Home–neighbourhood: A material–affective infrastructure for the creative city

Debates on the relationship between urban spaces and creative industries have traversed multiple dimensions and spatialities. Yet, with some notable exceptions, analytical focus rarely lands on domestic space. This article engages with the domestic geographies of creative work in the city to explore the growing centrality of home both as a locus for this work and as material–affective infrastructure sustaining creative production. Drawing on longitudinal research with musicians in Sydney, Australia, we use the lens of creative practitioners’ experience through COVID-19 – wherein home and neighbourhood were necessarily centred – to unpack the intensification of home’s importance to creative work. The article explores how home, understood relationally as encompassing home–neighbourhood, plays a pivotal role as an informal, low-risk and supportive creative production space. Relational spaces of home – enrolling kitchens, bedrooms, home studios and gardens, as well as nearby local venues and scenes in the self-reinforcing affects of creative collaboration and performance – provide vital material–affective infrastructure for the process of collaborative creativity. Participants revealed the geographies of ‘creative homes in creative neighbourhoods’ fashioned via the self-intensifying affects of levity, appreciation and sociality, enabling and supporting ongoing creation. Home–neighbourhoods were central to worlds of creative work, intensified by COVID-19’s tempering effect alongside digitalisation, assetification and financialisation. Foregrounding the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism, housing (in)security and creative work, we conceptualise home–neighbourhood in relation to the emerging geographies of hybrid and home-supported work, with key implications for urban cultural and housing policy.