Returning Is Not the Same as Going Home

Reflections on the World Cities Report 2026, displacement, and the phenomenology of home

The recently published World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis, Pathways to Action offers a stark assessment of the state of global housing. According to UN-Habitat, as many as 3.4 billion people worldwide now live without secure, safe, or adequate housing. The report describes a world shaped by spiralling housing costs, displacement, informal urbanisation, climate vulnerability and deepening inequality. Yet among the statistics and policy recommendations lies a quieter, more revealing observation: “a home encompasses complex social, economic, and psychological dimensions and outcomes.” 

It is an important acknowledgement because modern housing debates often reduce home to economics, infrastructure or supply. Homes become “units”, “stock”, “assets” or “deliverables”. However, anyone who has worked with displaced communities knows that the loss of home is never simply the loss of shelter. It is the loss of familiarity, continuity, memory, identity and social belonging. The destruction of home destabilises not only where people live, but how they experience the world itself.

I was reminded of this repeatedly while working on Housing, Land and Property (HLP) issues in Iraq with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in 2017. Over several months, I visited displacement camps, unfinished buildings occupied by internally displaced families, and damaged neighbourhoods in and around Mosul and Erbil. Families spoke of destroyed houses, confiscated documents, dangerous roads, unexploded devices hidden in homes, missing relatives and fears of returning. Yet beneath these practical concerns was another layer of anxiety that was harder to define. People were not only displaced geographically. They had become detached from the spatial and emotional worlds that had once given meaning to everyday life.

Again and again, displaced families revealed an important distinction. When asked whether they wished to “return”, many hesitated or answered no. Fear, insecurity and uncertainty weighed heavily on them. Yet when asked whether they wished to “go home”, the answer was almost always yes. The difference between those two responses is profound. Returning is an administrative process. Going home is something altogether more human.

This distinction has long been explored within phenomenology, particularly in the work of thinkers such as Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Gaston Bachelard and Eugène Minkowski. Although writing decades ago, their reflections on lived space and human dwelling feel remarkably relevant in an era increasingly shaped by displacement and urban instability.

In Human Space, Bollnow argues that human beings do not simply occupy abstract geometric space. We live within emotionally structured environments that provide orientation, protection and stability. The home acts as a centre of existential security, separating the familiarity of the interior from the uncertainty of the outside world. Conflict destroys this relationship. Displacement is therefore not simply movement from one location to another, but the collapse of a person’s spatial centre.

This was visible everywhere in Iraq. Families living in camps or unfinished buildings were often physically safe, yet remained psychologically unsettled. Women heading households after the disappearance or death of male family members spoke not only of economic hardship but of fear, disorientation and insecurity. Even when accommodation was available, it rarely restored the deeper conditions associated with home: privacy, continuity, dignity and control over everyday life.

The World Cities Report itself acknowledges some of this reality. It notes that displacement destroys “livelihoods, shattered families, disrupted social networks and lasting psychological impacts.” Yet contemporary housing policy still tends to frame reconstruction in predominantly technical terms. Governments and aid agencies understandably focus on rebuilding infrastructure, restoring services, clarifying land tenure and facilitating return. These are essential tasks. However, post-conflict environments repeatedly demonstrate that rebuilding structures alone does not necessarily rebuild home.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored this idea beautifully in The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the house is not merely a functional shelter but a repository of memory and imagination. Homes accumulate emotional meaning through the routines and rituals of everyday life. Bedrooms, staircases, kitchens, corners and windows all become saturated with personal memory. Home, in this sense, is deeply intimate.

This intimacy makes the spatial consequences of violence particularly enduring. During the Iraq assessment, local people repeatedly described how schools, public buildings and civic spaces had been used during ISIS occupation for interrogation, torture and execution. After liberation, many of these same buildings were expected to return to ordinary civic functions. Schools would reopen, meetings would resume, and aid agencies would occupy municipal buildings once again. Yet these spaces had been transformed psychologically. Their meanings had changed.

The report observed that such buildings risk becoming “an everyday reminder of the conflict, thus perpetuating the trauma and social hostility.” This remains one of the most overlooked dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction. Architecture is never neutral. Buildings absorb memory. A school associated with disappearance or torture cannot simply become ordinary again because a conflict has officially ended. People continue to inhabit the emotional residue of violence long after the physical fighting stops.

The psychiatrist and phenomenologist Eugène Minkowski helps explain why. His work explored how trauma alters lived experience, including the experience of space itself. Fear contracts the world. Streets, thresholds and neighbourhoods become psychologically charged. Space no longer feels open or familiar but uncertain and threatening.

This atmosphere was evident among many displaced communities in Iraq. Families feared returning to roads, checkpoints, neighbours, militia groups and even their own homes. Some worried about hidden explosives. Others feared accusations of collaboration or revenge. Many had little information about whether their homes still existed at all. Displacement created a condition of prolonged uncertainty in which people were physically suspended between places, unable fully to return yet unable fully to settle elsewhere.

The World Cities Report 2026 rightly argues that the housing crisis must be understood more holistically. It calls for approaches that move beyond narrow numerical targets and instead consider affordability, security, participation, inclusion and social resilience. This shift is welcome. However, post-conflict experience suggests the challenge goes even deeper. Housing policy cannot fully succeed if it misunderstands what home actually is.

This matters because peacebuilding itself is deeply spatial. Stability is not achieved solely through treaties, elections or economic recovery. It is also shaped by whether people feel safe enough to inhabit everyday spaces again. Reconstruction involves rebuilding trust, familiarity and shared social life as much as rebuilding walls.

One of the most striking things about the unfinished buildings occupied by displaced families around Erbil was the determination of people to create some sense of home despite impossible conditions. Concrete shells intended for future commercial or residential development had become improvised domestic worlds. Families partitioned rooms with blankets, created cooking areas, cared for children and attempted to establish routines amid instability. Even in displacement, people continued trying to produce home.

Perhaps this is ultimately what the global housing debate must confront. Home is not simply inherited through ownership or restored through reconstruction. It is continuously produced through everyday acts of dwelling, memory, care and social connection.

The World Cities Report 2026 is important because it recognises that housing is about more than shelter. Yet the experiences of displacement in places such as Iraq remind us that the real challenge extends beyond rebuilding cities. A person may return to a district without recovering any sense of belonging. A rebuilt house may remain psychologically uninhabitable. A city may physically recover while continuing to carry unresolved trauma within its streets, schools and homes.

Returning, after all, is not the same as going home.

Written by Frazer Macdonald Hay

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