Paper short abstract:

With a general interest in homing in the context of mobility and migration, I look at the food cultures of Bad Godesberg as a highly polarised urban district. I show how eating in public places contributes to homing processes, using maps, sketches and situational analysis.

Paper long abstract:

Many urban districts face different and heterogenous groups of people with a life course shaped by mobility and migration. Here the process of relating to public places, or 'homing', can provoke conflict. To take a closer look on how homing proceeds, I investigate eating as a highly complex, but weakly regulated activity of everyday life (Warde 2016). My main argument is that non-domestic eating contributes to homing processes on different levels. As a member of the project "Urban Food Cultures and Integrative Practices" I observe why people in the district of Bad Godesberg go to certain places for eating out and avoid others. Also I am interested in what they think about where certain groups eat and where they don't.

Based on situational analysis (Clarke 2005) and critical cartography, on the one hand I register places of non-domestic eating on a map myself. On the other hand, I use sketching interviews asking for a description of the district as well as certain gastronomical places. Enriched by participant observation I compare those three levels of general district mapping, subjective district mapping and place sketching. Hereby I get a "deep map"-like impression (Roberts) of the food cultures and their relation to homing processes in the highly mobile urban district of Bad Godesberg.

Clarke, A. 2005: Situational Analysis. Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn, London

Roberts, L. 2016: Deep Mapping and Spatial Anthropology. Humanities, 5 (1), 5.

Warde, A. 2016: The Practice of Eating, Cambridge