Stay Home: Mapping the New Domestic Regime

This article argues that a new ‘domestic regime’ has taken hold in Anglo-American economies since 2008. The combination of austere fiscal policy and loose monetary policy produced sustained house-price inflation in an otherwise stagnant economy. This combined with broadband-enabled digital platforms, a highly flexible labour market, and a routinely undervalued social reproductive sector transformed how capitalism operates in these economies. Taking the UK as a central case our goal in this article is twofold. Firstly, we aim to identify and map the elements that make up this ‘domestic regime’. To adequately grasp this regime, we suggest that it needs to be considered in all its multi-faceted, interlocking dimensions: the financial, the productive, the reproductive, the spatial and the infrastructural. Secondly, we extrapolate from our hypotheses to some broader sociological and political questions and problems. In particular, to ask how this centering of housing and home alters our understanding of inequality, and how it potentially disrupts conventional liberal modes of governmentality.