Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture. Questions about meanings of 'home' and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about 'home': the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; 'media home' imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of 'homes of tomorrow' and digital smart homes. A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies"

Spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, this book investigates how home is imagined, staged and experienced in western culture. Questions about meanings of ‘home’ and domestic culture are triggered by dramatic changes in values and ideals about the dwellings we live in and the dwellings we desire or dread. Deborah Chambers explores how home is idealised as a middle-class haven, managed as an investment, and signified as a status symbol and expression of personal identity. She addresses a range of public, state, commercial, popular and expert discourses about ‘home’: the heritage industry, design, exhibitions, television, social media, home mobilities and migration, smart technologies and ecological sustainability. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research including cultural history and cultural geography, the book offers a distinctive media and cultural studies approach supported by original, historically informed case studies on interior and domestic design; exhibitions of model homes; TV home interiors; ‘media home’ imaginaries; multiscreen homes; corporate visions of ‘homes of tomorrow’ and digital smart homes. A comprehensive and engaging study, this book is ideal for students and researchers of cultural studies, cultural history, media and communication studies, as well as sociology, gender studies, cultural geography and design studies.

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.

House and home are words routinely used to describe where and how one lives. This book challenges predominant definitions and argues that domesticity fundamentally satisfies the human need to create and inhabit a defined place in the world. Consequently, house and home have performed numerous cultural and ontological roles, and have been assiduously represented in scripture, literature, art, and philosophy. This book presents how the search for home in an unpredictable world led people to create myths about the origins of architecture, houses for their gods, and house tombs for eternal life. Turning to more recent topics, it discusses how writers often used simple huts as a means to address the essentials of existence; modernist architects envisioned the capacity of house and home to improve society; and the suburban house was positioned as a superior setting for culture and family. Throughout the book, house and home are critically examined to illustrate the perennial role and capacity of architecture to articulate the human condition, position it more meaningfully in the world, and assist in our collective homecoming.

This book presents fourteen contributions by authors examining the importance of dwellings and local communities in people's everyday lives. The volume explores the ways in which home is created both ideally and practically, at levels ranging from individual housing units to neighborhoods and public spaces.