Home

347 Pages·2022·39.12 MB·English

by  Robyn M. Dowling, Alison Blunt

HOME
Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive
place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic
life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world.
Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition
was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research
boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter
on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban.
The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical
geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as
well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and
performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the
domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation- as-home;
and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter
includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time
periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across
these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human
constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research
agenda for home in a world of COVID-19.
The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions:
that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home,
power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar.
This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of
academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape
the field of home studies into the future.
Alison Blunt is Deputy Vice Principal for Impact (Culture, Civic, Community) and
Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is founding co-director
of the Centre for Studies of Home, a partnership between Queen Mary and the Museum of
the Home. Her research on home, migration, and the city has been funded by the AHRC,
the ESRC, and the Leverhulme Trust. She is the academic lead on ‘Stay Home Stories’, a
project funded by the AHRC as part of the UKRI rapid response to COVID-19.
Robyn Dowling is Dean of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.
She has an abiding interest in how people make home in cities and dwellings. Her
current research focuses on urban governance responses to climate change, technological
disruptions, and innovation.
KEY IDEAS IN GEOGRAPHY
Series editors: Noel Castree, University of Wollongong and Audrey Kobayashi,
Queen’s University
The Key Ideas in Geography series will provide strong, original and accessible texts
on important spatial concepts for academics and students working in the fields
of geography, sociology and anthropology, as well as the interdisciplinary
fields of urban and rural studies, development and cultural studies. Each text
will locate a key idea within its traditions of thought, provide grounds for
understanding its various usages and meanings, and offer critical discussion
of the contribution of relevant authors and thinkers.
RESILIENCE
Kevin Grove
POSTCOLONIALISM
Tariq Jazeel
NON-REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY
Paul Simpson
CLIMATE CHANGE
Mike Hulme
SPACE
Peter Merriman
HOME, SECOND EDITION
Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
series/KIG
HOME
Second Edition
Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling
Cover image: Casper Laing Ebbensgaard
Second edition published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling
The right of Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling to be identified
as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2006
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blunt, Alison, author. | Dowling, Robyn M., author.
Title: Home / Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling.
Description: Second edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York,
NY: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Key ideas in geography |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021048255 | ISBN 9780367347253 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367347284 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429327360 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Home. | Households. | Housekeeping. |
Dwellings. | Architecture, Domestic.
Classification: LCC GT2420 .B654 2022 | DDC 392.3/6—dc23/
eng/20211029
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048255
ISBN: 978-0-367-34725-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-34728-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-32736-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429327360
Typeset in Joanna
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
FOR EAMON, CLANCY, AND BEA

CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
List of Tables x
List of Boxes xi
List of Research Boxes xiii
Acknowledgements xiv
1 Setting Up Home: An Introduction 1
2 Researching Home 40
3 Residence: House-as-Home 92
4 Home and the City with Olivia Sheringham 141
5 Home, Nation, and Empire 189
6 Home, Migration, and Diaspora 247
7 Leaving Home 309
Index 321
vii
FIGURES
1.1 ‘What does home mean to you?’ Responses from third-year
undergraduate students taking ‘Geographies of Home’ at
Queen Mary University of London in 2020/21 2
1.2 A photograph submitted to the ‘Stay Home’ collecting
project at the Museum of the Home by Lahiru 5
1.3 The Museum of the Home, London 7
1.4 Withdrawn UK coronavirus public information
campaign image 19
1.5 Frontispiece by FC Witney from The Art and Craft of Home-
Making by EW Gregory 22
2.1 Cover of Australian Home Beautiful, April 1946 61
2 .2 Great & Tiny War (publicity image), Bobby Baker, 2018 66
2.3 The Roof Garden Commission: Cornelia Parker, Transitional
Object (Psycho Barn). The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The Iris and B Gerald Cantor Roof Garden,
April 19–October 31, 2016 67
2.4 House by the Railroad, 1925. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) 68
2.5 Divya flipping through her photocopied scripture book 77
2.6 Calligraphic artwork in the living room of a Muslim
participant’s family home 79
3.1 Multiplying the economic significance of house. Expansive
view of newly built houses jammed side by side, 1952 94
3.2 Transnationalising ideals of home in India 106
3.3 Suburban front garden 108
3.4 Semi-detached, John and Ethel Landy, Michael Landy, 2004 109
3.5 Bride standing next to the cocktail bar, 1975 124
3.6 East London teenage bedroom belonging to Freya, aged 15 127
4.1 ‘I Am Here’, Fugitive Images 154
4.2 A balcony banner during lockdown in Barnet, North London 163
viii
FIGURES
4.3 Elektra, Jacqui, Karim, Iona, and Harriet: objects that have
sustained us 165
4.4 Daniel’s view from his flat, Hackney, East London 169
4.5 Emily at home in Hackney, East London 170
4.6 A view on families and apartments 173
4.7 The Sorceress 176
5.1 The Sinews of Old England by George Elgar Hicks 190
5 .2 How the Mutiny Came to English Homes 191
5.3 Mrs Turmeric, the Judge’s Wife, G Atkinson (1859), ‘Curry
and Rice’ on Forty Plates; or, the Ingredients of Social Life at ‘Our Station’ 202
5.4 Colonel and Mrs Cotton at home in India, 1887 203
5.5 Griffith Marsupial, Frank and Pierina Bastianon, Gerrit Fokkema, 1987 214
5.6 God Bless America, Oklahoma, November 2001 219
5.7 A rainy laundry day in 1630, from ‘Swept under the carpet?
Servants in London households, 1600–2000’, Museum of
the Home, London (2016) 234
6.1 ‘English’ landscape aesthetic in Shaughnessy, Vancouver 257
6.2 New housing aesthetic in 1990s Shaughnessy, Vancouver 257
6.3 Parlour at the New York City Tenement Museum, New York 259
6.4 The 1970s room at the Museum of the Home, London,
curated by Michael McMillan 261
6 .5 Globe on the Meridian Line, London 266
6.6 ‘Go home’ van, London, 2013 274
6.7 Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre and the
Lilac compound 281
6.8 Entrance to the Aida Refugee Camp 286
6.9 Luqman Uddin and his family who squatted in
Whitechapel in 1978 291
6.10 Altar to the Kitchen God (Ông Táo) on top of a refrigerator
in a participant’s home 294
6.11 Linh Vu, aged 7 in 1979, standing in front of Baker
Barracks, that served as a refugee camp, on Thorney Island
on the south coast of England 297
ix