“A Place Called Home?” Dynamics of Home(s) in North American Neighborhoods
When does home in the city become Heimat? What significance does the neighborhood hold when people live far from their actual home region?
Project description
Subproject B04 examines shifts in the meaning of Heimat in current urban development processes in North America. Heimat(en) can best be explored in urban geography as “Home(s),” since these encompass similarly diverse emotional-sensory as well as physical-spatial meanings. “Home”—that is, the hearth, the dwelling, or the house—is transformed, threatened, or positively influenced by a variety of dynamics in the course of planetary urbanization processes. Using the example of various immigrant neighborhoods in U.S. cities, the project analyzes how home is practiced far away from home. What significance does the neighborhood have in feeling at home in a place? How do these neighborhoods change due to the influx of new residents, but also due to political, economic, and social conditions in the city? With a special focus on Los Angeles and Chicago, Chinese and Mexican immigrant neighborhoods will be examined to understand which social, temporal, and multilocal homemaking practices are developed to make a home.
