Abstract
AbstractThe chapter explores the way in which people under conditions of movement and change deal with plurality in contemporary urban settings by tracing the home-making experiences of a group of Mexican professionals in Madrid (postgraduate students, academics, IT professionals, journalists, and others). While their idea of home aligns discursively within an ideal version of cosmopolitanism (“at home everywhere”), in practice their strategies to feel at home in Madrid show that these privileged movers tend to rely on specific though generic places characterized by their homogenizing tendencies, such as hotel chains, generic coffee places and airports, to achieve a feeling of home.
Highlights
Where is your home? My home is where I am. (Alejandro, Journalist) In the soles of my feet. (Santiago, Journalist) I carry my home on my back, like a snail. (Cristina, Physical therapist) Home was my suitcase. (Sofía, Filmmaker)The statements above seem to deeply resonate with the cosmopolitan ideal sparked by Diogenes who, as a Cynic philosopher, rejected tradition and local loyalties and found a sense of belonging to a much larger community – the kosmopolis – and was the first person to have stated that he was a “citizen of the world” (Appiah 2007; Warf 2015)
In order to feel at home in the city, they need to ensconce themselves into generic places that provide continuity and familiarity and the possibility of connecting with people that seem close to them, opting out from interacting with the perceived urban “other.” Such generic places are important for cultivating feelings of home through specific processes of personalization enacted in urban environments by local and foreign middle and upper classes alike
In order to fully explore the potentialities of such generic places, we need to keep in mind that they constitute the backbone of globalization and cosmopolitanization by representing the infrastructure that sustains the enhanced mobility of goods, people and information (Beck 2008, 33)
Summary
Where is your home? My home is where I am. (Alejandro, Journalist) In the soles of my feet. (Santiago, Journalist) I carry my home on my back, like a snail. (Cristina, Physical therapist) Home was my suitcase. (Sofía, Filmmaker). In the words of Ulrich Beck, “interfaces between spaces of globality and spaces of territoriality” (Beck 2008, 33), providing continuity and certain cognitive assurances through a set of standardized practices and settings in the context of mobility and work as “a semantic and spatial Esperanto, allowing foreigners to feel at home no matter where they are” (Delalex 2002, 108) In this sense generic places are a product of globalization, but are they a by-product of this (forced) cosmopolitanization. In order to feel at home in the city, they need to ensconce themselves into generic places that provide continuity and familiarity and the possibility of connecting (virtually and physically) with people that seem close to them, opting out from interacting with the perceived urban “other.” Such generic places are important for cultivating feelings of home through specific processes of personalization enacted in urban environments by local and foreign middle and upper classes alike These feelings are sustained by a communal belonging based not on a shared national identity but a class-based one.
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