This working paper investigates homemaking and home-related feelings and claims at the roots of majority-minority relations in the public urban domain. Who is entitled and legitimated to claim a public space as “home” under circumstances of deep and multifaceted diversity? What does this imply for inter-group relations and categorizations? Such questions call for original and comparative analysis across ethnic, urban and housing studies. While the notion of home has traditionally been understood as a private and domestic matter, it also has a major public significance – it “scales up”, as a matter of (public) space-related emotions, practices, and claims. In this perspective, home works out as a discursive and emotional resource for contentious politics around several divides, including (but not limited to) the one between natives, or long-term residents, and immigrants and their descendants. Several forms of domestication of the public sphere, of mutual interaction between the public and private life realm, and of claims-making between groups can be fruitfully revisited along these lines. A research agenda on the ways of framing, feeling and claiming public space as home is advanced accordingly.
HOMInG: THE HOME-MIGRATION NEXUS 