Home and the city

Sheringham, Olivia (2022) Home and the city. In: Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (eds.) Home (2nd Edition). Routledge, pp. 141-188. ISBN 9780367347253.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429327360-4

Abstract

This chapter develops a critical geography of urban homes and the city as home. Building on Chapter 3’s focus on home on a domestic scale, encompassing home, housing, and households and the normative values of ‘homeliness’ often attributed to suburban homes, we consider homemaking in the city. We explore urban politics and processes that shape urban homes and homemaking; the ways in which cities and urban life can be understood in relation to the homes and domestic life within them; and the idea of the city itself as home. Following Blunt and Sheringham (2019), we argue that the study of home should extend beyond the domestic dwelling and/or interior to consider the context in which urban homes are located – including housing estates, streets, neighbourhoods, and the wider city – and that the study of home is crucial to understand what it means to live in the city. Whilst we refer to examples of urban homes throughout the book, this chapter focuses on the ways in which the material and imaginative geographies of home and the city have been understood and experienced in relation to each other. Throughout the chapter we address the intersections of identity and power and the multi-scalarity of home through the mutually constitutive relationships between home on urban and domestic scales. We do so by exploring ‘urban domesticities’ (homemaking and ‘unmaking’ [Baxter and Brickell 2014] in the city), ‘domestic urbanism’ (the city as home), and the ‘home-city geographies’ that connect the two (Blunt and Sheringham 2019; see Box 4.1 on urban rooms with a view). Reflecting the ways in which urban homes and the ability to feel at home in the city are shaped by migrations and other mobilities, we also explore the ways in which home and the city – and urban dwelling and mobility – are intertwined (see Chapter 6 for more on home, migration, and diaspora).

Metadata

Item Type:	Book Section
School:	Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Administrator
Date Deposited:	15 Jan 2024 16:55
Last Modified:	15 Jan 2024 16:55
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52827

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