Afterword: The centrality of housing for good care

Abstract The afterword reviews some of the findings of the contributions to the Berlin Journal of Sociology’s issue 3–4/2025 on ‘Facing transformative change? Care and housing in Europe’, and considers the broader framing of the relationship of housing and care. The essay starts off with the observation of how little work has connected care and housing in the past, in part because care is conceived as activity and housing as structure, and in part because of a gender bias and discomfort about the reality of human vulnerability. After a brief discussion of the issue of housing in Thomas More’s Utopia, the paper considers a number of ways to connect housing and care, proposing the idea of care mainstreaming as an avenue (or, rather, various avenues) to explore, drawing upon feminist geography, and a more conventional care ethics approach that is based on four phases of care. But neoliberal economic reality, wealth-care, must remain a backdrop for all of these discussions. Turning to the essays of the Special Issue, they are discussed in the context of three sets of tensions: between wealth and intimacy, between society and community, and between individual and collective perspectives. The paper concludes by recognising that housing is an ideal location for solidarity against forces of wealth, provided that it allows for myriad possibilities of making housing safe and appropriate for people.