Air, Alleys, and Affection: The Politics of the Housing Survey between Basel, Liège, and Berlin
This paper traces the emergence, circulation, and transformation of a survey method that gained prominence at the end of the nineteenth century through the interplay between the Belgian tradition of enquêtes ouvrières and the Sozialenquêten of the Historical School of Economics. The so-called “housing survey” (Wohnungsenquête / Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières) represented a hybrid method that contemporaries struggled to define. Yet they agreed on one crucial point: unlike census-based housing statistics, the housing survey inverted the traditional epistemic hierarchy of the house in statistics. No longer a mere complement to a population, the house itself became the central protagonist of inquiry. The paper explores the transmunicipal circulation of this method through three distinct configurations of the house: a) the economization of indoor air in Basel, b) the ecology of dead-end alleys (impasses) in Liège and Brussels, and c) the affection of housing misery in Berlin. While these surveys contributed to the long-standing moralization of workers’ domestic habits, they also exposed the association between the ongoing deterioration of housing conditions and a broader culture of organized neglect by landlords, police, and municipal councils. In this sense, the shift from a moral to a political-economic framework emerged directly from a survey methodology that decentered the population, foregrounding instead the material realities of housing. As the survey moved from Basel to Liège to Berlin, it not only shifted from public to private but also eroded the boundaries between bourgeois and working-class knowledge producers. Socialists not only reappropriated hygienist housing surveys but also adapted the method to fit their own housing investigations. As weaponized forms of knowledge, socialist versions of the housing survey repeatedly arrived at the same, stark conclusion: “You can kill someone with an apartment just as easily as with an axe.”