bears the weight of that expectation? We hope the session will reimagine what care, dignity, and belonging could look like in the spaces we design.