The related notions of habitation and habitability offer a very promising way for framing the conversation about the issues around which environmental political theory has gravitated from its inception: sustainability, environmental justice, preservation. However, the connection between the two must probably be revised in order to produce an ideal of habitation that is useful in the current sociopolitical context. This paper seeks to clarify their mutual relations and explores the way for the politicization of habitation. Underlining the role of nonintentional actions in the past history of habitation, it will argue that, in order to politicize habitation, the latter must be made salient -so that citizens realize that the socionatural relation is not that 'natural'. Ernesto Laclau's notion of the political as an uncovering of contingencies may be useful, while the Lacanian notion of fantasy may be used to explain the gap between current (instrumental) modes of habitation and pervasive (Arcadian) ideals of it. As to how can the relation between habitation and habitability be effectively politicized, this paper will argue that it is the political, rather than politics, what offers a most promising path for re-imagining habitation in our complex and ambivalent societies. Ecological citizenship and newly created spaces for nature are sketched as strategies for politicizing habitation. Bioregionalism is recovered as a radical politics of habitation whose flaws must be avoided if habitation is to be reframed in a mostly urban, hypertechnological world. In this regard, the paper also develops a particular narrative for a reframed habitation, a 'clever adaptation' understood as a regulatory ideal towards which different actions and discourses can be directed.
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