Home-city geographies: Urban dwelling and mobility

Abstract

Developing an agenda to conceptualise the connections between the domestic and the urban, this paper focuses on urban domesticities (homemaking in the city), domestic urbanism (the city as home) and the home-city geographies that connect them. Home-city geographies examine the interplay between lived experiences of urban homes and the contested domestication of urban space. Reflecting the ways in which urban homes and the ability to feel at home in the city are shaped by different migrations and mobilities, the paper demonstrates that not only home and the city, but also urban dwelling and mobility, are intertwined rather than separate.

Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research

“…Also exploring walking, Kullman () considers pavements as a lively urban infrastructure that are provocative of urban care for the children and dogs that navigate Helsinki. In Blunt and Sheringham's (, p. 11) work on home–city geographies, understanding “home and the city as integral and overlapping spheres” can provide a fruitful alternative conceptual pathway for mobile urban care research. Perhaps, train journeys, bus trips, taxi rides, or cycling may be made visible by researchers seeking to explore the ways forms of public, shared, or active transportation become infrastructures of care in the city, caring for human and non‐human others, occupying urban worlds, and enabling the possibility of caring practice (see Kullman, , on pavements and Power & Mee, 2019, on infrastructures of care).…”

The lived experience of COVID-19: housing and household resilience

“…Geographers have previously expanded the meanings and boundaries of 'home' to include the wider neighbourhood and city (Blunt and Sheringham 2019). However, in the current pandemic and lockdown, the domestic sphere has become the prime site for practices, including those that may have previously been performed in the urban domain.…”

The “living of time”: Entangled temporalities of home and the city

“…Other scholars have explored how urban public life has been either eroded (Atkinson, 2003; Zukin, 2010) or reimagined (Koch & Latham, 2013) through processes of “domestication.” As Amin writes, it is “[b]ecause of the domestication of time by the routines and structures of public space … [that citizens develop] an urban capacity to negotiate complexity” (2008, p. 12; also see Sennett, 2018). Moving beyond the metaphorical “domestication” of urban time and space, we foreground home on domestic and wider urban scales, encompassing the connections between urban domesticities and domestic urbanism that constitute a “home‐city geography” (Blunt & Sheringham, 2018). Inspired by “assemblage thinking” that “points us towards a range of intersecting temporalities, as well as the open multiplicity of urbanisms inherent to the city” (Dittmer, 2014; also see McFarlane, 2011), we focus on the entangled temporalities of home and the city to understand “the living of time” for urban residents.…”

“…Through its interweaving of temporal and spatial scales, Estate captures the multi‐layered yet deeply interconnected temporalities of home and city lives that are the focus of this paper. The film powerfully reminds us not only of the domestic lives of urban residents whose (hi)stories are largely absent from wider narratives of change in the city (Blunt & Sheringham, 2018) but also of the enduring presence of the past in the fabric of the urban landscape and in the lives and stories of those who inhabit it (also see, for example, Terence Davies’ elegiac film to Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, Of time and the city , 2008). Estate draws attention to the “dynamic simultaneity” (Massey, 2005) of space, in this case a London housing estate in a diverse neighbourhood, and the multiple “time zones at work” – different generations, stories, memories, and future ideals – all “brushing, blurring, merging and shifting with and against each other” (Zimmerman, 2015c, n.p.…”