‘Moving past the front stoop’: critical geographies of home

All that is discussed and analysed throughout this book can be traced back to one word: home. Bringing Home the Housing Crisis is fundamentally about our relationship with home, who is portrayed as deserving of it, what happens when it is taken away from us, and how we fight back in order to regain it. Although now a growing sub-discipline, particularly within human geography, it has only been in the past two decades or so that the key social and political roles of the home have begun to be taken seriously by academics.

Much academic work has focused on the home in relation to belonging, comfort and material culture (Manzo 2003). There exists an extensive and ever-growing body of literature that explores the nature and nuances of people's emotional relationships to the homespace (see for example, Miller 2001; 2008; Blunt and Varley 2004; Burrell 2014). This includes literature focusing on senses of place, place attachment and place identity. Within this work, the home is usually understood as an intrinsically positive site. This was particularly true up until the mid-1990s, with scholars such as the sociologist Peter Saunders for example insisting that there were no gendered divisions or tensions within the confines of the home. Based on a household survey (whose participants were exclusively middle-class) he asserted that there are no differences in the way men and women view meanings of home (Saunders 1988). The sociologist Peter Somerville, in a similar vein, produced a supposedly objective set of signifiers of home in the early 1990s, consisting of: shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and paradise (Somerville 1992).

Such attempts to quantify home and its meanings hugely oversimplified the complex relationship people have with it, in particular overlooking negative aspects of home – for example, as a site of women's oppression or domestic violence (Blunt and Dowling 2006). Such unchallenged associations of home equalling comfort led feminist scholars to critique this somewhat benign approach (Sibley 1995).