Flatting Futures: Negotiating Domesticity, Home and Individuality in the New Zealand Flat

Abstract

The flat has become an established social unit in New Zealand. It forms part of a life-stage transition from the family home into independent housing, which can also include an extension of flatting into adult life. For young people this shift is accompanied by social and cultural expectations which are no longer based on markers of adulthood such as marriage, home ownership and parenthood, but are instead framed around ideas of mobility, independence and individuality. This thesis presents an ethnographic analysis of flatting households in Wellington, New Zealand. This study identifies and explores the public and private spheres and tensions in different flatting situations. Flats are a kind of domestic unit, but do not have the basic kinship bonds that define nuclear domestic units associated with families. Without an underlying social connectedness, the inhabitants of flats are held together by sometimes tenuous social ties that can include friendship. The flat is simultaneously an intimate domestic realm and collection of unrelated individuals. It can be a ‘home’ but often is a temporary and transient type of household. While some flats can be ‘family-like’, others are constructed in opposition to forms associated with the family home. The resulting paradoxical themes involved in negotiating daily life in households, and how spatial, material and social relations are shaped in the flat, are examined. Wider themes of individualism, mobility and changing forms of relatedness and domesticity in modern society are also considered.