Lack of housing or ‘dwelling paradox’? Housing, social norms, and commodification of services as sites of unhoused persons’ struggle for infrastructure access

People living rough or in emergency accommodations and with limited financial means lack stable access to infrastructures for water, energy, communication, and mobility. While a growing body of research has analysed unhoused persons’ limited infrastructure access, perspectives on reasons for these limitations and possible solutions vary decisively. Whereas some authors have argued that houseless persons need housing or shelter to overcome their infrastructure access problems, others identify the primary provision of infrastructure within housing, connected social norms, and the criminalization of infrastructure practices in public spaces as key problems for houseless persons’ infrastructure practices. Drawing on results of a qualitative study in Berlin (2020–23), I contend that both perspectives explain part of the issues unhoused persons face, but that we need to pay closer attention to foundational social arrangements, including property relations and the present mode of housing and infrastructure provision, to understand unhoused persons’ infrastructural precarity and overcome it.


Protschky, A. (2026). Lack of housing or ‘dwelling paradox’? Housing, social norms, and commodification of services as sites of unhoused persons’ struggle for infrastructure access. In Weishaupt, T., Weckwerth, J. & Hinrichs, C. (Eds.). Homelessness in Affluent Societies. Edward Elgar, pp. 131–146. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035357277.00013