From the Bed to the City: Microgeographies of Home-Making on the Run

[Master's Thesis - Defended on 20 September 2019, Brussels, Belgium]

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Over the past couple of decades, the world has witnessed a radical rise in mobility. This poses serious challenges to the way we anchored ourselves in the world. New home cultures have emerged from temporally and spatially transitory living arrangements. Home is no longer one sedentary ideal, but it can be multiple, dynamic, and incomplete. Home and Home-making processes can be seen as an ensemble of everyday materialities and micro practices. Humans, places, and material objects connect to each other and form a narrative structure, which extends over multiple scales, from small objects in the bedroom to the city at large. Living a life on the move, 4CITIES students are an illustrative example of transitory urban living. Inspired by the works of the French writer Georges Perec, this thesis develops a Perecquian methodology to investigate the home-making experiences of the students of 4CITIES Master Course in Urban Studies, which revolves around three main axes: multi-scalarity of everyday spaces, the connectedness of life narratives and materiality, and an autobiographicality that transcends the personal. Starting from the bedroom, and the life and the objects it contains, this study soon surpasses those four walls and explores 4CITIZENS’ microgeographies of home-making on the run, in Copenhagen.

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[Full text available HERE]