Human nature, society and the home

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Abstract
‘The New Psychology’, which combines biology, psychology and the social sciences, is now generating considerable insights and debates. Such work gives special emphasis to ‘the expressive order'; people's own understandings and statements deriving from the innate drives affecting their behaviour as well as the socially‐constructed cultures of which they are part. Housing and urban studies, this paper suggests, should be part of these developments. Involvement in such issues should, for example, help us address questions which have recently been raised in Housing Studies by Saunders and Williams. They underlined the fact that the home is of central significance to the lives of individuals and they suggested that the significance of the home for contemporary social change has been underestimated. The intention of the present paper is to suggest that the new syntheses of ethology, sociobiology, social psychology and sociology might be one means of establishing the home's wider significance and its centrality to people's lives and identities. This paper concludes by arguing that housing studies could make major contributions to this emergent combination of the natural and social sciences.

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