Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space

This chapter invites a systematic exploration of the interplay between superdiversity and homemaking in the public urban space. The notion of home, as a form of special place at tachment, also involves the public sphere and lies at the root of contrasting ways of per ceiving, claiming, and using public sphere. Drawing on a literature review and original re search on home and migration, this chapter discusses the factors whereby different social actors and groups have unequal rights and opportunities to make themselves at home in public regions, such as streets, parks, amenity infrastructures, or entire cities. In the lived experience of the public space, different social actors and groups claim or at least perceive certain portions of it as their home, where they hold a higher or even exclusive right to stay, be in control, and belong. Such processes tend to go unnoticed as long as they involve the ethnic and long-resident mainstream, but they become more visible and contentious when there is no self-evident majority group—no group that, by habituation if not by legal entitlement, is in a stronger position to call a certain place home. Overall, a critical emphasis on home(making) in the public scales “up” the metaphor of home to cap ture competing views of superdiverse public spaces and of the appropriate ways to use them. This raises substantive issues on the access, use, recognition, and even ownership of the public.