We’re going to begin this lesson with an exercise. Get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, or pull up a new document where you can make some notes before you read the prompt. Your answers will be incorporated into the discussion for this week.
Exercise
Part 1:
When you hear the word home, what immediately comes to mind? Don’t think about it; just write down the first five things that come to mind. These can be words, phrases, descriptions of mental images, memories, etc. — whatever comes to mind when you hear the word “home.”
Part 2:
Review the list that you made. Do you notice any patterns in how you think about home? What overall qualities do you ascribe to it, based on your list?
Traditionally, home is presented as 1) a place, that is 2) safe, 3) secure, and 4) a space of belonging. In the United States, it’s an image we see throughout both folk and popular culture. For example, the song “Home, Sweet Home” begins:
Ads from organizations such as the National Association of Realtors and mortgage lenders regularly rely on similar visions of home, such as this ad from Citi (see video below), which is aimed at Black Americans, who historically have lower rates of homeownership than White Americans (Collins & Margo, 2011); the gap between Black and White homeownership is currently the widest it has been in fifty years (Choi, 2020).
Your own home — it’s more than just a house.
It’s a kitchen that’s been passed down, along with the recipes.
Three generations on the wall, with room to grow.
The rhythm of home — the smells, the sounds, the flow.
The feeling of owning a home is not black or white.
Citi is working across our business to make home ownership a reality for more Black Americans.
The idea of home as a familiar and comfortable place associated with family was a major theme for humanistic geographers working in the 1970s. Drawing on phenomenology (a branch of philosophy), they worked on the assumption that home is not just emotionally significant, but also a starting point or focal point for everyday life. This passage from Ted Relph’s book Place and Placelessness provides a clear example of this line of thought:
A passage from Yi-Fu Tuan’s landmark book Space and Place shows this conceptualization of home in action:
Return now to the list you made for the exercise above. Do the ideas of Relph and Tuan resonate with your own? For some of you, perhaps they do; for others perhaps they don’t. As we will see in the next section, geographers in the 1990s and 2000s started to question this approach to home.
References
Choi, J. H. (2020, February 21). Breaking down the Black-White homeownership gap. Urban Wire.
Collins, W. J, and Margo, R. A. (2011). Race and home ownership from the end of the Civil War to the present. The American Economic Review, 101(3), 355-359.
Relph, T. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.