Under Construction: How Home-making and Underlying Purchase Motivations Surface in a Housing Building Site

Abstract

Drawing on material geographies of home, this paper argues researching building sites furthers understandings of home-making, purchase motivations and modes of valuing new homes. The building site is examined through semi-structured walking interviews with 21 households living in a master-planned estate (MPE) under construction in southern Sydney. MPEs are a fitting representative for profiling the intricacies of new build housing developments. In these contexts, the duration of the building site persists; this overlaps with early occupation and creates challenges that are expected and unexpected, brief and enduring. Results are presented in two sections. First, sharing space with builders and new neighbours fractures some expectations of an ideal home. Home-making proceeds by accommodating, both emotionally and physically, the challenges of building sites. The second section shows how residents weigh up home-making challenges alongside anticipated financial reward. This reward is always speculative though, and the building site compounds this: residents take a risk at the outset, managing fears and worries that hinge upon the aesthetic expression of others. Building site experiences are both an example and evidence of home as a process. Housing studies should continue to pause at these interstitial moments, towards better grasping the expectations and aspirations of contemporary home-making.     

家政社会化与城市住宅

家政社会化是我国城市家庭生活变化的必然趋势,这一变化改变了城市家庭的生活方式,直接影响到城市住宅的设计与建设,以及未来住宅的发展。该文以家政社会化的发展趋势为出发点,着重从现代家政及其社会化对城市家庭生活的影响,研究由此引发的城市住宅的变化。并在此基础上研究住宅设计与建设的对策,为未来城市住宅设计、建设的可持续发展提供新的思路!     

What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces,the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration

Migrants’ constructions of their domestic spaces, and their struggle to feel at home in both receiving and sending societies, are an emerging focus of research in migration studies. Housing issues are also a privileged observatory on their transnational social engagement, as well as on the changing boundaries of their membership and belonging. This article addresses the everyday bases of their home-making and house-building practices, drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy. What can be inferred from the ways in which migrants inhabit their houses “here”, while typically investing in better housing arrangements “there”, as to their alignment towards either society? What do their housing-related practises suggest about the potential to feel locally and transnationally at home, given the structural constraints they are subject to? By tracing the meanings, enactments and locations of migrants’ home, I aim to advance the debate on home and migration in two respects: the persistent materiality which underlies the home experience, and the significance of migrants’ houses, particularly in sending societies, as a window on the mixed social consequences of migration.     

At home in home care? Contents and boundaries of the ‘domestic’ among immigrant live-in workers in Italy

How ‘at home’, if at all, migrants feel in their everyday lives abroad is a neglected research issue, with meaningful implications for immigrant, social and housing policies. Their employment as live-in care workers with elderly clients is a unique site to address it, as this article aims to do, based on an archive of life histories of immigrant women in Italy. Co-residential domestic work foregrounds migrants’ need for a domestic space of their own, within the place of someone else. Building on immigrant women’s narratives, I explore what senses and dimensions of domesticity, or even of home, are negotiated in their routine interactions with older clients and the latter’s family members. Within a dwelling place which conflates work and domesticity, the cognitive, emotional and practical dimensions of migrants’ gendered home experience are nothing obvious. How is home-making – as a set of practices oriented to pursue security, familiarity and control – enacted under these circumstances? Is the cultivation of a sense of home beneficial to the clients only, or do immigrant women themselves feel at home somehow? Different ‘modes of domesticity’ are discussed, at the intersection between continuous expectations of home-making and discontinuous ways of feeling at home.     

Housing and home-making in low-income urban settlements: Sri Lanka and Colombia

Enabling the making of home is central to the practices of housing, but constructing home is more than building adequate shelter. It is about establishing, nurturing and managing social relationships and bringing together spaces, objects and elements to represent and celebrate desired relationships, events and memories. Drawing on empirical data from Sri Lanka and Colombia, this paper examines in detail the practices of home-making in low-income settlements. By focussing on people’s conceptions of home and by identifying key social and societal practices, the paper offers insights into the processes of home-making among ordinary dwellers in developing countries and calls for culturally sensitive and holistic housing interventions which support and complement these processes.