Shared Flats in Madrid: Accessing and Analysing Migrants’ Sense of Home

Abstract

Many migrants opt for shared accommodation as a way of coping with the shortage of affordable housing in large cities. As a distinct type of co-housing, flat sharing has been described as one of the many forms of housing precariousness, and even as a type of homelessness. This chapter describes a series of substantive and methodological issues arising from an ethnographic study conducted with Peruvian migrants in Madrid. It examines how people produce a sense of home in the context of sharing an apartment, and how this process is related or not to the act of dwelling in a particular flat. In doing so, it argues that dwelling in a given place and developing a sense of home are closely related, but do not always go hand in hand. The (in)congruence between living in a given place and evoking feelings of home depends on the role that dwellers play within the shared household and the degrees of control that they have over different settings within the flat. The usage of the domestic space and the ways in which its settings become compartmentalised constitute entry points to methodological issues emerging from the study of dwelling with strangers.