Home Is Where You Park It

Abstract

Living in an automobile is an increasingly common but underexamined experience in the United States. The car provides shelter against the elements of outdoors, but living in the automobile requires a complex set of practices over dispersed space in order to meet basic bodily and social needs. Using accounts of car dwelling found in survival guides, news reports, blogs, and day-in-the-life videos, this article analyzes some of the fundamental tensions between stillness and mobility, private and public, and home and homeless evidenced in the place-making practices of car dwelling. In analyzing the relationship between material arrangements, practices of spatial and social regulation, and identity formation, I argue that while car dwelling cannot be linked to one specific identity or experience. Relying on Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘practicing place’ this article shows how the complex negotiations of place-making expose multiple routes to theorize nonnormative uses of space and materiality and to develop more equitable access to resources.