Making-Unmaking-Remaking Home in Lockdown Margate

Set in Dalby Square and Gardens, Margate, a vulnerable community disproportionately impacted by Covid-19, this project explores and maps home as process and network in a COVID 19 context using a transdisciplinary methodology drawing on law, history, architecture, health and housing studies. In this project home is understood as simultaneously bounded and networked, a space and a set of processes and relationships. We utilize the focus on home networking and home making-unmaking-remaking that has been the inevitable consequence of 'lockdown' to unpack the taken-for-granted understanding of home as a safe haven and explore issues around social and environmental regulation, inequalities, marginalization, vulnerability and dislocation as they have been intensified by COVID-19. We situate these in, somewhat paradoxical, historical understandings of Margate as a 'haven of health', and develop a toolkit for a rich and productive understanding of contemporary home making, unmaking and remaking during a global pandemic.