Housing, Theory and Society,

Vol. 25, No. 1, 113, 2008

INTRODUCTION

Mental Geographies of Home and Place:

Introduction to the Special Issue
LEEKE REINDERS & MARCO VAN DER LAND
OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands

ABSTRACT Recent years have witnessed a resurgent interest in the study of home and place
across the social sciences. By breaking away from positivistic grand theories, researchers have
developed a heightened sense of the manifold ways people attach themselves to place, inscribe it
with meaning and construct it through discursive acts of imagination. This themed issue sets out
to explore a middle ground perspective on home and place, in which a constructionist approach
is combined with a political economic approach, which also locates home within the wider spheres
of power relations and class conflicts. Shedding a harsh light on a soft topic, a relational
perspective on home and place is formulated in which the subjective and culturalist notion of home
and housing is located within wider social and political-economic structures. The issue thereby
focuses on the theme of the disruption of home, dealing with places where and times when home
sentiments are displaced or disarranged as a consequence of extra-local or external forces.
KEY WORDS: Home, Place identity, Mental geography, Middle ground, Relational approach

In the summer of 2001 home took central stage in Nieuwland, a low income and
mixed-ethnic neighbourhood close to the Dutch city of Rotterdam. Marking the
start of the large-scale regeneration of Nieuwland, the local municipality organized
an evening for local residents. Being part of a re-branding project, which aimed to
revitalize the neighbourhood image and adjust it to the tastes of middle-class
residents from outside, the event showcased the rhetoric that usually surrounds
urban regeneration. A documentary video of this event, broadcasted at a local
television station, shows Karin, the managing director of the housing corporation,
making an uplifting speech and Peter, the city councillor, cutting a large cake,
topped with the new marzipan neighbourhood logo. The film then cuts to a large,
softly lit room of people. In the middle of the room a platform is set up, spotlighting
a Victorian styled chair with blue cushioning, its arms and back painted in glistening
Correspondence Address: Leeke Reinders & Marco van der Land, OTB Research Institute for Housing,
Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 9, 2628 BX Delft, The
Netherlands. Tel.: +31 (0)152783783; Email: L.G.A.J.Reinders@tudelft.nl and M.vanderLand@tudelft.nl
1403-6096 Print/1651-2278 Online/08/01000113 # 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14036090601150998

L. Reinders & M. van der Land

gold. The chair sets the stage for residents to speak about the early years of
Nieuwland and how life used to be when they grew up there. Two older women, Ati
and Liesbeth, recall their memories of neighbourhood life in the 1960s, when the
local baker and waste food collector used to come by every week and children could
play freely on the newly built asphalt roads. Jamila, a Turkish woman, recalls an
incident when during a bus ride she got lost in a disorienting environment of straight
roads and tall apartment buildings. And Jan tells a troubled story of the closing of
two billiard clubs in the neighbourhood, which forces him to play in a club located in
strange territory. Nieuwland certainly means home to them, but the exact meanings
of home have changed continuously during their lives and will continue to do so
when their neighbourhood is subjected to restructuring again.
With the advent of cultural, social, linguistic and post-modern turns and the more
frequent use of qualitative approaches across the social sciences (Jacobs 1993), the
field of housing studies has in recent years witnessed something of a paradigm shift.
Breaking away from positivistic grand theories and the master discourse of political
economy, researchers increasingly show a growing awareness of the manifold ways
in which the notion of housing is inscribed with meaning and discursively
constructed through acts of discourse, imagery, identity politics and symbolic
representation. This themed issue follows such a social constructionist paradigm
(Jacobs & Manzi 1996, Gurney 1999, Hastings 2000, Clapham 2002), which
understands people as playing an active role in the discursive creation of commonsense worlds and in the creation, sharing and negotiating of social and cultural
knowledge, perception and meaning in and through daily interactions of speech, text
and ritual, without losing sight of political economy. It uses a multidisciplinary
approach to the concept of home-places, until now rarely used (Mallet 2004), in
which a social-psychological and phenomenological concept of home is informed by
sociological theory and the anthropology of space. Such an inter-disciplinary
perspective has its pitfalls. After all, academics work within separate communities of
speech and practice, each with their own key thinkers, congresses, journals,
institutions and research traditions. Geographical, psychological, anthropological
and sociological studies of home, in this respect, still are very much caught within
their respective frames of scholarly minds. For example, social psychologists mainly
study individualistic dimensions of place identity and often do not include the
cultural notions and social and discursive practices in which home is framed and
constructed. On the other hand, sociologists often do not use their sociological tools
to explore human perceptions and emotions. There is still a void in sociology when it
comes to analysing how people understand their social and spatial surroundings (cf.
Dickens 1990). However, it is exactly within the crossing of disciplinary boundaries
that a fruitful approach to home-places can be found.
To combine questions on the individual attachment, collective sharing and
construction and political embeddedness of home in wider structures of power, a
mental geography of home is in need of a multidimensional venture, mixing elements
from sociology, social, environmental and community psychology, social geography
and the anthropology of space. It should, however, first and foremost have social
relations as its starting point of analysis. This introduction therefore sets out to
formulate a middle ground perspective, in which a constructionist approach
(emphasizing the social construction of reality) is combined with a political economic

Mental Geographies of Home and Place

approach, which locates home also within the wider spheres of power relations and
class conflicts. Shedding such a harsh light on a soft topic, a relational perspective on
the mental geography of home is formulated in which the subjective and culturalist
notion of home is located within wider social and political-economic structures. This
issue thereby focuses on the theme of the disruption of home, dealing with places
where and times when home sentiments are disrupted or disarranged as a
consequence of external forces. We end this paper with a short introduction to the
four contributions to this themed issue, which in different ways deal with these
disruptive mental geographies of home and place.
Locating Home In Middle Ground
This themed issue grew out of a conference on the mental geography of residential
environments, held on 14 and 15 October 2005 at the OTB Research Institute in
Delft. Bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars, the conference
intended to contribute to the building of theoretical concepts and the empirical
understanding of the way mental aspects of the relationship between people and their
residential environment inform the use and appreciation of home-places. We stated
that as much as it is what people do that shapes places, it is what people think and
feel about their social and physical environment that can have a strong effect on how
places develop. These mental geographies as we preferred to call them, inform the
motivations and attitudes of residents, potential residents, architects, real-estate
owners and developers, storekeepers, passers-by and policymakers. We claimed that
mental geographies occur in the minds of people, but also include collective
constructs. The conferences discussions and presentations learned that a distinction
between shaping place by doing or by thinking, and between individual and
collective construction of mental geographies, is not as clear-cut and is more complex
than we were initially aware. Another important insight was that mental geographies
happen in a wider political and economic context. This themed issue elaborates on
these two particular insights.
Discussions on home, alongside other soft themes, such as identity, nostalgia
and memory, are marked by the narrative of loss (Arefi 1999) often associated with
processes of social-spatial fragmentation of western cities, which became apparent in
the post-war period. As several authors claim, in modern societies the authentic and
spatial bound experience has been lost (Webber 1964, Relph 1976). According to this
widely held view, the increased prosperity and mobility of large segments of society
has led to more complex and flexible social structures. Furthermore, developments in
the means of transport and telecommunication are seen as contributing to a
decreased attachment of individuals to physical spaces and leading, on a wider scale
level, to processes of de- and re-territorialization (Morley 2001). Referring to the
decreased importance of place as identity carrier, the process of de-spatialization
is traced not only in the changed orientations of many contemporary global
travellers, but also in the urban landscape itself. Some contemporary cityscapes in
this sense have been described as a generic city, composed of what is conceived of
as uniform and exchangeable non-places, such as airports, shopping malls and
fast-food restaurants (Auge 1995). The notion of place identity also frequently turns
up in discussions about areas believed to be in a critical period of threat, uncertainty

L. Reinders & M. van der Land

and reorientation with regard to their physical and social environments or in the
realm of ideas. Whether it concerns questions on the character of the nation-state in
the process of European integration, the profiling of regional identities under threat
from processes of urbanization and suburbanization, or the large-scale restructuring
of post-war housing areas, such as Nieuwland; each case is an example of spatial
entities going through a process of severe transformation. What home is about and
what home means are questions, which should therefore be explored within the
context of social and spatial fragmentation and uncertainty. Threat, uncertainty and
reorientation stimulate people to utter personal associations with a place and to look
for old certainties marked by memories or objects of nostalgia (cf. Buttimer 1980b).
Phenomenologists understand home as a concept denoting order, permanence and
identity. Following the Indo-European notion of kei, meaning something
precious, from which the German word for home (Heim) is derived (cf. Mallet
2004), home is generally seen as a private, safe and familiar space, a haven or shelter,
where people find an opportunity to relax and retreat from public surveillance.
Attachment to the precious home-place in this sense has many characteristics of a
primordial sentiment (Fried 2000), created by the familiarity of daily routines, role
places (the regular settings for activities and interactions) and important others (the
in-group as an extension of home and family). Here, home is basically referred to as
a special kind of place, more significant for an individual than any other place, and
one within which an individual or social group experiences strong social,
psychological and emotional attachments (cf. Easthope 2004:136). Although
Coates and Fordham (2000) rightly claim that home cannot be seen in isolation;
it is at the centre of a complex web of social networks and access to essential
services, this should not be taken to mean that home is only, or even necessarily, a
house. It should not even be seen as necessarily attached to a particular geographical
space. Home often stretches beyond the residential environment and can connect
with both functional as well as affective relations in other settings than the place
where people actually reside. Thus, whether seen as a virtual space (Mallet 2004), a
mystic place (Chamberlain 2001), a sacred structure (Manzo 2003), a verbal
environment (Wirth-Nesher 2001) or an imagined community (Anderson 1983),
home can be manifest in different domains and at different levels of scale (Cuba &
Hummon 1993). For example, the notion of the casita as a metaphor of home used
among Puerto Ricans in New York, relates both to the domestic dwelling space and
the national homeland. Sciorra (1996) describes the building of a casita as a
concertive action of collective reminiscences, a politicization of memory that
distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of
useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the
present (hooks, quoted in Sciorra 1996:78).
Seen as a shelter and protection against external influences, the notion of home, as
Setha Low and Peter King show in their contributions to this issue, can be
threatened. In a modern sense home is often seen as a phantasmagorical space in
which the far away infiltrates the domestic sphere. () the far away is now
irredeemably mixed in with the space of the near, writes Morley, as processes of
migration and of media representation bring actual and virtual forms of alterity into
jealously guarded home territories of various sorts (2001:428). Neighbours can
become strangers and home can be found in far away places or far flung times. In the

Mental Geographies of Home and Place

same way that people can be rooted and feel they belong to a place, they can also
be uprooted and have a sense of non-belonging (Godkin 1980). Human
identification with places therefore relates both in a positive and negative sense to
the ways people create distinction, continuity and self-esteem (Twigger-Ross &
Uzzell 1996). Home-places also need to be seen in relation to the intermingled
notions of movement and settlement, permanence and stability (Pascual-de-Sans
2004:350). Home-places thus can be ridden with tension, often produced in a
dialectic between what belongs to the home-place and what does not, what is
mentally near and what is mentally distant, what feels like inside and what feels
like outside, who we call we and who we call others. This also means that
home-places are by definition constituted by the fact that they exist in relation to
other people and places. As King (2004) notes, home-places are porous and receptive
to external influences. Following or anticipating these feelings of intrusion and
estrangement, people may take refuge in their homes, be they common dwellings,
gated communities or other regressive forms of closure (Low 2004).
As a dialectic between permanency and movement and between inside and outside,
a discursive approach needs to incorporate wider structural forces that impinge on
feelings of comfort and security traditionally associated with the home-place.
Questions on how social beings perceive space, use it and inscribe it with meaning
cannot be separated from the structuring networks of property relations, market
forces, class struggle and forces of production (Madanipour, Healey & Hull 2001).
This themed issue therefore aims to shed a harsh light on a soft topic, in which soft
questions on the attachment to and meaning of home-places are related to hard
insights about their social construction and material effects. The sociology of homeplaces requires the combination of a focus on meaning and the mediation of
differences with a rather more straightforward analysis of the political and economic
conditions in which home-places exist. Such a middle ground perspective assumes
a coherence between material and symbolic landscapes that is communicated
through the cultural meanings of specific places (Zukin et al. 1998:650, see also
Zukin 1995 and Kalb & Van der Land 2000). Riley (in Manzo 2003:55) rightly claims
that no matter how complex the interior response to the landscape, the landscape
remains a social and political fact it is an external landscape of broader
implications. Home is as much about how we belong to a place, as it is about how
we legitimate practices, about ideology and power and about who we are and who
are the others. A middle ground perspective is useful because it relates social
processes of identity formation with the structural schemes in which individuals and
social groups are embedded (Mele 2000, Eade & Mele 2002). Transcending
conventional distinctions between the realms of the political and the everyday, the
economic and the cultural, it acknowledges the complex ways in which home-places
are socially constructed and culturally encoded, while also relating these discursive
practices to the material conditions in which they take place (see McCann 2002).
Next to striking a middle ground between a culturalist and political-economic
concept of home, this themed issue also wants to approach home-places from a
relational point of view. In recent years sociologists and anthropologists have begun
to focus on space and place as integral elements of social structures and practices.
The so-called spatial turn in sociology (cf. Orum 1998) entails the understanding
that places are not just settings in which people act and operate, but intricately

L. Reinders & M. van der Land

connect with the development of personal and group identities. Because people
inscribe it with meaning, possess and occupy it, derive social status and identity from
it, space is understood as having symbolic value. All social and cultural activity is
located in places, and places are an integral element in the social production of
identity. As Harris and Lipman write:
Social interaction involves the exchange of meanings that have been attributed
to people, to their actions, and to the physical setting in which they occur
People do not simply react to their physical environments; they endow them
with meaning, they interpret and change them. And the manners in which they
do so are not independent of their social relations. These relations do not
occur, as it were, outside of the physical world. That is, the particular manmade physical settings in which social interaction tends to occur are not mere
containers of social action; they embody socially constructed meanings (Harris
& Lipman 1980:417418).
Shared concepts of space and place result from collective systems of representation and signification, such as values, norms and social codes. These manifest
themselves in and through public discourses (Strauss 1970, Wohl & Strauss 1958)
and discursive units such as heritage narratives, ideographs, typifications,
characterizations and rhetoric (Bridger 1996). In reaction to the Carthesian view
in which space is seen as absolute, rigid and unproblematic, researchers increasingly
shift attention from the material and physical environment to the representation,
interpretation, narrative construction and cultural encoding of place. Places, for
example, are thereby increasingly seen as narrative constructions. As Donald writes,
space is less the already existing setting for such stories, than the production of
space through that taking place, through the act of narration (1997:183). Through
narratives, e.g. about their residential career, people present themselves, connect past
and present, self and other in relation to the environment (Mason 2004, cf. Leach
2002). Several authors have also used walking as a narrative practice through which
socially shared spaces are constructed (de Certeau 1997, for recent examples see
Secor 2004, Richardson 2005, Von Hassell 1998). More recently the social
construction of place is related to linguistic processes by which people negotiate
meaning through language. For example, discourse analyses emphasize the
correlation between material reality and the language used to represent it (within
housing research see Jacobs & Manzi 1996, Gurney 1999, Hasting 1999, 2000).
Focussing on the continuous construction of environmental knowledge instead of its
static distribution, discourses point us to the social strategies and practices in which
places are framed and constructed. Martin (2003) uses collective-action framing as
a concept for describing common spatial experiences by which people imagine an
ideal and future neighbourhood.
In this special issue we want to confirm the views of other authors who claim that
subjective notions of home can be studied in the visible and audible world of social
interactions and relations, rather than in the impenetrable realm of personal and
individual feelings. We wholeheartedly agree with Dixon and Durrheims claim that
we should relocate place identity by removing it from the mind and returning it to
the face of human dialogue:

Mental Geographies of Home and Place

It thereby reconstitutes place-identity as something that people create together

through talk: a social construction that allows them to make sense of their
connectivity to place and to guide their actions and projects accordingly Not
only does it acknowledge the relevance of places to their collective senses of
self, but it also highlights the collective practices through which specific place
identities are formed, reproduced and modified (Dixon & Durrheim 2000:32).
Such a discursive approach might, to a certain extent, solve the dilemma of the
concept of home as being locked in private perceptions, which are so hard to
pinpoint because of their diffuse character (Lowenthal 1972). Relating class, social
networks and space, Blokland (2001) sees places not only as articulations of social
relations but also as means by which people are able to create, renew and restructure
those relationships through public representations, local myths and interactions in
meeting places. As Imrie, Pinch and Boyle (1996) write, places are very much
constitutive of social life not reflective of them. With regard to, for example, the
creation of home by Vietnamese Americans in an ethnic enclave in California,
Mazumdar, Mazumdar, Docuyanan and McLaughlin (2000) identified a community of memory, in which migrants as a social group strive to create a kind of
continuity through architecture and the built environment. Little Saigon functions as
a substitute of home in Vietnam, whereby migrants are able to deal with and express
feelings of loss. A relational perspective thus draws attention to the inherently social
nature of home-making. It points us to collective acts of homing and the dialectic
relationship between people and places.
Disruption of Home
Home arises from the dialectic between permanency and movement, staying and
leaving. Almost by definition home is produced in the interplay between the routines
of daily life (continuity) and changes that threaten it (discontinuity). As Mallet notes,
homes always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive and
those who leave There is movement and dislocation within the very forming of
homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance (2004:79). Places not only
are, so to speak, they happen and gather, as Casey writes (1996:25), i.e. they
gather animate and inanimate entities in their midst, as well as experiences, histories,
languages and thoughts. That is why people experience it as the same place. A place
is generative and regenerative on its own schedule (Casey 1996). Gathering is
inherent to place and manifests itself in both continuous and discontinuous elements.
The difference between both lies in the degree to which events could to a certain
extent be foreseen or fit a local path of development. Disruption or discontinuity in
that development is the result of sudden changes in the social or physical domain or
within the world of thoughts and imagination (Buttimer 1980a).
Periods of intense change can enhance strong feelings of belonging as well as
disbelonging. On the one hand the narration, recollection and glorification of place
identity surfaces especially in times of stress (cf. Buttimer 1980a). Disruption of
home, however, can also mean that the present place has suddenly lost its function of
a stronghold. In such circumstances people lose, as Borer (2006:192) writes, both
a link to a past experienced as meaningful and a link to a future imagined as

L. Reinders & M. van der Land

potentially meaningful. Strong place attachments also result in stronger feelings of

loss when disrupted. Furthermore, disasters, such as an earthquake (Coates &
Fordham 2000), a war (Nagel 2002) or a terror attack (Low, Taplin & Lamb 2005)
expose feelings of being lost and reveal social networks and senses of privacy and
belonging otherwise hidden from view. The degree to which place attachment is
interwoven with place identity is important for the degree in which changes in places
have strong psychological effects (Fried 2000). Place attachment can also lead to
extreme forms of territorial commitment involving, for example, hostile strategies of
hegemonic control and surveillance. The geographical displacements following the
disruption of home are major intrusions in the routines of individuals and, as Fried
(2000:194) writes, among the most serious forms of externally-imposed psychological disruptions and discontinuities. Those who experience great changes in their
residential environment adapt either by moving or by staying. For those who stay
this can entail ignoring or (aiding to) removing certain dissatisfiers, which thereby
conceals a tolerance, an adjustment to inevitable inadequacies (Fried 2000:199).
Discontinuity which resulted at first in a disruption of home can in the long run
become accepted as belonging to home: most people manage to acclimate
themselves and even appear satisfied with conditions they may have considered
intolerable only shortly before (Fried 2000).
The degree to which one succeeds in doing so depends partly on socioeconomic circumstances. Disruptions in the physical or social environment seem
to hit those with few means the hardest. Because of restricted means and few
alternative options, for some social groups such as elderly people, low-income
households, home often means a fixed geographically delineated place.
Displacement or changes in the social and physical environment have most
impact on them, as they cannot move, while others can and do. For example, in
many urban neighbourhoods a steady influx of migrants has resulted in social
problems. Established residents have often been evaluating the influx of (other)
immigrants into the neighbourhood negatively (Elias & Scotson 1965). Reactions
of established residents towards the influx of migrants affect the way newcomers
to the area experience their (new) residential situation. Neighbourhoods do not
become decayed because migrants in lower social class positions have arrived, but
because of the residential strategies both established residents and newcomers
develop, which include the ways they deal with neighbourhood issues and which
affect the quality of life in the neighbourhood. When established residents react
by creating strong in-group boundaries and use practices of exclusion in daily life,
access to resources and amenities in the neighbourhood (social capital) become
closed off to newcomers (cf. Portes 1998). Not the way established residents as
such react towards the settling down of migrants, but the dialectic relations
within and between the two social groups affect the way in which the
neighbourhood will (still) be perceived as a home-place.
No less important in this example is the influence that opinion makers, politicians
and other public figures exert on both feelings of home and the social behaviour that
transforms concomitant cognitions and emotions. As Tilly (1998) rightly claims,
individuals, groups and societies are no self-propelling essences and as such homeplaces too are embedded in structures which influence the way places develop. This
again is a dynamic two-way process. Changes occur as a result of acts of social

Mental Geographies of Home and Place

construction by those who make use of places as their home, as well as individual
and collective actions by those for whom the place has no such connotations. Places
are no bounded wholes, but should be seen as open nodal points within a larger set
of interacting systems (Easthope 2004:129). The faraway can penetrate the home
(Morley 2001), the more so to the extent in which a place is integrated in global flows
of capital, people, ideas and images. Home sentiments are not only the product of
such global restructuring processes, but also result from the possible responses a
population can conceive and articulate (Kalb & van der Land 2000:276).
Themed Issue
Through the re-migration of young adults returning from the cities in the North of
Ghana (Cassiman), the secession and fencing off of home-places in Americas gated
communities (Low), the emulation of neighbourhood stigma in a deprived American
neighbourhood (Blokland) and the alternative ways of finding home in a different
time-space constellation (King), each of the four contributions to this issue touches
upon the theme of disruption of home.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among the Kasena of Ghana, Ann Cassiman
highlights the role of migration from the homelands to the city and the meaning of
migrating and re-migrating young Kasena men and, increasingly, women for those
who stay behind. She compares the young urban migrants to the hunters of the
traditional Kasena, as they create new modes of being-in-the-world, and as such
domesticate the outside world and change the meaning of home. Migration
patterns are materially represented in the village migrants once migrated from the
use of modern materials from which their houses are built and by other mutations
from domestic architecture, and also by artefacts brought home from the city
exposed in the realm of the house. The homes of returned migrants, however, are no
real homes as they are not part of the ancestry, i.e. they have no fundaments in the
history of the Kasena. It is in the interaction between those who leave (and return)
and those who stay behind that home gets disrupted. Cassiman hereby explains an
unusual view of the local in the global. She does not conceive of globalization as a
unilateral force to which locals adapts, but rather understands migration to the city
(and therefore to the global world) as something that brings the world and
modernity into the home-place itself, thus effecting the essence of dwelling and
home. Cassiman therefore states that home can only be created out of the interplay
between, on the one hand, being seated or dwelling in oriented space, and on the
other hand, a hunt or quest into the unpredictable, unknown and globalized
worlds. Here home is not so much seen in opposition to the outside world, but as a
product of active individuals in relation to others from outside. Cassimans
concept of the material production of home-places very much relates to a social
constructionist perspective, in which places are not understood as something pregiven, but are rather seen as an integral element of social interaction.
As important as it is for Kasenas young migrants to return to their village from
the city with proof of material success, for the inhabitants of The Ghetto, or the
G in Talja Bloklands field study she reports about in this issue, it is seen as a failure
to stay in the neighbourhood and not be able to move up and move out. Only
failures would consider the ghetto a home-place. By emulating the negative way the

10

L. Reinders & M. van der Land

neighbourhood is conceived of by other urban dwellers and the authorities, people

who actually live in the area thereby contribute to the stigmatization of the area. The
G is morally rejected: residents do not care about their own neighbourhood; they live
there only temporarily, most of them feel they are deviants who do not earn our
respect. Blokland shows what a relational perspective teaches us about how such
perceptions of home come about. The emotions and cognitions attached to homeplaces and the disruption of home are seen as the product of social relations. In order
to learn about home, individuals should be described along the trajectory of change
(Fried 2000:198), looking closely at the continuities and discontinuities of their life
course, including the dynamics of daily social relations and transactions.
Neighbourhood stigmatization and emulation of the neighbourhood are distinctive
patterns of what Blokland calls relational place-making, including the way social
relations have developed throughout history, the complexity of social networks and
the resulting fact that there are no clear subgroups and clearly delineated goals as to
what the neighbourhood as home-place should be like. Place-making is thereby not
seen as the end result of fixed relationships, but rather as an intermediate element in
the continuous creation and renewal of social relations.
Although Cassiman touches upon the forces of globalization, which serve as a
context in which migration takes place, Setha Lows contribution shows how the
psychological spin-off of political economic relations can be of major importance for
the creation of home. Whereas home up until the 19th century mainly meant the
possibility of a safe retreat, this re-active meaning was gradually surpassed by a proactive and often idealized meaning of home as a mystical and sacred, warm and
comfortable space. However, Low shows us the contradictory movement of a rapid
expansion of gated communities for both well-to-do and low-income households,
resulting from transformations in social, economic and political conditions. These
produce new structures of feeling in which fear of others and widespread feelings
of anxiety and paranoia serve as the psychological base upon which local
environments get disrupted. The fortified castles of the dark ages are being
reinterpreted in the shape of modern living communities with gates and high security
levels. These residents create safe and comfortable homes in reaction to their feelings
of fear, anxiety and paranoia, which in turn are sustained by societal and political
forces and which dominate conversations in public and private life.
In contrast to the other three contributions, Peter King in his contribution looks
for home exactly outside the here and the now. What, he asks us, if the place we are
in the midst of is different from the physical space that we currently inhabit? He
stresses the importance of memory in order to regain a sense of home that has got
lost. This particular discontinuity between feeling home and the present physical
time and place, i.e. being in exile, is probably the most clear-cut form of disruption in
the four contributions. In his analysis of Mirror, a film by the Russian filmmaker
Tarkovsky, King shows us what Low in her contribution calls the pro-active
perspective of home. Instead of using the notion of ontological security, King prefers
to speak of protected intimacy, stressing the relational aspect of home as a place
where we can be with others. The ontological aspect of home (security) is not
enough: home is made out of social relations. Both these social relations which
support a place, as well as the relations of power in which that place is embedded,

Mental Geographies of Home and Place

11

create the two fundamental themes on which a mental geography of home-places

could be built.
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