Making temporary homes: Why meanings and activities matter

Why meanings and activities matter

Abstract

A housing shortage has been slowly building up in the Netherlands in the last 30 years. Since 2015 more attention has been paid to how the influx of refugees increases the housing shortage and how difficult it is for urgent home seekers, including refugees, to find a place to live. Decreasing the housing shortage by building new houses takes time, while people need to find a space to live now. Temporarily transforming vacant buildings into housing could reduce this need for a brief moment, so that the housing market has time to catch up. However, these vacant buildings do not look like typical living spaces and might be located in places that would otherwise not be considered for housing. Plans for refurbishing vacant buildings need to be made quickly and there is no time to consult any future residents on what they might need. Thus, designs are made equally quickly, optimising building efficiency and reducing costs, and the user perspective is not a priority. Could there not be a way to integrate the user-perspective into the design of these temporary transformations, so that these dwellings can also become homes?

A review of literature on temporary building transformations for urgent home seekers from housing studies, indoor environmental quality, architectural design and environmental psychology was conducted and eight case studies were visited. The main finding was that the concept of home could benefit housing design. Current building guidelines do not include the user-perspective, which is of importance to residents. It is clear that people’s attachment to the neighbourhood, their ability to change things in the dwelling, and having sufficient control over the indoor environmental quality, can influence their well-being. For urgent home seekers, the status and possibilities of their dwelling at the start of residency might matter even more so, because they have less control over the design of their environment. What is unclear, however, is how the concept of home can be integrated into the design process. Thus, the research question is as following:

How can meanings of home and what people do at home contribute to better temporary home design?

Existing qualitative research on the concept of home was used to quantify the meanings of home and compare them between students, starters on the housing market, and refugees accepted for permanent residency. A questionnaire was developed with statements on meanings of home, what activities people engaged in, and which indoor environmental preferences they had for those activities. Six factors were found (with a factor analysis): Appropriation, Representation, Privacy, Sociability, Rootedness, and Future. These were then related to the activities within the home and preferences for the indoor environmental quality with multiple regression analyses. It turned out that Representation was related to cleanliness, while Rootedness was related to receiving guests and cooking. Privacy was connected to a reduction in receiving guests and Sociability with an increase. Future was related to a clean and light place to take a shower. Appropriation was connected to placing the activity of sleeping close to that of studying and/or working. Which meanings of home someone values most, seems related to how the home is used and what preferences someone has. As such, understanding the meanings of home and how they relate to what someone does, can be a way to improve housing design. But what do people do to make a home and how exactly do they do these things?

Semi-structured interviews with students, starters on the housing market and refugees accepted for permanent residency were conducted to increase our understanding of what people do to make a space into a home. The interviews were analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and the visual data (photos made by the interviewees and sometimes the researcher, and drawings made by the researcher) was used to place the content of the interviews in a physical context. Three main themes were found: Familiarising, Organising, and Managing. For the interviewees, home was a place that should reflect their identity and it should have the possibility to improve it. The themes reflect the ways in which that is done, and how objects, decorations, and other people can be a part of making a house into a home.

To find out how meanings of home related to what people do to make a home, a workshop was set up to associate those meanings to statements which had been derived from the interviews. The interviewees’ quotes were sorted by their similarities, after which groups of quotes were combined into a general statement. The participants of the workshop went through this list of statements, organised per theme, and related them to none, one, or more meanings. The results indicated that the meanings of home might be organised on three axes: Appropriation and Representation, Privacy and Sociability, and Rootedness and Future. The results also indicated that the themes of Familiarising, Organising, and Managing operate on different time frames (continuous, long-term, and short-term, respectively). This means that small actions, too, can contribute to creating a home, such as putting away the dishes and turning on the lights, but that the distinction of which specific actions help someone and which do not, depend on the individual.