Creating Home Territories During Housing Relocation: Affects and Activity Rhythms

ABSTRACT This paper expands understandings of home by developing the concept of home territory to comprehend the experiences of older adults who experienced housing relocation and how they reconstituted a sense of home. The study draws on the experiences of 41 older adults who underwent the Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme (SERS) in Singapore. Our conceptualisation of home territory argues that homemaking can extend across multiple locations, other than the old and new home. Home territory emphasises how a person establishes home through processes of territorialisation, reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. We argue that older adults' experiences of home territorialisation are constituted through sensory experiences, social connections and the placement of material objects within and outside of their immediate domestic space. Connecting with familiar faces and recreating activity rhythms in the new neighbourhood are referred to as home reterritorialisation processes. Travelling beyond the neighbourhood to engage in everyday activities that help them recapture feelings of nostalgia and familiarity constitutes home deterritorialisation. This broader conceptualisation of home territories reflects the fluidity and expansion of geographical boundaries associated with home space, experienced through affects and rhythmic activities.