Housing

This note treats housing as a system, with a working definition that relates it to niche construction and ecosystem engineering. The practical case is housing for animals under different degrees of human control, from zoo enclosures, sanctuaries, shelters and kennels to nest boxes, artificial refuges and buildings that wild animals adopt. The design interest is co-design in which the relevant agents lead and all parties work towards workable compromises inside agreed limits of habitability and risk.

Cf.

• home, home as assemblage,
• homing, dwelling
• homemaking, homescape, household
• habitat, microhabitat, niche, territory, home range
• enclosure, exhibit, holding area, back-of-house, den, run, pen, aviary, kennel, cattery, vivarium
• nest box, roost box, artificial refuge, habitat structure, seabird "hotel"
• sanctuary, refuge, shelter, rehabilitation centre, soft-release enclosure
• husbandry, keeping, confinement, captivity, domestication
• envelope, membrane, border, borderland, threshold
• dweller control, infrastructure of care, housing regime, active dwelling
• usable space, effective habitat size, choice and control, competence, agency
• post-occupancy evaluation, temporary exhibit design, reflexive interactive design, animal-aided design, wildlife-inclusive design
• differential habitability, residency and infestation

Related Notes

• Captivity and keeping: Captivity, Zoo, Kennels, Domestication, Pet, Companion Animals, Refugee
• Habitat and structure: Habitat, Niche, Habitat Structure, Artificial Habitat Structur, Hollows, Animal Design, Indoor Ecosystems
• Relations and cohabitation: Multispecies Cohabitation, Relations, Belonging, Infrastructure, Metabolism, Care
• Participation and governance: Leadership, Participation, Ladder, Stakeholder, Deliberation, Governance, Paternalism, Power
• Welfare and justice: Capabilities, Freedom, Autonomy, Agency, Thriving, Health, Justice
• Systems and uncertainty: Complexity, Dynamics, Risk, Uncertainty, Redundancy, Resilience, Time
• Methods: Animal Computer Interaction, Multispecies Design, Interspecies Design, More than Human Design

Working Definition

Housing is the continuing construction, provision, occupation, maintenance and governance of places of recurrent dwelling. It buffers inhabitants against exposure and supports their rest, care and reproduction, while it regulates who may dwell there, on what terms and at whose cost.

• Continuing. Housing never reaches a finished state, because maintenance, adaptation and decay continue after construction. Cf. Process Ontology.
• Five activities. Construction, provision, occupation, maintenance and governance can sit with one agent or with many. A beaver builds, occupies, maintains and defends its lodge. A zoo tiger occupies an enclosure that others build, provide, maintain and govern.
• Places of recurrent dwelling. Inhabitants return to these places for shelter, rest, care, storage and reproduction, which distinguishes housing from habitat use in general. Cf. homing, Habitat.
• Buffering. An envelope moderates heat, cold, wet, light, noise, predators, pathogens and unwanted attention. It works as a selective membrane more than as a sealed boundary.6
• Rest, care and reproduction. These functions separate a dwelling place from a feeding or travelling place, although many dwellings also store food or host work.
• Regulation and cost. Every housing arrangement admits some beings, excludes others and shifts costs onto neighbours, workers, displaced beings or future inhabitants.14

Relatives

Cf. the implications of niche construction and ecosystem engineering for conservation67 and the political ecology of beaver engineering.68 Cf. Niche, Beaver.

Modes of Housing

• Dweller-control test. Captivity appears where an inhabitant holds occupation alone while others hold construction, provision, maintenance and governance. Co-design moves these activities towards inhabitants and makes the remaining asymmetries explicit.1 Cf. Captivity.

Housing as a System

Housing theory has moved attention from dwellings as a stock of objects to housing as a process and a set of relations.

• Housing as a verb. What matters in housing is what it does for its inhabitants more than what it is materially. Housing therefore works as a verb: a process that subsumes products, with its value in the relations between actors, activities and achievements, which general systems models can describe. When dwellers control the major decisions, the process and the environment support individual and social well-being, and when they lack control, dwelling environments can become a barrier to fulfilment and a burden on the economy. Local self-government in housing achieves the requisite variety of dwelling environments.1 For animal housing, the parallel question asks how much control resident animals have over siting, layout, use and change.
• Infrastructure of care. Housing patterns care through its materials, markets and governance, which prompts the question "is this a housing system that cares?"2
• Affordances, politics and inhabitation. An infrastructural reading asks which ways of living a housing form makes possible, how it distributes power, and how inhabitants live in it and press back against it.3 Housing infrastructures are temporally fragile, and breakdowns expose what they afford.3
• Relational housing. Relational approaches connect the particular with the structural, treat home as unbounded across neighbourhoods, networks and landscapes, and credit materials and devices with agency.4 Indigenous relational understandings present the house-as-home as embodied co-becoming with Country.4
• Three layers. The housing regime places a home within wider systems of planning and economy. Critical phenomenology reads the gap between the ideal home and the actual one. Active dwelling turns that gap into political homemaking.5
• Selective membrane. The modern home appears autonomous because it excludes cold, dirt, pollution and sewage, yet it depends on produced nature that flows in and out through pipes and cables.6 The envelope admits, excludes, slows, filters, concentrates, shelters and redirects organisms, substances and forces. Cf. Indoor Ecosystems.
• Differential habitability. Every housing arrangement supports some lives and exposes others. It decides who receives shelter, whose presence counts as residency and whose counts as infestation, who performs maintenance, and where waste goes.

Processes

Housing happens through overlapping processes, and each has a counterpart in animal housing.

Relations

• support: shelter protects bodies from harmful exposure
• exchange: heat, moisture, nutrients, money, labour, information and care circulate
• exclusion: walls, laws, prices, fences, repellents and classifications decide who belongs
• dependency: residents rely on infrastructures, carers, other organisms and ecological processes
• conflict: bodies require incompatible temperatures, territories, foods or rhythms
• adaptation: residents and environments change one another
• inheritance: present arrangements carry past decisions and constrain future ones

Dynamics

Units of Analysis

The relevant unit depends on the question:

• enclosure, holding area, off-show area
• institution, with its routines, staff and visitors
• network of institutions that exchange animals through breeding programmes
• animal territory, home range or migration route
• catchment, soil community, microbial community
• supply chains for food, bedding and building materials
• seasonal cycle, fire regime, climate trajectory
• multispecies neighbourhood around a facility

Six Dimensions

More-than-Human Homes

Human geography has extended home beyond human households, and its cases supply terms for animal housing.

• Post-humanist housing. Companion animals act as family members and occupy housing in their own ways, so the sociology of housing needs a post-humanist revision. The House Rabbit Society offers an example of new forms of co-presence.11
• Border processes. Brushtail possums that live in the ceiling and wall cavities of Sydney homes turn homemaking into continual border work. Their sounds and smells unsettle human residents and also add to their sense of belonging, while walls and ceilings mediate the encounter. Possums often return after removal, partly because law limits relocation to 50 metres.12
• Borderlands. Pesticide campaigns against bedbugs turn immunitary protection into auto-immunity: the chemicals harm residents and ecosystems and select resistant bedbugs. Residents then move from rigid borderlines towards borderlands of negotiated coexistence.13
• Labour and violence. The more-than-human home distributes violence and labour unevenly among humans and other animals, and one being's homemaking can unmake another's home.14
• Homescapes. Multispecies homescapes include the experience of sharing home with other species, the limits and liminalities of homeness, and the loss of a multispecies home.15 See also migrant homes,16 coastal homemaking17 and design for cross-species cohabitation.18
• Animal housing as infrastructure. Animal housing links laboratories, zoos, farms and homes through shared politics, practices and infrastructures. One case follows animals moved from a psychiatric hospital laboratory in Copenhagen to a small private zoo in 2004.19
• Maintenance as compromise. Kittiwakes that nest on urban infrastructure in eastern England show maintenance as a way of coming to terms with new ecological proximities. Street cleaning and repairs that support breeding birds allow messy co-presence, while institutional constraints make radical alternatives hard to imagine.20
• Experimental housing. Kittiwake "hotels" in the United Kingdom and Norway developed through ad hoc experiments that changed understanding of urban-avian life.21

The Captivity Gradient

Captivity holds a relational profile of captivity across spatial, temporal, bodily, social and epistemic dimensions. Housing makes those dimensions concrete.

• Captive, liminal, wild. Captive animals live among, depend on or are confined by humans. Liminal animals live in human settlements without necessarily affiliating with or depending on humans. Wild animals live apart from humans or have little to do with them.22 Owls raised in captivity tolerate humans more than wild-caught owls, and wild powerful owls in hospitals or aviaries are often stressed and difficult to keep.22
• Pervasive captivity. Expanding cities confine, control and create dependency in many urban animals, which extends captivity beyond enclosures. The argument treats captivity itself as value-neutral and concentrates on harmful pervasive captivity.23
• Risk portfolios. Ungulates managed from traditional zoos to large ranches face different portfolios of welfare risks. Good welfare is possible across these settings, and some indicators allow comparison between them.24

Lessons from Zoo Enclosure Design

Zoo research offers the most developed evidence on how housing features affect animals. Its findings move attention from footprint to usable, chosen and changeable space.

• Usable space. Usable space counts every surface and volume that animals can reach and use. In one pygmy marmoset exhibit, 24 m² of floor corresponded to 116 m² of usable surface, and furniture supplied more than half of the usable volume.29
• Effective habitat size. Captive tigers can pace 19 km in six hours, which shows that small enclosures still permit much locomotion. The deficit lies in cognitive opportunities that shrink with size. An expert panel ranked foraging as the top psychological priority of adult Amur tigers and ranked swimming, fighting and bathing lowest. The review proposes programmable pathways with sensor-driven gates and scent cues that multiply decisions within a fixed footprint.30
• Social and management factors. In zoo elephants, exhibit space showed few associations with welfare outcomes. Time housed alone and the number of transfers between zoos raised the risk of stereotypic behaviour, hard flooring was the largest risk factor for musculoskeletal problems, and diverse enrichment and unpredictable feeding protected against several problems.9
• Number of areas. During chimpanzee introductions, arousal-related scratching fell as the number of accessible areas rose. The result favours modular enclosures that keep choice open during husbandry restrictions.10
• Relative complexity. Complexity depends on body size, dominant senses and the pace at which a species perceives its world. Very large naturalistic exhibits complicate disease monitoring, identification and the capture of sick animals. The review recommends gradients of temperature, light, humidity and sound, multiple feeding stations, rotation between exhibits, holding areas built to exhibit standards, and visual barriers against visitor pressure.8
• Rotation. Rotation exhibits let animals spend mornings in one area and afternoons in another.31
• Unused options. Resources can improve welfare without active use. Some motivations are sated quickly, choice and control can help even when animals do not exercise them, and some features supply structure, landmarks and blocked sightlines.32 Polar bears benefit from private dens that they use about 2% of the time.33
• Choice, control, challenge and agency. Choice selects between alternatives. Control predictably produces desired results. Agency needs both control and surmountable challenge. Open questions include the right number of choices, the effects of removing choices once given, and the bias of the evidence towards primates.33 Cf. the six Cs: coping, comfort, choice, control, challenge and compassion.34
• Around the clock. Husbandry often follows staff schedules. A 24/7 approach maps the animal's life across day and night, weekends, seasons and life stages, and calls for technologies that let animals engineer their own environments.35
• Back-of-house. Non-public areas lag behind exhibits, and animals may spend much of the day in them. Proposals include animal-friendly materials, animal control of the ambient environment, animal choice of access to multiple areas, and design for the hours when carers are absent.36
• What animals need to do. Aviary design can start from what birds need to do, such as fly.37
• Natural living. Natural-living conceptions of zoo welfare face their own dilemmas.38

Housing as a Multi-Actor System

Animal housing serves animals, carers, veterinarians, visitors, managers and neighbours at once, and several fields offer tools for that plurality.

• Interdependent coworkers. Human-factors tools such as function allocation, operational sequence diagrams and needs assessment can treat animals, staff and visitors as interdependent coworkers whose requirements clash or complement each other.39
• Trials before construction. Temporary exhibit design tests exhibit components before building, with input from animals, visitors and staff, and can reduce construction costs and later redevelopment.40
• Institutional risk. A welfare risk assessment process adapted from the Five Domains Model, trialled at three zoos over three years, identifies areas of welfare risk across many species.41 Cf. the 2020 Five Domains Model with human-animal interactions42 and the agency domain.43
• Reflexive interactive design. Designers of laying-hen housing wrote a brief of requirements for the hen, the farmer and the citizen, and used it to bridge requirements that seemed to conflict.44 A dust bath unit illustrates how the animal can contribute to design to overcome welfare trade-offs.45 A later approach gives engineers a brief of animal capacities and calls for a shift from "taking care of" animals to "providing agency".26
• Shelter trade-offs. Barren, easily cleaned cat housing helps disease control, while cats need to hide, perch and choose interaction, and enriched housing speeds adoption.7 Cf. Kennels.
• Institutional conditions. Interviews with zoo experts show that choice and control depend on public expectations, welfare research, shifting stakeholder priorities and cooperation between departments.46 Animal-centred technology could grow from single enrichment devices to facility-wide animal movement systems and transitions to release. Its costs include cultural resistance, staff training, reduced contact between carers and animals, obsolescence and maintenance.47

Co-Design and Nonhuman Leadership

• Emerging participation. Animals participate through volitional, semiotic and choice-rich engagement. They respond through compliance, diversion or subversion, set the pace, price and form of their involvement, and need the freedom to disengage.48 In one study, a dog chose to press a low switch with her paw instead of her snout, and her responses to posture and height prompted redesigned controls.48
• Co-design with orangutans. Zoo-based interaction design has involved orangutans in shaping their enrichment.49
• Welfare through competence. Competence grows through choice, control, variety and complexity. A matrix that crosses these four areas with the Five Domains identifies design opportunities. A seven-step iterative process uses low-fidelity, "Wizard of Oz" and safely destructible prototypes, followed by formative and then summative evaluation.50
• Sanctuary stewardship. A participatory design study at a wombat sanctuary, running since 2017, prototyped enclosures and landscapes for wombats under treatment for sarcoptic mange. It discusses taking sides in interspecies conflict, dialogue beyond words, and obligations of care over time.51
• Sanctuary governance. Resident animals shape the norms of a shared sanctuary community.25
• Design with. Design with nonhuman species targets place-based relationships more than the control of species. It draws on design methods, coexistence, rewilding, adaptive management and traditional land management, and it enables negotiation without relying on linguistic political models.52
• Animal agency in management. A review of 190 studies found that assumptions of rigid behaviour, preference for pristine habitat, and marginal human-wildlife relations led wildlife management to unanticipated harmful outcomes.53
• Diagnostic questions. Five questions test whether a project supports nonhuman leadership: recognition, solidarity, autonomy, conviviality and commoning. Conviviality treats friction as a normal part of collective life and seeks compromise through care. The commoning question asks whether durable institutions and infrastructures embed multispecies participation.54 Cf. Ladder,55 Leadership, Multispecies Cohabitation.56
• Housing in the wild. Computer-aided design and manufacturing can produce habitat structures for cavity-dependent animals, with scanning and monitoring that support iterative improvement.28 Almost all field studies of artificial refuges measure occupancy, while few measure fitness or use controls, so few can show effects on individuals or populations.27
• Wildlife-inclusive design. Successful projects involve ecologists early, consider the whole life cycle of target species, monitor after occupancy with feedback, and involve stakeholders.57 In animal-aided design, the requirements of target species set boundary conditions for planning and also inspire the design.58

Compromise within Limits

The literature reviewed here offers no joint, operational definition of the limits within which animals can choose. Its sources suggest a layered working model: set limits together, keep meaningful choice inside them, monitor animals and humans, and revise.

• Non-compensatory limits. Welfare Quality sorts farms into categories bounded by reference profiles. A unit must reach the aspiration value on two or three of four principles and must stay above the next-lower category on the rest, which limits how far good scores offset bad ones. Stakeholders helped define the categories, and the procedure compromises between ideals and what practice can achieve.59
• Explicit trade-offs. Small changes in how values are articulated and prioritised can produce major changes in management decisions, so structured decision-making should make values and trade-offs explicit.60
• Borderlands. Coexistence can move from borderlines to borderlands when attempts at total control harm the residents they protect.13
• Care and maintenance. Conviviality seeks compromise through care,54 and maintenance can work as a compromise that allows messy co-presence.20

Examples

Housing as an Ecology of Care: From Blank Type to Dwelling

Implications for More-than-Human Design

• Treat an enclosure as one node in a housing system that includes back-of-house areas, transport, other institutions, staff routines, visitors, microbes, wild neighbours and governance.
• Treat institutions as hybrid: carers, resident animals, technologies and routines together make the housing system.
• Design the envelope jointly and leave its interior open to resident choice.
• Measure usable, effective and chosen space in preference to footprint.
• Prototype with animals before construction and keep housing adjustable after occupancy.
• Make trade-offs explicit, and keep harms that cannot be offset outside any trade-off.
• Extend "nothing about us without us" to resident animals, so that housing decisions include their leadership through choice, refusal and use. Cf. Leadership, Participation.
• Match methods to the position on the captivity gradient: choice within enclosures where human control is high, and shared place-making where it is low.
• Treat maintenance and repair as continuing design.

Open Questions

• Who sets the hard limits, and how can resident animals contest them?
• How can housing represent absent parties such as wild neighbours, future residents and the in situ populations that justify captivity?
• When does added choice make confinement more acceptable without changing its terms? Cf. the key tension in Captivity.
• Can exit, through release, rehoming or transfer to a sanctuary, become a designed option within the housing system?
• Which welfare indicators hold across settings, from zoo to landscape?24
• How should designers weigh the preferences of one resident against the welfare of its group or of other species?

References

Footnotes

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2. Fair, Hannah. “Labor, Violence and the Unfamiliar: Animals’ Geographies of the More-than-Human Home.” Progress in Environmental Geography 3, no. 4 (2024): 332–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687241278367.˄

3. Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.˄

4. Odling-Smee, John, and Kevin N. Laland. “Ecological Inheritance and Cultural Inheritance: What Are They and How Do They Differ?” Biological Theory 6, no. 3 (2011): 220–30. https://doi.org/10/ggcm7w.˄

5. Jones, Clive G., John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak. “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers.” Oikos 69, no. 3 (1994): 373–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/3545850.˄

6. Jones, Clive G., John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak. “Positive and Negative Effects of Organisms as Physical Ecosystem Engineers.” Ecology 78, no. 7 (1997): 1946–57. https://doi.org/10.1890/0012-9658(1997)078[1946:paneoo]2.0.co;2.˄

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8. Laidre, Mark E. “Animal Architecture.” Current Biology 31, no. 22 (2021): R1458–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.082.˄

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