ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to identify an ongoing alternation between a material form and social life, and in Benny and Louise influential approach to material culture, building on a Hegelian dialectics, Daniel Miller has importantly pointed to the processes in which ‘things’ are socialized. It presents a double course: while tracing the origins of the European leisure caravan and its material development, it looks at how caravans are designed, manufactured, marketed and sold in caravanning industry with a particular focus on Sweden. The historical development of the caravan reveals a material connection between military technology and the mobile dwelling. Touring caravan production increased again in the 1950s UK, and the 1950s and 60s were a blooming period for an industry that by was also well established in other European countries. A caravan spends more or less five days on the production line, where all the different pieces and parts of the caravan are joined and built into a new mobile dwelling.
