Home

In casual language, the terms home and house are often used interchangeably. In some instances, their meanings do indeed overlap. However, just as not every neighborhood is a community, so also not every house is a home. A house is a physical construction. A home is a mental construct. A house is a tangible, concrete object. Home is an elusive, nebulous notion. Home signifies an emotional attachment. It connotes a relatively permanent place of refuge where people find comfort, a base from where they can safely explore the outer world. It is something to which people like to return. Leaving home can be a psychologically difficult process, unlike vacating a house, which involves more pragmatic issues.

Not all houses are homes to their occupants, nor are all homes found in houses. Partners in newly formed households may hold emotional allegiances to the different hometowns in which they grew up. Sometimes, immigrants feel homesick for their country of origin. Soul mates maintain homes in each other's hearts. In this sense, home is lived experience.

Insofar as houses are homes, their coincidence is shaped significantly by economic and cultural factors. Historians have shown how the evolution of the idea of home in Europe paralleled the emergence of a new form of household in the wake of the Middle Ages. This process of household formation did not occur uniformly throughout society but took place first in the large houses of the well-to-do rather than in the cramped quarters of the poor. Lacking patrons among the religious and aristocratic establishments during the Golden Age of the 17th century, Dutch painters depicted household scenes in luxurious house interiors populated by a different clientele: a new bourgeoisie and merchant class whose affluence contrasted with and derived in no small part from the labor by and exploitation of [Page 277]others, less fortunate, whose stark living conditions in the same low countries, or in far-off colonized regions, are not featured nearly as often in pieces of the period. In other words, cultural and economic factors affect not just housing conditions themselves but also their artistic depiction.

Also historically, cultural norms have typically ascribed to women responsibility for transforming houses into homes. Still today, survey questions and bureaucratic forms bestow the role of homemaker upon women who are so designated when not gainfully employed in the official labor force.

The same observation applies to environments of the home. Cultural definitions have assigned roles in the public domain primarily to men, whereas women have more typically been confined to the domestic realm for the tasks of homemaking and child rearing. Thus, low-density residential environments, although gender neutral in themselves, in practice discriminated against women in the particular cultural and economic context that prevailed.

Use of houses as homes is similarly governed by cultural and economic factors. For example, the social organization of relationships among the members of a household occupying a house produces a certain pattern of spatial and temporal use of the interior space. In hierarchical arrangements, this has usually meant that women and children were relegated to smaller and less desirable parts of the house (e.g., a dark kitchen at the back or a small room with little privacy). The physical design of a house, in turn, reifies the household structure. This is clearly seen in the traditional Chinese courtyard dwelling whose physical layout has served to maintain and reinforce patriarchal dominance.

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