Progress in Humran Geogragphy 29, 4 (2005) pp.
505- 515
Cultural geography: cultural
geographies of home
Alison Blunt
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London,
Mile End Road, London El 4NS, UK
I Introduction
In her 1998 review of feminist geographical
work on 'house and home, the household,
and the domestic world', Mona Domosh con-
cluded that 'the home is rich territory indeed
for understanding the social and the spatial.
It's just that weve barely begun to open the
door and look inside (1998: 276, 28 1). Since
then, a wide range of research both within
and beyond geography has focused on the
home and domesticity (for a review of socio-
logical work on the home, see Mallett, 2004).
Alongside a range of recent books published
across the humanities and social sciences
(including Burton, 2003; Chapman, 2004;
Giles, 2004; Pink, 2004),1 a new interdiscipli-
nary journal entitled Home Cultures was
launched in 2004, which is 'dedicated to the
critical understanding ofthe domestic sphere,
its artefacts, spaces and relations, across
timeframes and cultures'. In addition, a
special issue of Cultural Geographies on
'Geographies of Home' was published in
2004; a special issue ofAntipode in the previ-
ous year focused on social reproduction and
included three papers on 'domesticity and
other homely spaces of modernity' (this isslue
was also published as Mitchell et a., 2004);
two recent editorials in geographical journals
addressed the theme ofhome (Jacobs, 2003;
Smith, 2004); and a book entitled Home will
form part of the Routledge Key Ideas in
© 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd
Geography series (Blunt and Dowling, 2006).
Clearly, since Domosh wrote her report,
cultural geographers and many other scholars
have let themselves in to explore the rich
territory ofhome. Doing so, they have unset-
tled ideas about home and domesticity by
questioning what might at first glance appear
to be familiar and mundane.
Research in cultural geography more
widely continues to be rich, diverse and
challenging, as reflected by a number of
recent landmark texts, reviews and critiques
(Anderson et a., 2003; Duncan et a., 2003;
Jacobs and Nash, 2003; Duncan and Duncan,
2004a). In their introduction to the Handbook
of cultural geography, Kay Anderson, Mona
Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift describe
cultural geography as 'a contested terrain of
debate - in fact, a far-flung set of debates ...
Cultural geography is a living tradition of
disagreements, passions, commitments and
enthusiasms.' For the purposes of the book,
they introduce cultural geography as 'a series
of intellectual - and, at core, politicized -
engagements with the world. It is a style of
thought, fixed in neither time nor space'
(Anderson et a., 2003: 2; for more on the
methodological approaches that cultural
geographers have adopted to engage with the
world, see Blunt et al., 2003). The editors
draw out five themes that 'make up this style
of thought: culture as distribution of things;
10. I 191/0309132505ph564pr
506 Cultural geography
culture as a way of life; culture as meaning;
culture as doing; and, informing all of these
themes, culture as power. The editors identify
'dwelling' as one of a series of 'styles' for
thinking spatially about culture. In contrast to
early phenomenological work on authentic
human experiences of place, current ideas
about 'dwelling consider "'inhuman" thinking
about place, informed by developments in
the sociology of science, actor network
and non-representational theory' (Anderson
et a., 2003: 7; for a study of the ways in
which ideas about place can inform housing
research, see Easthope, 2004).
Reflecting both human and 'inhuman ideas
about place and landscape, the edited volume
Patterned ground (Harrison et a., 2004)
consists of numerous short entries on a won-
derfully eclectic range of subjects - from bees
and post offices to caves and meanders - that
are shaped by the entanglements of nature
and culture. In his piece on 'home', Yi-Fu
Tuan writes that 'Home is a place that offers
security, familiarity and nurture' (Tuan, 2004:
164). In a longer survey ofvarious 'landscapes
of home', James Duncan and David Lambert
(2003) describe the complexities and ambi-
guities of home in relation to emotional
geographies, gender and sexuality, housing
and identity, transnational homes and com-
munities, and home and empire. They con-
clude: As perhaps the most emotive of
geographical concepts, inextricable from that
of self, family, nation, sense of place, and
sense of responsibility towards those who
share one's place in the world, home is a
concept that demands thorough exploration
by cultural geographers' (2003: 395).
The home is a material and an affective
space, shaped by everyday practices, lived
experiences, social relations, memories and
emotions. As Ann Varley and I wrote in the
introduction to the special issue of Cultural
Geographies, the meanings and lived experi-
ences of home are diverse: As a space of
belonging and alienation, intimacy and vio-
lence, desire and fear, the home is invested
with meanings, emotions, experiences and
relationships that lie at the heart of human
life' (Blunt and Varley, 2004: 3). Cultural
geographers have begun to tell engaging and
complex stories about home and domesticity
that are at once material and imaginative, and
are conceptually informed but substantively
grounded. Both home and culture- and their
unsettled interplay- are intrinsically spatial
and political, and have inspired a wide range
of geographical research in recent years.
The three parts of this report review recent
cultural geographical research on home and
situate this thematic focus in relation to
broader debates about materiality, embodi-
ment, transnationality and the nonhuman
world. 'Residence' (section II) considers
domestic architecture and design alongside
material cultures of home; 'Dwelling' (section
III) turns to the lived experiences, social
relations and emotional geographies of
home; and, finally, 'Cohabitation (section IV)
introduces the domestic entanglements of
nature and culture.
II Residence
Recent cultural geographical research on
the home reflects a concern not only with
rematerializing geography (see, for example,
special issues of Geoforum (2004) on
material geographies and Social and Cultural
Geography (2003) on 'culture matters'), but
also with the interdisciplinary literature on
material cultures (including Miller, 2001).
Within geography and housing studies, recent
work on the material geographies of home
includes studies of residential segregation,
residential mobility and location, gentrifica-
tion, and household demographic change.
Cultural geographical research on the materi-
alities of residence has focused on two
additional themes: domestic architecture and
design; and the material cultures of objects
and their use, display and meanings within the
home (for a different approach to studying
the materiality of home, which draws on
science studies and explores the importance
of nonhuman agency, see Hitchings, 2004,
and section IV below).

In a rich range of historical and contempo-
rary research, cultural geographers have
explored the ways in which domestic
architecture and design are inscribed with
meanings, values and beliefs that both reflect
and reproduce ideas about gender, class, sex-
uality, family and nation. An important theme
within this work has been the connections
and disjunctures between idealized designs
and the embodied practices of everyday
domestic life. The disjunctures between
design and dwelling are most apparent in
relation to disability. A special issue of
Housing Studies on 'Housing quality, disability
and domesticity' (2004) shows that 'For
many disabled people, the physical design of
dwellings is not well suited to their needs for
access into, and ease of movement about and
use of, domestic spaces. Rather most domes-
tic design is premised on the production of
dwelling spaces to facilitate use by people
without bodily impairment' (Imrie, 2004a:
685). Not only has domestic design rarely
focused on bodily impairment, but neither
have housing studies nor cultural studies of
home. As Rob Imrie argues, 'a person's
feelings about, and experiences of, the home
cannot be dissociated from their corporeality
or the organic matter and material ofthe body'
(Imrie, 2004b: 745; see also Imrie, 2005).
Other research has focused on the home,
housing, health and home-based care (see, for
example, Milligan, 2003; Smith et at, 2004;
Easterlow and Smith, 2004; Robson, 2004).
In a different context, Ruth Fincher (2004)
also explores the ways in which domestic
architecture and design are shaped by, and
reproduce, particular inclusions and exclu-
sions. Drawing on interviews with high-rise
housing developers in Melbourne, Fincher
argues that 'interpretations of gender are
entwined in developers views of the appro-
priate life-course stage of the residents of
inner-city high-rise buildings' (2004: 327).
Four key themes run throughout the develop-
ers narratives: the emergence in the antipodes
of a 'European 'lifestyle' of high-rise resi-
dence for the affluent; that living in a high-rise
Alson Blunt 507
suits an absence of family; that suburban
homes, unlike high-rise residences in the inner
city, remain the place for families; and that
women living alone are seen to require partic-
ular protection in the form of secure housing
(for recent books on suburban residence, see
Chow, 2003; Hayden, 2003; Duncan and
Duncan, 2004b).
Other research on idealized designs and
embodied domesticity has focused on partic-
ular spaces within the home, notably the
kitchen. In his work on British domestic
modernities, for example, Mark Llewellyn
(2004a) discusses the kitchen designs of the
housing consultant Elizabeth Denby and the
Modern architect Jane Drew, and the ways in
which they applied modernist principles of
scientific efficiency in an attempt to rational-
ize the gendered spaces of domestic work
(see also Freeman, 2004; Hand and Shove,
2004; van Caudenberg and Heynen, 2004).
Yet 'the experience of the kitchen was some-
what different from the theory' (Llewellyn,
2004a: 55). In his study of Kensal House in
London, Llewellyn (2004b) explores lived
experiences alongside the'envisioned spaces'
ofthe first housing estate inspired by Modern
architecture to be built in Britain. Opened in
1936, Kensal House was designed as an
'urban village, whereby 'modern urban living
[would] have the connectedness and sense of
community offered by village life' (Llewellyn,
2004b: 233; see also Bayliss, 2003, on council
cottage estates and a sense of community in
interwar London). Elizabeth Denby was
employed as housing consultant, and the
kitchens at Kensal House were designed
according to her Modernist principles:
'Modern architects argued that the kitchen
should be a machine for cooking in, but this
small, modern, and efficient space, the heroic
ideal of the architects, completely overlooked
working-class social practice' (Llewellyn,
2004b: 240).
The gendered space of the kitchen is also
an important focus of work by Justine Lloyd
and Lesley Johnson (Lloyd and Johnson,
2004; Johnson and Lloyd, 2004) on the
508 Culturalgeography
postwar home and the Australian housewife
from 1940 to 1960 (for another study of the
figure ofthe housewife in relation to the fam-
ily and nation, but this time in postwar Italy,
see Tasca, 2004). They argue that 'The object
of new technologies for cooking and cleaning
was to eliminate labour, yet they did not nec-
essarily eliminate the figure of the housewife
herself' (Lloyd and Johnson, 2004: 270).
Lloyd and Johnson point to a contradiction in
postwar 'female domestic subjectivity: 'On
the one hand, both state and market dis-
courses suggested that women could sweep
away the elements of traditional, particularly
prewar, home designs that bound them to the
home. On the other, popular magazines also
placed a great deal of emphasis on the look of
things and on looking itself, further inscribing
women's identity within domestic space'
(2004: 251). Janet Floyd (2004) also focuses
on kitchens, but reads a range of more
contemporary 'kitchen texts and contexts'
such as television cookery programmes,
recipe books and performance art to explore
embodied domestic practices. She argues that
the kitchen is a site of work and imagination,
and is a potent site for the negotiation of
gender, class and national identities, which are
often articulated through spatial narratives of
upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside.
The domestic geographies of inside and
outside, and the relationships between design
and embodied practice, have been studied in
other contexts too. Inga Bryden (2004), for
example, focuses on the architectural and
spiritual significance of the traditional court-
yard house, or 'haveli', in Jaipur in northern
India. Drawing on oral history interviews on
the haveli as a gendered and inhabited domes-
tic space, Bryden shows how the Hindu
architectural principle of Vastu Vidya informs
the everyday lives of families within a
particular residence. Vastu Vidya defines the
dimensions and orientation of the house and
the direction of household activities, and a
haveli is designed on a nine-square grid that
dictates internal divisions and the proportion
of open and covered spaces. As Bryden
explains, 'Vastu symbolically and functionally
connects the body of the individual with the
spaces of the home and with a cosmological
context' (2004: 36). Renate Dohmen (2004)
also explores the relationships between
design and embodied practice in India by
focusing on the twice-daily production of
'kolams', or threshold designs, by women in
Tamil Nadu. She studies the acts of design
through a performative reading of the rela-
tionships between the home and the world,
and argues that the designs create a space of
belonging not only for individual women and
their families, but also for the community at
large. As she writes, 'the designs, while referr-
ing to the private sphere of the domestic, are
executed in the public sphere of the road,
making the individual performative act of
drawing a collective affair. ... the presence of
the designs clearly signal "home," "woman"
and "wellbeing" to the wider community'
(Dohmen, 2004: 22).
Research on various forms ofvisual culture
has been particularly important in work on
material cultures within the home. Alongside
other work on art and the home (including
Painter, 2002), geographers have explored the
spatiality of domestic visual culture. For
example, in her research on 'the everyday
viewing of family photographs by a particular
group of mothers', Gillian Rose argues that
family photographs signal both presence and
absence, and stretch domestic space 'through
a relation with people, places and times that are
not in the home at the moment of looking, or
at least if they are, they no longer appear
as they did in the photo' (2003: 15). Divya
Tolia-Kelly (2004a; 2004b) has also studied
the domestic display and use of family photo-
graphs, alongside images of landscape, reli-
gious iconography, and particular home
possessions, in the homes of South Asian
women living in London. Drawing on inter-
views, tours of the home, and discussions
about particularly significant objects and
images, Tolia- Kelly shows that geographies of
home extend far beyond the household,
charting routes and connections between the

past and the present and across diasporic
space (see also Dwyer, 2002, for more on
British Asian geographies ofhome). As Tolia-
Kelly argues, 'These visual cultures operate
beyond the mode of the visual, incorporating
embodied memories of past landscapes and
relationships with pre-migratory lives in
colonial territories' (2004b: 685).
Similarly exploring the material geogra-
phies ofhome both within but also far beyond
the domestic sphere, other researchers have
studied the intersections of production and
consumption (including Patchell, 2002; Leslie
and Reimer, 2003; Reimer and Leslie, 2004),
and the contested spaces of home, neigh-
bourhood, family and nation (Mitchell, 2004).
Deborah Leslie and Suzanne Reimer, for
example, have studied the retailing, marketing
and consumption of household furniture in
Britain and Canada in the 1990s, and argue
that there has been 'a return to the aesthetics
of modernism' (2003: 293). Situating their
research in relation to broader debates about
the modernist suppression of both domestic-
ity and femininity, Leslie and Reimer trace the
multifaceted and ambiguous nature of such a
'return'. Elsewhere, redressing the under-
theorization of home consumption within
wider debates about identity and consump-
tion, Reimer and Leslie explore its role 'in
identity construction within both individual
households as well as different household
groups' (2004: 187). In her study of'monster
houses' built in an 6lite Vancouver suburb -
Shaughnessy Heights - by a wealthy group of
migrants from Hong Kong since the 1980s,
Katharyne Mitchell (2004) traces competing
narratives about citizenship and democracy
that are materialized through this new form of
domestic architecture and debates about
zoning regulations (for more on geography,
law and property, see Varley, 2000; 2002;
Blomley, 2003; 2004a). As Mitchell explains,
'The newly constructed houses contrasted
vividly - in form, structure, scale, aesthetic
and urban sensibility - with the historicist
styles of the existing residential architecture
in its picturesque suburban streetscapes'
Alson Blunt 509
(2004: 145), and prompted bitter debates
about who could claim residence not only in
the neighbourhood ofShaughnessy but also in
the Canadian nation.
III Dwelling
Another important area of research on the
cultural geographies of home has explored
the lived experiences, social relations and
emotional significance ofdomestic life. While
the home can be a place of safety and sec-
urity, it can also be a place of fear and danger,
as shown most clearly by research on domes-
tic violence (including Warrington, 2001;
Meth, 2003). In a paper on homelessness,
space and domestic violence in South Africa,
Paula Meth argues that ideas about home
often remain implicit in research on domestic
violence, and require further interrogation.
She concentrates on assumptions about the
home as a formal material space, the home as
private, and the domicile as home, and argues
that 'Nuanced ideas about the home as differ-
entiated, political, and marginalizing ... need
closer attention within the domestic violence
literature and that 'the variable materiality of
the home needs to be addressed more fully'
(2003: 326).
Other research on the lived experiences of
dwelling has explored the politics ofdomestic-
ity, intimacy and privacy, the intersections of
home, identity and belonging, and the transna-
tional geographies of home. Moving beyond
the separation of public and private spheres,
research on these themes has investigated the
mobile geographies of dwelling and the political
significance of the home. In this section I dis-
cuss two areas of work that have addressed
these themes: postcolonial geographies of
home, nation and empire; and transnational
geographies ofmigration, home and work.
Postcolonial geographical work on home,
nation and empire has explored the material
and imaginative spaces of home, and the con-
tested politics of identity and belonging,
within metropolitan, indigenous, imperial,
settler and diasporic homes. Across a range of
disciplines and contexts, recent research has
510 Culturalgeography
focused on the symbolic and material impor-
tance ofthe home in shaping and reproducing
the ideologies, everyday practices and mater-
ial cultures of imperial power, nationalist
resistance and diasporic resettlement. Rather
than view the home as a private space that
remains separate and distinct from public pol-
itics, this research has shown that the home
itself is intensely political, both in its internal
intimacies and through its interfaces with the
wider world. Both within and beyond geogra-
phy, recent research has explored the ways in
which the symbolic and material importance
of the home in fashioning both nation and
empire has been embodied by women, partic-
ularly as wives and mothers.
Three examples of work on the cultural
geographies of home for women in India
illustrate this point. In her research on the
repatriation of British women who had lived
for many years in India before and at
Independence, Georgina Gowans contrasts
their imaginative geographies of home with
the difficulties of resettlement, particularly at
a time of rationing, economic hardship and
decolonization (Gowans, 2001; 2002; 2003).
My work on Anglo-Indian women in the 50
years before and after Independence explores
the spatial politics of home on domestic,
national and diasporic scales for a distinct
community of mixed descent. Domestic
spaces, embodied by Anglo-Indian women
and by memories of an imperial forefather,
were shaped by, and also helped to shape,
wider political discourses about home, iden-
tity and nationality. The mixed descent of
Anglo-Indians was both manifested and
erased by their dual identification with Britain
as fatherland and India as motherland (Blunt,
2002). These ideas about home and nation-
ality were reproduced and resisted on a
domestic scale, and were mobilized in an
attempt to establish an independent home-
land in the 1930s (Blunt, 2003a; see also
Blunt, 2003b; 2005 for more on the migration
ofAnglo- Indians to Britain and Australia after
Independence). Finally, Stephen Legg (2003)
has examined the importance of the home in
the anti-imperial nationalist struggle in Delhi
from 1930 to 1947, highlighting 'the ways in
which women achieved agency in a national-
ist movement that, while encouraging female
participation, attempted to spatially delimit
this activity to the home' (2003: 7). As Legg
shows, 'women helped to politicize the home
and assert their agency in a space often
read as one of silence and subjection' (2003:
23) by, for example, organizing their homes as
unofficial political headquarters, and wearing
homespun cloth, or 'khadi', which was part
of Gandhi's campaign to replace cheap
European imports with Indian-made goods.
The mobile and politicized geographies of
dwelling have also been important themes in
research on migration, home and work.
Research on the migration of predominantly
female domestic workers and the implications
of migration for home and family life show
that the cultural geographies of home are
shaped by political and economic processes,
and that domestic spaces are inextricably
bound to global inequalities. Geraldine Pratt's
work on Filipina domestic workers in Canada
interweaves a critical engagement with
poststructuralist feminist theory with detailed
empirical work in collaboration with the
Philippine Women Centre in Vancouver
(2004; see also Pratt, 2003/4, which is part of
a special issue of BC Studies on domestic
spaces, and Silvey, 2004a and 2004b, on
Indonesian domestic workers in Saudi
Arabia). Pratt shows that the migration of
Filipina domestic workers is racialized as well
as gendered, whereby 'Filipinas are discur-
sively constructed as housekeepers, with infe-
rior intellects and educations relative to
European nannies' (2004: 56), and are paid
significantly less than their European counter-
parts as a result. Pratt also describes the
difficulties of 'home-making' for Filipina
domestic workers who, as part of the Live-in
Caregiver programme, reside with their
employers. In a different context, Rosie Cox
and Rekha Narula (2003; see also Williams
and Bali2, 2004) analyse the 'home rules'
that constrain au pairs living with families in

Britain. Although the agreement between a
group of European countries specifies that au
pairs should be treated as part of the family,
various rules about the use ofrooms, whether
guests are permitted and eating practices
shape a range of'quasi-familial relations' (Cox
and Narula, 2003: 333). As Cox and Narula
explain, 'Like relationships within " real fami-
lies, false kin relations in au pair employing
households are not equal and rules that con-
trol space and behaviour within the home are
an important way in which power relations
are expressed and reinforced' (2003: 343).
Other research has investigated the
transnational geographies ofhome and family
life for domestic and other migrant workers.
This is a prominent theme in papers by Asis et
at. (2004) and by Mack (2004) in a special
issue of the Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography on the migration of southeast
Asian women. Drawing on interviews in the
Philippines and Singapore, Asis et al. study
'how migrant women and their family mem-
bers define and negotiate family ideals, gender
identities and family relationships, given the
family's transnational configuration' (2004:
199). They explore the ways in which family
ties are recast and relocated for domestic
workers, whereby 'The Filipino transmigra-
tion experience has "unbounded" the family
in several ways - by making it necessary to
maintain family ties astride borders and across
space, by expanding "family" to include kin
many times removed, or by regarding non-kin
as "family" based on "family-like" relation-
ships (2004: 212). Focusing on ideas of home
and family, Jennifer Mack has studied the
ways in which young Indonesian female
factory workers on Batam Island, an export-
processing zone close to Singapore, form
their own notions of family to create 'certain
freedoms [and] opportunities for micro-
resistance'. Doing so, 'Their homes become
spaces of release from both parental family
and transnational structures as well as their
own expectations' (2004: 174) whereby
'female factory workers [on Batam Island]
have resisted total domination from within
Alison Blunt 511
the system by claiming for themselves the
very terrain - "home" - that was previously
used to control them' (2004: 177).
IV Cohabitation
In this final section, I turn to geographical
work on the home that has traced the entan-
glements of nature and culture. My title is
inspired by Steve Hinchliffes account of the
politics of inhabitation, in which he writes
that 'Inhabiting is a more than human affair.
Equally, inhabitation is not simply a matter of
adding in non-humans' (2003: 207; see also
Whatmore, 2002). In this section, I consider
human and nonhuman cohabitation in rela-
tion to the philosophy and ethics ofdomestic-
ation and within the space of the private
garden.
In a paper on the ethics of the domesti-
cated environment, Roger King writes that
'Environmental ethics must continue . . . to
find ways to loosen the hold of the wild-
domesticated dualism and to embrace study
ofthe human-made artificial world, as well as
wild nature' (2003: -7). King argues that 'an
ethics of the domesticated environment is an
essential part ofenvironmental ethics', and 'is
internal to the development of ecological
responsibility' (2003: 13). As Peder Anker
(2003) notes, the term 'ecology' has its
etymological roots in the term 'oikos' or
house. Anker argues that 'oikos is not merely
a vague metaphor for ecology, but that built
households provide a key to understanding
the household of nature' (2003: 131). He
describes the homes and households of three
philosophers whose work has been highly
influential in environmental ethics and his-
tory: the American philosopher Henry David
Thoreau, the American ecologist Aldo
Leopold and the Norwegian deep ecologist
Arne Ness. As Anker writes, 'their views
on the household of nature stand in direct
relationship with their respective homes. The
language they used to describe nature is
thus understood in the context of the archi-
tectural language of their respective cabins'
(2003: 131).
512 Culturalgeography
Maria Kaika (2004) is also concerned with
the relationships between nature and the
home. Through a focus on water, she investi-
gates 'the material versus the ideologically
constructed boundaries between "the natu-
ral" and "the domestic" space, and examines
the ways in which nature became 'scripted as
"'the other" to the private space of the bour-
geois home in western societies' (2004: 266).
Kaika argues that 'the dwelling places of
modernity are hosts of the uncanny in their
very structure' (2004: 281), as shown by the
simultaneous need and denial of socionatural
processes within the home. During moments
of crisis, she argues, the networks, pipes and
other material manifestations of the connec-
tions between 'natural and 'domestic' space
surface as 'the domestic uncanny' (2004:
266). According to Kaika, 'Exploring the
uncanny materiality of'the other in the form
ofthe invisible metabolized nature or technol-
ogy networks points at the social construc-
tion of the separation between the natural
and the social, the private and the public'
(2004: 283).
Other research on the domestic entangle-
ments of nature and culture has concentrated
on the space of the garden, the embodied
practices of gardening, and horticultural
agency. Recent research on gardens and
gardening has been rich and wide-ranging,
including publications on the garden in art
(Postle et aL, 2004); landscape and transcul-
turation in Japanese gardens in Edwardian
Britain (Tachibana et aL, 2004); the relation-
ships between property, boundaries and
public and private gardening (Blomley, 2004a;
2004b); and the meanings that people attach
to gardens and to gardening (Brook, 2003;
Bhatti and Church, 2004). In addition to
these studies, other work on gardens and
gardening has been inspired by actor-network
theory. In his paper on 'People, plants and
performance', for example, Russell Hitchings
(2003) explores the relationships between
eight gardeners and the plants in their garden,
studying 'how human and non-human actors
worked together in the process of creating a
garden and how these processes informed the
human conceptions of these gardens' (2003:
102). This is part of a larger research project
on 'the changing material agencies and
entities that find their ways into the domestic
gardens of London', which has focused on
four specific contexts: 'the London garden
centre, the garden designer's studio, the
designed garden and the experienced
gardener's garden' (Hitchings and Jones,
2004: 8). As this work shows, human and
nonhuman agency shapes the space of the
domestic garden, providing important and
challenging insights for studying various
cohabitations at home and beyond.
V Conclusion
The editors ofthe new journal Home Cultures
state, as part of the journal's aims and scope,
that: 'Whether as a concept or a physical
place, "home" is a highly fluid and contested
site of human existence that reflects and
reifies identities and values. The rich diversity
ofwork by cultural geographers on residence,
dwelling and cohabitation not only attests
to the importance of the home as a site of
geographical analysis, but has also begun to
trace the complex entanglements of nature
and culture, and of human and nonhuman
agency, in shaping the domestic sphere.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robyn Dowling and Ann
Varley for their help as I prepared this report.
Note
1. For a bibliography on domestic space, visit
www. sfu. cal space! Domesticindex.htm,
which is an 'interdisciplinary research site on
houses, homes and gardens' based at the
Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser
University, BC, Canada.
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