Time, Place and Home: Exploring Meanings of Home in Vancouver

Abstract

Building on recent studies emphasizing how structural and contextual forces shape notions of home, I explore how the experience of home is related to the concepts of time and place. Using 46 interviews with 23 individuals, I investigate how home is defined and experienced by younger and older adults in relationship to Vancouver's particular cultural, geographic, and historical contexts. I find three main ways in which respondents established a sense of home in a city concomitantly known for its livability and unaffordability: the stepping–stone home (a future–oriented sense of home), the despatialized home (a present–oriented sense of home), and the extended home in time (a past–oriented perspective) and in place (a sense of home extended onto the natural environment). My study contributes toward comprehensive understandings of home with new empirical material showing how a taken–for–granted experience results from an interplay between structural, contextual, and individual factors.