Nature of Home

In this fast-driven society, there are a growing number of people who believe that home is an objective existence in common society. People living in urbanized districts are too busy to consider the difference between place and space. Unfortunately, they are losing their connection with their homes. People may ask “So what?” because they overlook the importance of home. In fact, in recent years, a series of researches emphasized that the home is crucial to people in modern society. Thus, it is essential to explore the nature of home in order to study the connection between people, space, and us. Studying features of home enable people to have a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of home. Later one, they can testify the result of studying the nature of home by removing all of such features away from home.

“Do houses equal to home?” Many people may ask such questions at the beginning of this discussion. The answer, surely, is no. In terms of Yi-Fu Tuan’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ideas, home is an extremely important type of place. Places are centers of emotional value where physical needs are satisfied. Compared with space, places are more subjective and emotional. Space will not be able to become place unless people’s experience and emotion give space unique feelings and meanings. People can regard anything, integrated with people’s emotion and experience, as homes. Tuan claims in his book “Place exists at different scales. At one extreme, a favorite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth. ” Therefore, home must be, or composed by, subjective existence.

Before exploring the result of removing all of subjective features away from home, people need to understand what the subjective features of home are and how such features can impact people consciousness and understanding of home. Meanwhile, people have to assure if these features are constant components of physical existence such as houses, or attached factors related to human beings’ activities and experience.

The first word jumped in my head when I was considering the feature of home was uniqueness. In contemporary society, everyone is special because people have distinctive childhoods, interests, majors, or careers. In other words, people enjoy their own unique growth tracks and experiences. People’s homes are part of their uniqueness and identities. Take for example to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: people wish to be recognized and distinguished. Such belief parallels to the idea of Susan Clayton, an environmental psychologist at the College of Wooster. She claims that people’s homes are parts of their self-definition, which is why they do things like decorate their houses. Maslow’s idea and Clayton’s statement support my idea that one of home’s features is uniqueness.

Experience and memory are factors that make people unique and special. Meanwhile, memory itself is another feature of home.