Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture on ‘The city as home?’ next Tuesday, 17 October (3pm), at Utrecht University – Open Dialogue session, convened by the Open Cities Platform.  The lecture revisits the recent debate on home and homemaking on extra-domestic scales, including the city one, drawing also on the multi-sited qualitative fieldwork of ERC HOMInG. How far the city public space feels like home and is domesticated, to the (dis)advantage of whom, are questions that cut across research in urban, housing, displacement and majority-minority studies. The presentation contributes to this debate in terms of ‘homemaking in the public’, as a way of exploring and comparing the unequal accessibility, visibility and ‘appropriability’ of the public domain. In his lecture, Paolo Boccagni  will argue that the moral and emotional repertoire of home is instrumental to opposite political stances, and that the embodied practices associated with it have to do with place attachment, as much as control and exclusion. The boundaries of home in the public are especially salient whenever outsiders lay some claim over the mainstream space, and the latter turns into a battlefield about who is entitled to stay, feel, belong, and make home there.