Paper short abstract:

Home is a temporal process. It changes in time. In this presentation different manifestations of temporality are analyzed in the housing experiences in the Third Age. What is the relationship between housing and experiences of home? What makes housing feel homely?

Paper long abstract:

The data consist of four group discussions which took place in Finnish South Ostrobothnia and in Helsinki in 2014. The data were collected through two written assignments, one of which was a written question, the other, an improvisation exercise. The data were transcribed and divided into clusters on the basis of keywords. Ten groups were differentiated, and a sexpartite ideal model of home was then constructed on the basis of the clusters.

People understand their homes as a series of events. When talking about themselves, people use memories and stories to structure temporality and their own existence. One's own life career is often structured as a series of moves. The main attention is not on the event of moving but on the key moments in each home. Consecutive homes help us remember what happened at each stage of life. History follows us also as inheritance. Buildings, movables and land property may be inherited property and therefore dear to the people owning it. Multispatiality, too, has a temporal dimension. It is built on consecutive place experiences. Supragenerational attachment often happens with a holiday home. Home is one of the most important places of nostalgia. Everyday objects and their use are key carriers of collective memory. Dressing, eating and ways of cooking may transfer the home feeling to new landscapes, so that a completely strange environment still feels like home.