Editorial special issue: House, home and dwelling

Abstract

The aim of this special issue is to further our understanding of 'house', 'home' and 'dwelling' by presenting five empirical studies that investigate different aspects of these concepts. All three are complex, multi-faceted and multi-layered concepts, whose diverse connotations are often used interchangeably. For example, the word home is used for the physical structure of the house, for the meanings attached to the house, as well as for the process of homemaking. From an analytical point of view this is undesirable, since we require our concepts to be as unambiguous as possible. Therefore, in this introductory paper, the guest editors present a conceptual framework for studying house, home and dwelling that is based on the fundamental distinction between an environmental object and the affordances attached to it. The studies presented in this special issue investigate different aspects of house, home and dwelling, but they all use this conceptual framework and share the same theoretical perspective on people-dwelling relations. And, although each of the papers has its own merits, together they demonstrate that the conceptual framework is an effective tool for dismantling the concepts of house, home and dwelling. © 2011 The Author(s).