Home is where I lay down my hat? The complexities and functions of home for internal migrants in contemporary China

- Dominant and internalized perceptions of migrants' home are critically examined.
- Connecting ancestral home, urban home locations, and home materiality in constructing home.
- Mobility, flexibility, and home change important to migrants' urban identity and belonging.
- Engaging multiple innovative methodologies is critical in studying migrants' homes.

This paper examines how the changing and complex notions of home in the context of China's internal migration can influence migrants' belonging and identity formations in the urban context. Tracing the evolution of migrants' conceptualization of home through three interrelated perspectives - the ancestral home (laojia), the city home, and the material home - it is becoming possible to challenge the dominant perceptions of migrants' home as an emblematic representation of their precarious urban position and its traditional association with formal and fixed alignment between place and identity. Employing a translocal approach to study the complexities and functions of migrants' home, this paper expose migrants' alternative home-making practices, highlighting their strong connection to flexibility and mobility, and the making of migrants' home a meaningful space for subjective transformations, within the limiting environment of powerful socio-spatial urban regimes. Reexamining the reliance on the traditional established connection between place, home, and identity, these new conceptualizations are important not only to better understand the development of migrants' urban identity and belonging, but can also as be used as a practical element in devising future urban development policies that will better address migrants' needs and integration into urban space and society.