Home and Identity

Abstract

Understanding our homes is essential to understanding ourselves, for our homes influence and are influenced by our identities. Though we often equate our home with our house, in the majority of cases, people describe home as more feeling than structure. It is a personal and, therefore, undefinable place, a space endowed with unique meaning that provides for its inhabitants a sanctuary of stasis necessary to help them adapt to a rapidly changing world. At work within our rapidly changing environments, however, is placelessness, an erosive force on the home and all other places of meaning in our society. Our identities are bound up with our homes, and challenges to the latter put the former at risk.