Paolo Boccagni will give a lecture at MiReKoc‘s Summer School on Urban Migration Governance in Istanbul, next 5 June. The school is part of the larger European BROAD-ER project. Paolo’s lecture will be about The city as home? Ways, prospects and dilemmas of homemaking in the public.

This 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 lecture 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 and of different portions of it, including those for leisure, consumption, and religious practice. As I aim to illustrate, the moral and emotional repertoire of home is instrumental to opposite political stances, and 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.