The Dictionary of Human Geography (93 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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An emotive place and spatial imagin ary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider DIE ZENTRALEN ORTE IN DEN OSTGEBIETEN UND IHRE KULTUR- UND MARKTBEREICHE (NEW PARAGRAPH) HAUPTDORF 600 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GEHOBENES HAUPTDORF 1200 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) AMTSSTADTCHEN 3000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GEHOBENE AMTSSTADT (HEUTIGE KREISSTADT) 9000 EINW. KREISSTADT 30 000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GEHOBENE KREISSTADT 100 000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GAUHAUPTSTADT 450,000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GRUPPENDORFGRENZE GEBIET: 2500 EINW. AMTSBEZIRKGRENZE GEBIET: 22 500 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) KREISGRENZE GEBIET: 210 000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) GAUGRENZE GEBIET: 2 700 000 EINW. (NEW PARAGRAPH) NEUGR?NDUNG (NEW PARAGRAPH) ENTWICKELN AUF TYPISCHE GR?SSE ABWERTEN AUF TYPISCHE GR?SSE (NEW PARAGRAPH) holocaust 2: Central place theory and the Generalplan Ost (NEW PARAGRAPH) sense of being and belonging in the world. As a space of belonging and aLienation, intimacy and vioLence, desire and fear, the home is invested with emotions, experiences, practices and relationships that lie at the heart of human life (see emotionaL geographies). Geographies of home span memory and (NEW PARAGRAPH) nostalgia for the past, everyday Life in the present, and future dreams and fears, and are imagined and materialized on scales from the domestic to the global (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Through its internal intimacies and connections with the wider world, the home is ?perhaps the most emotive of geographical concepts, inextricable from that of self, family, nation, sense of place, and sense of responsi bility toward those who share one?s place in the world? (Duncan and Lambert, 2004, p. 395). Although home might take the mater ial form of a house or other shelter, it extends far beyond a material dwelling, the household and the domestic. Rather than viewing the home as a private sphere that is separate from the public world of work, citizeNship and politics, a wide range of research in his torical and contemporary contexts has ex plored the importance of paid and unpaid work within the home, the ways in which home making practices are tied to ideas about citizenship, and the political signifi cance of the home and doMesticity (see do Mestic Labour; private aNd pubLic spheres). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The home has long been part of a geo graphicaL iMagiNatioN, as shown by early research on cuLturaL hearths and the diffu sioN of different house styles. More recently, humanistic, feminist and post colonial geog raphers have been particularly influential in studying the home. Humanistic geographers have written eloquently about the home as a site of authentic meaning, value and experi ence, imbued with nostalgic memories and the love of place. In the 1970s and 1980s, human istic geographers, in contrast to the abstrac tions of spatial science and inspired by the phenomenological work of Gaston Bachelard (1994 [1958]), described the home as a per sonal, intimate and poetical place. For Bache lard, ?a home, even though its physical properties can be described to an extent, is not a physical entity but an orientation to the fundamental values . . . with which a home, as an intimate space in the universe, is linked to human nature? (Bunkse, 2004, pp. 101 2; ori ginal emphasis). Humanistic geographers (including Bunkse, 2004) continue to write evocative accounts of home that bind individual dwelling to the wider cosmos (see huMaNistic geography). Other geographers have begun to study the home as a ?more than human? place, reflecting the entangled geographies and complex co habitations of Nature and culture (including Kaika, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Feminist geographers have also been con cerned with the relationships between the in timate relationships of home and the wider world, but in very different ways. Across a wide range of areas and contexts, feminist geographers have analysed the home as a gen dered place, shaped by different and unequal relations of power, and as a place that might be dangerous, violent and unhappy rather than loving and secure (on home and feminist politics, see Young, 1997a). feminist geog raphies challenge the masculinism that either ignores the home or overlooks the power rela tions that exist within it. Inspired by the work of many black feminists who have rewritten home as a site of creativity, subjectivity and resistance (including hooks, 1991), such stud ies also challenge a white, liberal feminism that has understood the home primarily as a site of oppression for women. For socialist feminists, the home is a site of sociaL reproduction for housing, feeding and nurturing workers and is crucial for analysing the wider interde pendence of capitaLism and patriarchy. For those geographers drawn to post structuralism and post coLoniaLism, the home is part of a wider spatial lexicon that has become import ant in theorizing identity, often closely tied to ideas about the politics of location and an attempt to situate both knowledge and iden tity (Pratt, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Post colonial geographers have also explored the relationships between home, nation and empire; the material and symbolic geographies of home and homeland; and the spatialities of home, dwelling and belonging in relation to indigeneity, settlement and diaspora (includ ing Blunt, 2005). A central theme within this research is the home as a site of power and resistance, as shown by studies of imperial home making, the importance of the home in anti imperial nationalist politics, sociaL just ice, belonging and the politics of home for indigenous people, and the contemporary pol itics of homeland (in)security. Rather than viewing the home as singular and static, a wide range of research on migration and dias pora unsettles notions of fixed roots and ori gins (including Ahmed, CastaÃÂ8feda, Fortier and Sheller, 2003), revealing multiple attach ments and belongings that are materially man ifested in home making practices and material cultures at home (Tolia Kelly, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Reflecting the current vibrancy of geograph ical interest in the home, Blunt and Dowling (2006) have developed a critical geography of home, arguing that: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined. ?[H]ome is a relation between material and imaginative realms and processes, whereby physical location and materiality, feelings and ideas, are bound together and influence each other ... Moreover, home is a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging. Home is lived as well as imagined. What home means and how it is materially manifest are continually cre ated and re created through everyday home making practices, which are them selves tied to spatial imaginaries of home? (p. 254). The materialities of home in cluding domestic architecture, interior de sign, material cultures and home making practices are themselves shaped by, and interpreted through, a wide range of ideas about home. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Home, power and identity are intimately linked. ?Home as a place and as a spatial imaginary helps to constitute identity, whereby people?s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home. These identities and homes are, in turn, produced and articulated through relations of power? (p. 256). Rather than view the home as a fixed and bounded site, grounding and containing identity, geographers have un settled both home and identity to reflect their mutual locatedness and porosity, rootedness and mobility. The home has become an important site for studying in clusions, exclusions and inequalities in terms of gender, class, age, sexuality and ?race?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographies of home are multi scalar. ?Home is a socially constructed scale that extends beyond the house and household. . . . [T]he relations of domesticity, intimacy and belonging that construct home not only extend beyond, but also help to produce scales far beyond the household? (p. 257; also see Marston, 2004a). Ideas and lived experiences of home are located within, travel across and help to produce scales from the body to the globe, as shown by the political significance of embodied do mesticity in reproducing and resisting na tions and empires; the bungalow and the high rise as transnational domestic forms; migratory transformations ofhome; and the employment of domestic workers in the global economy (including Pratt, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A wide range of research across the human ities and social sciences interrogates normative ideas of home as a private, bounded, autono mous, safe and comfortable place. The emo tive power of home is not only evident in feelings of attachment, belonging and familiar ity and their material manifestations, but also in feelings and experiences of loss, alienation and exclusion, as shown by research on do (NEW PARAGRAPH) mestic violence, homelessness and displace ment. The term domicide, for example, has been coined by Douglas Porteous and Sandra Smith (2001) to refer to ?the deliberate de struction of home by human agency in pursuit of specified goals, which causes suffering to the victims? (p. 12). Distinguishing between its ?everyday? forms through, for example, urban redevelopment and economic restruc turing and its ?extreme? forms including war and the forced resettlement of indigenous people Porteous and Smith estimate that at least 30 million people across the world are victims of domicide (cf. urbicide). ab (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bachelard (1994 [1958]); Blunt (2005); Bunkse (2004); Duncan and Lambert (2004); hooks (1991); Kaika (2004); Marston (2004a); Pratt (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Tolia Kelly (2004); Young (1997a). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
homeland
An area to which a people or a political community is closely attached. ?Attachment? has a profoundly cultural and political meaning in all major uses of the term. In much ofEuropean geography, ?home land? carries resonances of the German Heimat, a spiritual, even mystical and often romanticized attachment to a native land, the place to which a person is tied by blood that is also the space of the nation. In the first half of the twentieth century, ?homeland? in this sense became infused with ideologies of racial purity and patriotism in the veneration of the Fatherland that was central to the rise of fAS cism in general and the Third Reich in par ticular. For others, and particularly for the peoples of the diaspora, ?homeland? became an object of nostalgia, desire and identifica tion, most viscerally so for those displaced and without a home of their own: hence, for example, the project of a ?Jewish Homeland? that gained momentum after the First World War and culminated in the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term was cynically invoked to se cure the system of apartheid in South Africa through the creation of ?black homelands? (Transkei was the first). These were purely instrumental attempts to confine black Africans to scattered rural areas whose delimi tation bore little relation to their own cultural geographies (Butler, Rotberg and Adams, 1977). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In American cultural geography, ?home land? became a term of art in the second half of the twentieth century. It too implied an histor ically sedimented sense of identity that (NEW PARAGRAPH) derived from an intimate interaction between people and land (cf. cultural laNdscape), but it was invariably tied to the regioN rather than the national scale. Thus Nostrand (1992, p. 214) emphasized how inhabitants come to have ?emotional feelings of attachment, desires to possess, even compulsions to defend? their homeland. He was describing an Hispanic homeland, and cultural historical geographers have identified other ethnically based home lands within the USA (Nostrand and Estaville, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In the early twenty first century, how ever, in the wake of 9/11, the USA revived the concept of homeland on a national (and na tionalist) scale. The political cultural affili ations of the term were intensified with the creation of a federal Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Its actions are directed to wards border security and the prevention of terrorisM against the USA through advanced systems of surveillaNce, profiling and the like, but it is also deeply invested in what Kaplan (NEW PARAGRAPH) perceptively identifies as ?the cultural work of securing national borders?. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Kaplan (2003); Nostrand and Estaville (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
homelessness
A complex social problem that, in the most basic terms, is defined by a lack of shelter in which to sleep and to perform basic activities such as bathing. The character istics of homeless populations vary geograph ically. There are distinctions between the identities and experiences of homeless people in developed versus less developed countries, where service dependent substance abusers sleeping rough would be an example of the former, while the latter would be exemplified by rural urban migrants occupying squatter settlements (see squattiNg). There are also variations in homelessness among countries, stemming from differences in national econ omies, welfare policies and so forth. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In developed countries, the diversity of the homeless people has increased markedly since the 1970s. For instance, middle aged white males, who traditionally dominated homeless populations in North America, are now eclipsed numerically by ethnically diverse women, childreN, and youth, including people with mental disabilities, substance ab users, victims of domestic violeNce, and the elderly (Takahashi, 1996). While often regarded as largely an urban issue, homeless ness among these groups is also increasing in rural areas (Cloke, Milbourne and Widdow field, 2001). Finally, the break between being housed and being homeless is neither sharp nor definitive. Rather, homeless people may find themselves in a cycle, moving back and forth between the streets and shelters, after a prolonged decline from cheap rental housing, through living with friends or family, to shel ters and the street. This sequence also hides many homeless people, contributing to diffi culties in counting the population. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The causes of homelessness are a long standing topic of debate. Takahashi (1996) suggests that geographers largely adhere to structural explanations, which focus on inter connections between increased levels of pov erty and decreased availability of affordable shelter (Wolch and Dear, 1993). Specifically, this perspective identifies a combination of the following factors as crucial to the rise of home lessness in developed countries: economic change, leading to the expansion of low paid, no benefit, insecure service sector jobs; the de cline in welfare state benefits exacerbating economic problems, coupled with other policy shifts such as the deinstitutionalization of mental health services; demographic changes, including changing family structures, the femi nization of poverty, and increases in the elderly population; and the reduced availability of af fordable housing, in cities experiencing upward pressures on rents as a result of a back to the city MoveMeNT and geNtrificatioN, in subur ban and rural areas where prices are also rising, and in the wider context of declining state pro vision of social housing. The structural perspec tive contradicts other explanations that suggest that individual failings and vulnerabilities (e.g. drug addiction, family instability) are the pri mary causes of homelessness. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Solutions and responses to homelessness and their implications for social life have been an other focus for geographers. The privatization and reorganization of pubLic services has had a complex impact on the geographies of homeless people?s lives, as some cycle through institu tional settings (DeVerteuil, 2003). Also, public stigmatization of homeless people and increas ingly harsh policy responses to their presence in pubLic spaces (represented by anti panhand ling ordinances and ?bum proof? benches) have spurred ongoing investigations and inter ventions into questions of homeless people?s rights to space (Mitchell, 2003a). eM (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mitchell (2003a); Wolch and Dear (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH) homo sacer Literally both ?sacred man? and ?accursed man?, homo sacer was a (NEW PARAGRAPH) subject position conferred by archaic Roman law on those whose lives and deaths were deemed to be of no consequence. This dismal figure has come to be of considerable signifi cance in contemporary political philosophy and human geography. People placed in this position could not be sacrificed (because they were outside divine law their deaths were of no value to the gods) and they could be killed with impunity (because they were outside jur idical law their lives were of no value to their contemporaries). Agamben (1998) argues that homo sacer emerges at the point at which sov ereign power suspends the law, whose ab sence falls over a zone of abandonment. The production of this space the space of excep tion (see exception, space Of) is central to his account of modern biopolitics. Critics have dismissed Agamben?s retrieval of homo sacer as extravagant (Fitzpatrick, 2005) and even mythical certainly Agamben does noth ing to recover the wider cultural constructions of death in early Roman society, and the ways in which (for example) figures such as the gladiator were also exposed to death but his purpose is not primarily historical or exeget ical: it is, rather, to project homo sacer into the present as a cipher for bare LlfE. Agamben does so in order to claim that sovereign power has so aggressively reasserted itself that the state of exception is increasingly be coming the rule and that, in consequence, we are all potentially homines sacri. These argu ments have been important for debates around human rights and the very definition of ?the human?, where geographers have insisted on the uneven and differential distribution of vul nerability: homo sacer is marked by class, gen der, sexuality and ?race? (Gregory, 2004b; Sanchez, 2004; Pratt, 2005). These analyses also reveal the importance of the body: homo sacer is thus transformed from a metaphysical sign into a corporeal materialization of polit ical violence. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Fitzpatrick (2005); Pratt (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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