Changing Coastline

Challenging Notions of Home

Popular notions of a home conjure images of stability, safety, and permanence. Relocating a house challenges these notions by moving from the site that is imprinted with the domestic memory of home to a new location that will provide the foundation for these associations to reestablish. In order to preserve these associations and be able to continue living in the house it must be relocating to a new site that will be less affected by threatening forces like erosion.

Traditional conceptions of home are rooted in the house rather than the site where the house formerly existed. This is contrary to the ways in which place-making typically occurs. Keith Basso in his ethnography, Wisdom Sits in Places articulates that for the Western Apache community, the physical site is where the meaning resides for the community regardless of how it may change. A place has a permanent narrative that is stamped onto the landscape. Basso argues that when a place is transformed and there is a “lack of match” between what it used to be from what it is now, the social value and history surrounding the place remains the same (1996: 14). This model of placemaking establishes the physical site to be the nexus for its significance, which differs from how residents on the Cape socially construct home-related space.

Setha Low theorizes that space is both socially constructed and produced. The social construction of space is the symbolic experience of space and is defined as “the actual transformation of space- through people’s social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material setting- into scenes and actions that convey symbolic meaning.” The social production of space is the “physical creation of the material setting” (Low 1999: 862), which differs from constructed space because it is the physical manifestation of how society is spatialized.

In moving a house the space that is socially constructed around home is not invested in the produced space of its former location but in the structure itself and more abstractly in the space associated with the home, despite structural changes that the home may undergo while being moved. For example, before the aid of more modern moving technology, the practice of dismantling a home and then reconstructing it in another location was a more common practice. In such a scenario, the physical site would have changed and the structural purity of the structure was tampered with by taking it apart, albeit to put it back together in as close to its original form as possible. Rather than diminish the cultural value of the house, such a process actually embeds significance in the structure. The result is a house reassembled in a new location, yet the space continues to be socially constructed as the same home. By being relocated the house is further reinforced as a home because it has gone through this process in order to reclaim being a securely situated structure. Additionally, these moved homes ascend to a higher level of cultural value because they have undergone a process that is important to the Cape’s architectural history.

There is an effort to acknowledge the historical legacy behind many of these properties that have been moved. As one of the first places settled by Europeans in North America, the Cape has many historic structures with rich histories, having existed in many locations and in different permutations. With such a prevalence of older homes, there is an effort by the community to herald these architectural histories. This is communicated implicitly via shared community knowledge as well as explicitly by visible signifiers like the placement of plaques. Throughout Provincetown one can find blue and white plaques at the entrances of properties. These plaques commemorate homes that have been moved via barges from Long Point. This commemoration typifies the way in which the value of a property increases because it has been moved and that the sense of place is carried over to the property in its new location.