Open Dialogue Session 4: The city as home? Ways, prospects and dilemmas of homemaking in the public

The Open Cities Platform kindly invites you to come to the Open Dialogue Session. In this session, prof. Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento) will address the topic of 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 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.

Different conceptions of home articulate, and reproduce, contrasting ways of seeing and managing urban diversity. Questions of domopolitics,space thresholding and multiscalarity of home are worth revisiting accordingly.

In this session, prof. 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.

Dr Ilse van Liempt will be the discussant during this session and will respond to the talk of prof. Paolo Boccagni. Dr. Ilse van Liempt is Associate Professor in Urban Geography in the Human Geography Department, research leader of the UU wide Focus Area Migration and Societal Change and coordinator of the Research Master Global Urban Transformations.