Home (Key Ideas in Geography) by Alison Blunt (Author), Robyn Dowling (Author)

As I promised myself earlier on, this is a brief summary of (the first chapter) of the book "Home: Key Ideas in Geography"
Blunt and Dowling describes home "as a place and as an idea, an imaginary imbued with feeling"(2). these feelings include belonging, desire, intimacy and fear, violence, alienation.
Home is thus "spatial imaginary" they conclude.
"a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales and connect places" (2).

inspired by their word play I will suggest to consider home as "imaginary space". (How brilliant!)
the authors lists several frameworks that conceptualize the "home".
Marxist conceive home as a site for social reproduction, where the worker prepares him/herself for work./Basically/
Humanist geographers investigate how places entail meanings, significance for people. they are interested in how people relate to the dwelling, how a sense of home is created. this is what I am interested in as well.
they dont consider home as house or shelter, rather it is an "irreplaceable centre of significance".A place to withdraw and venture forth. this is where feminist critics are suspicious about. It is rather a romantic take of home they argue. As they find such an approach masculinist, the home is a haven for the men, who rest in it, but for women it is a workplace and more than that most of the time a site for oppression and violence.
I find the quote of Dovey quite interesting, she sees home as a relationship with the environment through which people make sense of their world. It corresponds with Stuart Hall's definition of culture. In a similar manner Nikos Papastergiadis sees home as a place where personal and social meanings are grounded.
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"Being Home refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; "not being home" is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself."
chandra Talpade Mohanty

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