The relationship between political ideologies and the production of space was the key focus of this book. It involved taking a closer look at competing promises of a new society to come – socialist and liberal ones – and their actualization, contestation, and subversion through the ‘politics of dwelling’. ‘The residential is political’ argue Madden and Marcuse in (2016, p. 1) – a way of thinking about a key everyday space that this book not only endorses but refines: the residential is a key site for making and remaking (sets of) political beliefs and thus a battleground for political ideas that is as useful in understanding the history of ideas as the more commonly studied ‘great books’ of ‘great thinkers’ (Freeden 2006, p. 8–9). Whereas the history of ideas traces and reconstructs concepts by the study of texts, the socio-material history of ideas that was pursued in this book looks at what becomes of ideas when they ‘hit’ space and what becomes of spaces when they are ‘hit’ by political beliefs.

Political ideologies, as one core message of this book suggests, are never simply inscribed into space but are instead made and remade, negotiated, and subverted in space. The second core message of this book is that the residential was and continues to be a profoundly political question that involves norms and ideals of citizenship, property relations, gender, and family life, as well as norms and ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality.