Time, Place and Home: Exploring Meanings of Home in Vancouver

Abstract

Building on recent studies emphasizing how structural and contextual forces shape notions of home, I explore how the experience of home is related to the concepts of time and place. Using 46 interviews with 23 individuals, I investigate how home is defined and experienced by younger and older adults in relationship to Vancouver's particular cultural, geographic, and historical contexts. I find three main ways in which respondents established a sense of home in a city concomitantly known for its livability and unaffordability: the stepping‐stone home (a future‐oriented sense of home), the despatialized home (a present‐oriented sense of home), and the extended home in time (a past‐oriented perspective) and in place (a sense of home extended onto the natural environment). My study contributes toward comprehensive understandings of home with new empirical material showing how a taken‐for‐granted experience results from an interplay between structural, contextual, and individual factors.

A home made of wood: Consumer experiences of wooden building materials

“…The home is an integral part of human life and everyday experiences. Home refers to a private (Vanzella‐Yang, 2019) and physical place that provides shelter, psychological comfort and familiarity (Scott, 2009). Home is also a commodity and it carries economic value, especially for those who invest financial resources into their own apartment or a house.…”

International Students and Homemaking in Transition: Locating Home on the Threshold between Ascription and Achievement

“…At the same time, leaving the family house is a foundational step for the subsequent housing pathways, whereby home is "subject to a lifetime cycle of reinventions in different locations" (Cieraad 2010: 99). Time and space can be used as analytical dimensions to reconstruct how people imagine, experience and project home (Vanzella-Yang 2019). This is precisely what Kenyon (1999) did in a study of the experience of home in the liminal space between college and parental house.…”

“…The ways of dwelling in transition of international students have much to say for research on the temporalities of home: how the time spent in a place and the prospects to stay there, or the lack thereof, affect the forms and reach of homemaking (Boccagni 2017;Vanzella-Yang 2019). In a country like Italy, in which the university-to-work transition is strongly constrained by credential inflation and intellectual unemployment (Assirelli et al 2019), international students have limited opportunities for long-term settlement.…”

Understanding the Divergent Logics of Landlords: Circumstantial versus Deliberate Pathways

“…Another potentially important factor stems from a North American culture that imbues special meaning onto homeownership (Besbris 2016; McCabe 2012; Vanzella‐Yang 2019). Individuals who previously lived in houses they rent out might attach complex meanings to those properties.…”