Abstract
The article explores the relationship between the concept of home as a “becoming,” and young people’s identity construction, in situations of residential instability caused by contemporary mobility. In line with the results of recent studies, the article argues that in some cases, this instability can be an opportunity to recreate the conditions of dwelling by transforming an anonymous space into a temporary home, which gets its meaning from the individual’s “ongoing personal project.” Drawing on a qualitative study which explored the temporal and spatial experience of young people in Italy, the article analyzes the narratives of a number of university students temporarily residing in the Lombardy region, highlighting the processes involved in recreating the feeling of being at home which take place in everyday life, by means of structuring domestic times and spaces, resignifying “objects” as “things,” negotiating household rules, and organizing care practices.
What Is “Home” in a Mobile Society?
One crucial change taking place in late modern societies (Bauman, 1998, 2000; Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990) is the redefinition of traditional spatial and temporal orders, due to the acceleration of both physical and virtual mobility and the growing speed of contemporary social life (Adam, 1995; Castells, 1989; Harvey, 1989; Leccardi, 2009; Rosa, 2003; Virilio, 1986). One of the key issues in this debate regards the changes that can occur in the relationship between individuals and the dimension of space traditionally characterized as “place” (Augé, 1995).
Thanks to their material presence, stability, and boundaries, places bear witness to the history of past inhabitants, support everyday relations between present inhabitants, and manifest the cultural references that connect the past to future projections. For these reasons, places are held to be a source of certainty for the identity of those who reside in them on a long-term basis, an important frame of reference for constructing a sense of duration (Bachelard, 2000) in individual life. And for this reason, the fact that “our connections to place might appear to have lessened in importance as people have become more mobile” (Taylor, 2010, p. 1) can be a problem in two ways. First and foremost, contemporary mobility could undermine the foundations of democratic citizenship, that is based on a rooted sense of belonging to a specific place in modern nation states, as Heller (1994) notes, or as can be deduced from the literature on the cosmopolitan dimension of contemporary culture (Amin & Thrift, 2002; Beck, 2006; Fine, 2007; Hannerz, 1992; Tomlinson, 1999). The second potential problem arises in relation to the construction of personal identity, above all when the place in question is that associated with the experience of “home.”
Home (Mallet, 2004) is the place/symbol of what Heller (1994) calls “perhaps homo sapiens’ most ancient tradition, favoring one place or certain places over all others” (p. 382). Within this tradition the idea of home has become established as an exclusive “fixed and clearly bounded spatial ‘being’” (Schillmeier & Heinlein, 2009, p. 218): a specific place people are connected to by a strong sense of belonging. For a long time, it was taken for granted that stable inclusion in this space gave people—in an unreflective, almost automatic way—crucial support in terms of identity, by means of the reassuring experience of “feeling at home,” namely in tune with their physical, cultural, and relational habitat. In contemporary societies, the problem is that the relationship between the place where one lives, on the one hand, and the experience of “feeling at home” on the other, can no longer be conceived either as linear, or as a given. Perhaps it was not even completely so in the past. Today, however, the meaning of this relationship is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, as can be observed, for example, in the context of the virtual, deterritorialized nature of communications enabled by ICT (information and communication technology). Indeed, on one hand it is possible to feel displaced from the place one has always lived in because “Even the large majority of people who remain relatively sedentary in this mobile world find themselves launched into virtual motion when the Internet or satellite television reaches into their living rooms” (Germann Molz, 2008, p. 325). Yet on the other, some people are constantly on the move, and still manage to create “ways of feeling at home wherever they are,” as Germann Molz (2008, p. 336) observes, in her analysis of narratives of round-the-world travelers.
Research into the ways in which individuals relate to the different forms of contemporary mobility 1 reveals a complex, highly variegated panorama, with regard to which “social science has found itself ill-equipped to negotiate and interpret the complexity and significance of home” (Moore, 2007, p. 145). The main problem is that a multidisciplinary approach is needed to acknowledge the dynamic, multifaceted, and ambivalent nature of phenomena connected to the notion of home. We need to move beyond rigid conceptual dichotomies (Cresswell, 2004) such as rooted belonging/rootless mobility, practices/experience, public/private, interior/exterior, to be able to highlight how different dimensions and meanings intermingle. And we need to analyze the ways in which people try to discover/rediscover, construct/reconstruct their own position in space and time, as life events progressively change the meaning of it.
An interesting angle for research and theory was presented in the special issue of Space and Culture devoted to “Care and the Art of Dwelling” (August 2009), which calls for a “reconceptualization” of the idea of home (Schillmeier & Domenèch, 2009, p. 290), drawing on Heidegger’s (1971) notion of dwelling.
According to Heidegger (1971), dwelling is “the manner in which mortals are on the earth” (p. 146). In short, by “manner” he means both: (a) “building”—intended both as “to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for” (p. 145) and “constructing,”(b) “thinking” (p. 158), and (c) “staying with things” by preserving “the presencing of the fourfold” (p. 149) in them. The space of dwelling is not something that exists a priori, a “locale” “that faces man” (p. 154) as the traditional idea of home implicitly suggests. And “it is neither an external object nor an inner experience” (p. 154). Instead, “Spaces, and with them space as such . . . are always provided for already within the stay of the mortals” (p. 154). As to Heidegger’s notions of “fourfold”—Geviert in German—and “thing,” Harman (2009) notes that the “fourfold structure means not only the four elements of earth, sky, gods and mortals, but also the ‘mirror-play’ between them” (p. 294): a “mirror-play” which coincides with “thing.” I agree with him that it is difficult to “clarify the fourfold on the basis of Heidegger’s own explicit statements” (p. 294) and this opacity affects the crucial notion of “thing” too. We can recover the notion of “thing,” by temporarily setting aside “the forced stylization of Geviert,” as Bodei (2009, p. 45) suggests in his work on “The life of things.” After having specified that, broadly speaking, the term “things” comprises not only material objects but also “persons and ideals and, in general, all that is interesting or important for us” (p. 22), Bodei develops his reflection, by focusing on the narrow sense of the term: the “objects” a human being materially produces. “Objects” become “things” by reason of their potential uses—for practical functions as well as for contemplation. Things are “invested with affections, concepts and symbols that individuals, society and history accumulated in them” (p. 22), so that by using/contemplating them, human beings access the meanings referenced in them, forcing individuals “to listen to reality,” and give up “the false idea that individual identity is a monad” (p. 115).
Our argument is that Heidegger’s approach, integrated with a clearer definition of “thing,” like that we have drawn from Bodei’s analysis, has at least two important implications for the debate on “home.”
First and foremost, this approach suggests that “home” should be viewed as a kind of space whose meaning and features cannot be separated from the manner in which human beings reside in it, combining the aforementioned components of the notion of dwelling in various ways. From a sociological point of view, we could rename these components as follows: human action—“building”—preserving and constructing the physical and symbolic features of people’s habitat; the reflection implicit in “thinking” about the individual and collective meanings accumulated in “things”; the establishment of a meaningful relationship—“staying with things”—either with some objects invested with the aforementioned “affections, concepts, and symbols” or with “persons and ideals” that are significant for the inhabitant of the home.
This idea shifts the meaning of home from “place” to “face” (Latimer & Munro, 2009), something that appears to be especially consistent with the progressive individualization of contemporary social and cultural settings. This shift enables us to ponder the meaning of home for our contemporaries, avoiding the determinism associated with the idea that one major condition for feeling at home is the sense of belonging to an exclusive, fixed, and clearly bounded portion of space. And it also enables us to overcome the dichotomy between the forced equation of “rooted belonging = home = personal identity,” and its opposite: “rootless mobility = homelessness = identity dispersion.”
Another implication of Heidegger’s notion of dwelling for today’s debate comes from the ambivalent status of “things,” with which the human being stays: something to use, in order to adapt reality to oneself and, at the same time, something that reflects the meanings others have accumulated inside it, which one must “listen to,” by adapting oneself to reality. This ambivalence suggests, we cannot consider individual’s relationship with “home” as exclusively “personal”: “something we can create ‘on our own,’ no longer that which joins us up to everyone else, but that which separates and keeps each apart from the other” (Latimer & Munro, 2009, p. 319). Instead, we must also pay specific attention to the “Otherness” (Latimer & Munro, 2009) reflected by “things,” in order to study individuals’ ability to establish a meaningful connection with place.
This article sets out to examine the role these implications can have in orienting sociological research on the redefinition of spatial—and temporal—orders in contemporary Western societies, by drawing on a study that explores young people’s experiences in Northern Italy.
Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of the Study
The study springs from our interest in the ambivalent nature of personal uncertainty connected to the acceleration of physical and virtual mobility. This acceleration is applying strong centrifugal forces to the three dimensions of the temporal and spatial experience that come together in the traditional idea of home, giving rise to tensions that can influence an individual’s identity construction in different ways. First and foremost are the physical and symbolic dimensions of the setting in which everyday practices develop. The second dimension is that of cultural references, the arena in which the time of transcendence forms, to which individuals link the meaning of their lives. The third dimension is that of the relational network individuals look to for recognition. The tensions between these dimensions can cause paralyzing sensations of displacement and insecurity (Bauman, 1998), when the setting for people’s everyday lives appears unconnected and unrelated to their cultural and/or relational status. We cannot, however, exclude that these tensions may be experienced by some individuals at a given time in their life as an opportunity to look for new, more satisfactory arrangements for identity construction.
In order to study this ambivalence, the shift from “place” to “face” implicit in Heidegger’s approach can play a crucial role, by suggesting that instead of exploring the places where people feel at home, we should be examining the manner in which people feel at home. It is also crucial to focus on the interplay between the aforementioned three components of the notion of dwelling. In our study, the search for an empirical way to capture these dynamics led us to pay specific attention to two key points of social constructionism in the sociological tradition (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). The first is the centrality of the everyday life dimension in the construction of reality, and the second is the discursive nature of this construction.
We therefore examined a number of narratives about everyday life experience, wondering whether and how they could help us reconstruct what Schillmeier and Heinlein (2009) call the “becoming” of home by means of “a set of spatial and temporal practices and experiences that fabricate the (un)canniness of what it means to be at home or not” (p. 218).
This analysis is part of a long-term research project which got under way in Italy in 2006, with a nationwide study 2 on the processes that men and women of different age cohorts, in different personal and residential situations, develop in their everyday lives to reconstruct a personal and social sense of space and time in both domestic and urban settings.
In line with what we noted above, the hypothesis that underpinned all the different strands of the study was that everyday life is not only the dimension of the routine, of what is taken for granted, but also the arena in which creativity can develop (de Certeau, 1984). In this arena, individuals can deploy action and reflectivity to recover their familiar relationship with things, people, and places, thus achieving the ontological security (Giddens, 1984) connected to the traditional idea of home, which is challenged by the present forms of physical and virtual mobility. The familiarity of one’s setting is necessarily bound up with organizing and establishing usage practices. In this way, objects, people, and domestic/urban spaces that are initially strange, unfamiliar, and problematic gradually become “things” per the aforementioned meaning: familiar, commonplace, and predictable, creating a setting where the experience of dwelling can be played out.
One of the results of the national study (Mandich, 2010) was to highlight some processes of resignifying space, in which the public and private dimensions—domestic interiors and urban exteriors—were closely intertwined. For some individuals, the aim of these processes was to acquire some form of control over the spaces of everyday life, in order to create new forms of sociality and self-recognition in their physical setting.
In the second stage of the study, the teams from Pavia and Milan explored a number of issues that emerged from 70 narrative interviews (Schütze, 1977) with young people aged 18 to 35 years about their experiences of domestic and urban space (Leccardi, Rampazi, & Gambardella, 2011).
With regard to domestic spaces, we have observed the evolution of young people’s relationship with the family home during the transition from childhood to adolescence, and then young adulthood. Their narratives show interesting gender differences and highlight continuous negotiations with the adults to establish specific spaces and times for the individual. As for gender, we observed some differences similar to those noted by Abbott-Chapman and Robertson (2009) in their study of the “favorite places” of adolescents in Tasmania. During adolescence, girls, more than boys, consider the family home as the sole place where they can experience the sense of feeling at home, while boys spend more time outside the home, drawn to settings where their peer groups gather. These differences tend to lessen as the individuals grow up, when both boys and girls begin to implement an ongoing process of constructing their “own” home.
The other difference we noted concerns the extent of each adolescent’s negotiating power to implement strategies of “space zoning” and “time zoning” (Munro & Madigan, 1999) in the family home. The ability to feel at home in the family residence is strongly influenced by each individual’s capacity to establish the spaces and times he or she wishes to allocate to “being alone,” compared with “being with others,” that underpins the organization of family life. In particular, “space zoning” strategies are based on establishing rules that give individuals a margin of leeway when it comes to deciding which “things” to place in the spaces they view as their “own,” how to position them, what use to make of them, and how to take care of them. These rules determine the territorial confines of each body within the space of the home and the power relationships between its inhabitants (Hurdley, 2013).
Asserting one’s power to dictate one’s own rules can often take the form of untidiness (Pasquinelli, 2004): a deliberate, “organized” form of untidiness that adolescents vigorously defend, conceived as a way of laying claim to a specific area of the family’s space.
Similar strategies can be observed in other cohabitation scenarios regarding not just cohabiting couples but also peers in shared accommodation: a fairly widespread residential set up for young people who relocate for study or work purposes. In this article, we focus on three cases connected to this kind of mobility, which translates into short/medium term moves—lasting a few months or at the most a few years. The specific characteristic of these moves is that they are viewed from the start as temporary, open to the idea of further moves, albeit not always with a defined time frame or destination. Our hypothesis is that the temporary nature of these stays does not prevent some individuals from formulating dwelling strategies, allowing them to achieve some kind of “emplacement” (Korac, 2009) in their present situation, which they experience “as if” the possibility that it might change in the future does not substantially influence their ability to “feel at home” there.
The three narratives we have chosen appear of interest not only because they highlight the way in which individuals’ differing capacities for action, reflection, and relationships are reflected in everyday practices and experiences, influencing how the aforementioned process of “temporary emplacement” takes place. Another source of interest is the diverse interplay between the need for stability/continuity on one hand and the appeal of change/discontinuity on the other, something that is implicit in the biographic temporality that these individuals associate with the idea of home. This interplay depends in part on their faith in their ability to adapt to new settings, gained in previous experiences of mobility. And in part it depends on the kind of personal project that each participant views as possible in his or her current situation.
Constructing “Temporary Homes”
The three cases we have chosen are those of Elvira, Gino, and Saro, who are similar in terms of age, their “stated” reason for moving and their current accommodation situation. Their differences include gender and previous experiences of mobility. Moreover, Saro had arrived in his new accommodation only a few weeks previously, while the other two had been there for almost 2 years. All three belong to the 24 to 26 years age group, are in Pavia—a Lombard university town—to study, and live with peers in a rented flat. None of them is in a stable relationship, and they all have fairly vague ideas of where they might live in the future.
Elvira gives a detailed narrative of her first move away from the family home 2 years earlier and how her relationship with the home and the city developed in that period. Aged 25 years, she moved from Palermo to the North of Italy, where she shares a flat with three boys and a girl. She left Sicily to attend a post graduate teaching course (SILSIS), and she currently works in a school in the province of Pavia with an annual teaching contract. Gino is 26 years and is on his second move, interspersed with various periods of travel, mostly for holidays. Two years ago, he moved to Pavia to complete his specialization. Saro is 26 years, hails from Bari and arrived in Pavia 2 weeks ago, after a long series of moves in Europe and beyond.
The three narratives reveal different ways of experiencing the initial impact with the new accommodation, organizing life inside it and connecting it to the immediate surroundings and the city as a whole. These differences reflect their personalities and the different “ongoing personal projects” (Taylor, 2010, p. 3) that emerge from their narratives. Yet all three show a basically similar approach to the stages involved in constructing a relationship with the new setting, based on the ability to feel comfortable in a new place not only by seeking out familiar “things” but also by organizing household routines, negotiating personal times and spaces, and finding a satisfactory way of managing the interplay between the domestic interior and the urban exterior.
Getting to Grips With a New House, Arranging One’s “Things”
The first impact of a new setting can be very displacing, above all for those like Elvira, moving away from their family home for the first time. Indeed, despite the fact that it was a personal decision to move away from her close-knit family, she found the experience a daunting one. While at the beginning of her interview, Elvira gives a purely practical reason for moving—to attend the SILSIS school—at the end she reveals the real reason behind the decision. Basically, she was unsatisfied with the point her life had reached, and she felt the need to put herself to the test and leave the security of Palermo behind to explore new horizons, as most of her peers now do.
Two years on, Elvira still remembers her initial sense of bewilderment, observing that “When I went into my room for the first time I felt like killing myself: I need mess and the room was so tidy . . . .” Her prevailing feeling was that of losing her identity, not “recognizing” herself in her setting: It did not feel like home and she had no way of knowing that it ever would.
To get over this, she needed to reestablish the feeling of “who” she was and “the things that represent me.” Elvira’s response was to start arranging some familiar belongings, brought from “home,” in this unfamiliar space: “my” PC, first of all, “my” photos, “my” posters, “my” favorite books, and CDs. She also tried to cover the grey, anonymous “objects” in her room with bright colors, to transform this unfamiliar setting into somewhere that reminded her of the warm colors of the “things” she had left in her home town: “I made some clouds with light blue card and some yellow stars to stick on the walls; I covered an old sofa with some bright material.”
The second stage involved exploring the practical layout of the house to assess whether it had all the “things” that were essential for everyday life. This led to a change in the way Elvira was getting accustomed to the space. After creating a form of continuity with her previous home—thanks to the “things” she had brought with her—she focused on the opportunities for change afforded by the present, finally feeling free to organize the space and pace of daily life. The first step was getting some new things to make her current room more liveable. She bought a big bed, constructed a makeshift table for the TV and above all set about sorting out an Internet connection.
Gino missed his family less, having already studied abroad on the Erasmus Programme. He also recalls that the first stage in getting accustomed to his new life involved customizing his personal space:
I tried to personalise it a bit, with an ethnic tapestry [ . . . ]. I got the stationery shop to cut me a big piece of card where I put the little notes I exchange with the person I’m seeing, to keep them, and leaflets and receipts from dinners, restaurants, invoices. [ . . . ], I’ve hung prints of places I’ve visited [ . . . ]
Like Elvira, Gino’s narrative reveals a certain degree of pride in the ability to adapt to the new setting and how both managed, at least in part, to adapt the setting to themselves. In Gino’s case too, this sentiment is related to the real reason he moved to this city: not purely, or not so much to attend the specialized degree he was interested in, but with the desire to explore new horizons and “not go back down south [to Sicily].”
With reference to the initial impact with his current accommodation, Gino does not mention feeling disorientated, but talks about the practical problems he encountered when adapting to a flat that was much smaller, less well equipped, and comfortable than his family home.
The narrative provided by Saro, a 26-year-old who arrived in Pavia 2 weeks previously to attend a specialization course, after a long series of moves, has a different tone. His moves are apparently connected to pursuing job opportunities in the sector of international cooperation. In actual fact, in his long interview, this factor is not associated with significant memories. With the exception of Bologna, he does not say anything about the places he has lived in and the work he has done. When reading this interview, we get the impression that Saro’s numerous moves are more like stages in an ongoing journey to find himself and a meaning for his future.
Recalling his first impressions of his accommodation in Pavia, Saro underlines above all the practical aspects of the house:
the first impact was strange because when I went back down south [to his parents’ home] I told them “It’s nice, because it’s clean, and well-kept,” then when you live there you find out all the things that don’t work.
With regard to his room he says:
All I’ve done so far is hang up a flag a friend brought me from Germany, and put up speakers for the computer [ . . . ]. The first bit of decor I bought was a plant, a ficus: it’s nice to see something living in the room, apart from the things you put on the wall.
Obviously Saro too has brought “the usual things” with him: a few books, a few DVDs of his favorite films, and above all his PC, which he uses to keep in touch with friends in different places and download the music he likes. These “portable” memories have to be selected each time he moves to travel light.
Saro is less attached to the place he is currently living in, because his arrival is too recent for him to be familiar with the setting and its inhabitants. This detachment is underlined by the way in which he constantly highlights functional aspects of his accommodation rather the relational, emotional landscape: it is big enough, it has everything he needs, it is not too expensive, and so on. When Saro talks about “home,” he means only his family home. The city and the house he is living in now are the place where “for now, for better or worse, I have ended up” to do a specialized degree in international economics.
The “Becoming” of the Home and Domestic Practices
All three narratives show that after personalizing one’s room, the next stage is organizing everyday life. For those living in a shared flat, the most important, and difficult, thing is establishing forms of communal living with the other inhabitants of the flat. Reciprocal adaptation is called for and nothing can be taken for granted. The negotiation process proceeds by trial and error. Each individual’s privacy has to be established, and routines and personal schedules must be synchronized to everyone’s satisfaction. The cleaning and tidying of communal areas has to be equally divided and the flatmates have to understand what each individual sees as an acceptable level of sharing.
Once these things have been established, the new house becomes liveable, over time turning into a place to take care of, and where “you can feel comfortable.” At this point, domestic practices become crucial: an element that can make or break one’s bond with the house and the duration of the flat share.
When it comes to communal activities, cooking and eating together can be pleasurable when people get to know each other. Elvira, for example, observes that
we spend a lot of time in the kitchen; we see the house as a family dimension: my friend and I are far from home, very far, so this is home for us now [ . . . ]. We all cook.
While preparing meals can be an opportunity to spend time together, cementing the bond between flatmates, sharing cleaning tasks often represents a critical point which can challenge interpersonal relationships. Elvira talks about problems with a flatmate who always leaves housework to the others, not even washing “the plates and glass that she uses.” This situation is being resolved by the girl in question moving out. Gino, on the other hand, recalls problems the previous year, when it proved impossible to establish a rota for cleaning duties that fulfilled his own standards of cleanliness and order: “the others did nothing to keep the house tidy; the shared spaces and even the bathroom were only cleaned once a week, while I think the bathroom needs to be cleaned every day.” At the start of his second year in Pavia, Gino found new flatmates and made sure they “knew the score” right from the start:
obviously everyone looks after their own room, but we all clean the communal areas. And we do our washing together. [ . . . ] We do the shopping together, so we spend our free time going round the supermarkets to find the best offers.
The organization Gino has established is based on a strict division of labor and clear boundaries of his personal space. This organization is based on establishing the house rules which are the basis for gaining control over the times and spaces of the house. Gino’s top priority is keeping his own room—his favorite space—clean and tidy. “My room is my haven,” he says. In this “haven,” everyone has to respect the order he has created: “my things are in order and they have to stay that way.”
Although Gino never closes his door, by demanding that this order is respected, he can be sure that no one will invade his territory. Another way of establishing control over his spaces is in terms of time: fixing boundaries between personal time and time with others: “During the week I don’t want to be disturbed because I’m studying, so it’s just the weekend, and me and my group of friends eat together at home.”
Elvira’s organization, on the other hand, is based on an “orderly chaos,” as she describes it. When it comes to looking after the flat she explains:
We take turns clearing up [ . . . ]. But here we share everything [ . . . ]. We have no half measures: [either we let the mess build up for days], or you start working and lifting and moving everything into the corridor and doing a major clean up. [ . . . ] I’m not sure who’s supposed to clean the corridor, it sort of cleans itself every so often. Then everyone cleans their own room. I do that myself: if I don’t have a lot on I clean it twice a week, or ten days might pass before I get round to it, at the most it gets a bit dusty.
The same level of “chaos” also applies to their routines: There are no set routines or schedules, everything depends on what each person has to, or wants to, do. This deliberate chaos is a form of organization, because it serves to make the shared flat a “very open house,” open to the flow of relationships between those living in it and those visiting as friends.
Saro also talks about an “orderly chaos,” yet he appears to mean something different from Elvira. For Elvira, mess is a way to make the house feel lived in, and create a relaxed atmosphere which is open to the clutter of other people too. For Saro, it seems more of a way of signaling the temporary nature of his stay in a given location, where he does not belong, or at least not yet. He does not feel it is particularly important to take care of the house, except in terms of “keeping things decent.”
The ways in which these young people organize their household routines profoundly reflect their personalities. For Elvira, who seems to favor the quality and breadth of interpersonal relationships in her personal “becoming,” the house is a point of departure for seeking significant relationships with flatmates, friends, and inhabitants of the local neighborhood. In this sense, her idea of home has strong emotional connotations and embraces a space that goes from her bedroom to the entire flat, neighborhood, and city:
I’ve got very attached to this place [ . . . ] it’s one of the nicest areas of the city, a very lively area with little shops, street parties, the neighbourhood bar, the lady in the stationery shop, it’s got a neighbourhood feel that is not easy to find [ . . . ]. I know I’m a very sociable person, everyone here knows me, from the bakery to the stationers to the meeting places in the area, and that’s really nice. [ . . . ]. That is the best dimension for me.
Gino, on the other hand, seems to be building his identity around constructing a satisfactory professional future far from his region of origin. He organizes his days according to a precise schedule of study, household jobs, and socializing. He sees the city as a setting where he can look for “pockets” of opportunity to exploit. These “pockets” are mainly the university where he attends lectures and has a small group of friends, the supermarkets running special offers, the park near his flat where he goes jogging, the sports center where he plays tennis. Unlike Elvira, Gino seeks to feel at home by establishing rigid spatial and temporal boundaries, which enable him to control both the relationship between interior and exterior, and that between personal space, shared space, and practicalities. For Saro, the house is a place to study, surf the net, and fulfil essential everyday needs, and a base from which to explore the city and the university, with a curiosity that appears more intellectual than emotional:
I love visiting the place I’m living in. I prefer getting around on foot rather than using public transport, and maybe taking different routes to get to know the city a bit at a time, because I love discovering a new area.
As well as reflecting the different personalities of the three young people, it appears that the differences between these narratives can also be attributed to having encountered the new setting at different stages in their lives. Elvira was getting ready to enter the world of work after graduating. Gino was tackling the last stage of a linear academic career, which his previous experience of mobility with the Erasmus Programme was a coherent part of. Saro had a series of moves behind him, linked to gaining experience in the field of international cooperation. Paradoxically, Saro, the most “mobile” of the three, is the only one who uses the term “home” to refer exclusively to his family home, as if that was the only source of certainty in his experience, which revolves around having the freedom to explore the opportunities offered by being open to any possibility.
These differences are also reflected in the way in which, after the first stage of settling in, the young people developed their image of home and more in general the expectations for future that each nurtured.
Detaching From the Family Home and Prospects for the Future
At the time of the interview, Elvira was settling into her new setting. A stay which started out as a temporary adventure was becoming more permanent, thanks to finding a job, albeit temporary, and having to decide where to join the permanent register for teaching jobs: joining this limits aspiring teachers to staying in the same area for a number of years. In this regard, she makes an observation that suggests she is open to the idea of changes in the future: “of course maybe one day I’ll regret it, in the sense that joining the permanent list in Pavia was a major decision—you’re on it for six or seven years”
After a year of “organized chaos,” her daily routines have settled down and are now structured around her work schedule. The organization of the house has also changed: less open to improvisation, and a constant flow of friends and acquaintances passing through, and more linked to the relationships between a small group of flatmates.
Gino too is starting to think about staying on after he finishes university. In this city, which is smaller than the one he left, he says he has found “his own dimension.”
Neither Elvira nor Gino rule out the possibility of deciding to, or having to, move somewhere else after a few years. Yet both of them are sure they do not want to return to their home towns. They feel that this period has changed them profoundly, to the point that they no longer recognize themselves in their home setting. When they go back, they find the family home “stifling,” or too “different” from where they are now. Gino is starting to see his city as a “holiday destination,” somewhere to spend a “fortnight” break before going back to normal life, in Pavia. Elvira too now finds it hard to accept the organization of spaces and times in the family home:“When I go back home in the summer, after a month or so I really miss my little room in Pavia. The peace and quiet, being able to do what I want, being independent, deciding my own schedule.”
Saro appears to be focused above all on the need to settle into his new course, without worrying about what he will do at the end of his stay. The process of getting used to the new setting appears to go hand in hand with his opinion of the Faculty he has chosen:
my first impression wasn’t fantastic because it gives the idea of a city that’s a bit neglected, almost dying. But then I decided I would base my decision on the quality of the course, which looked pretty well organised. However, in the last few days, I have started to appreciate the city too.
It will be interesting to interview Saro once more, toward the end of his course, to see if his relationship with the house and the city has changed.
Conclusion
In light of a reconceptualization of home as a “becoming” (Schillmeier & Domenèch, 2009; Schillmeier & Heinlein, 2009), underpinned by the mix of action, reflection, and relationship, we have drawn from the notion of dwelling (Heidegger, 1971) to analyze the narratives of a number of young people in order to understand whether and how they manage to “feel at home” in a situation of mobility, in accommodation viewed as temporary. We might assume that to implement strategies of emplacement (Korac, 2009), after being displaced from their home, people require a degree of certainty regarding the stability of their new setting. For some, this is the case. Yet in the complex panorama of situations connected to new forms of mobility, we can also observe forms of “temporary stabilization” which take shape when individuals succeed in connecting the changing meaning and nature of the place they inhabit—its “becoming”—to the changes in their own lives, affecting their personal sense of “becoming.” Young people, above all, whose future is dominated by uncertainty, appear to exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, which enables them to exploit the opportunities afforded by the present moment, and forge a creative relationship with space and time; a relationship that is challenged by the acceleration of these dimensions in contemporary societies.
The hypothesis that guided our analysis is that this creativity takes shape in everyday life (de Certeau, 1984), starting with the organization of the time and spaces of the home, transforming “objects” into “things,” negotiating rules with the other members of the household, and allocating household tasks (Douglas, 1991). We highlighted how these processes can take different forms and have different outcomes, depending on both the characteristics of the physical setting and the different personalities of the participants. Their personal projects, although open to unpredictability and future changes, also reveal a need for certainty that manifests itself in the need to recreate the “ontological security” (Giddens, 1984) implicit in the idea of home, albeit in new forms.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
The author is grateful to the two anonymous referees for their criticism and helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article