There is a line of cases relating to the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus where this has been tested. Applicants include people who used to live there, and who have been denied the chance to return. Some of them can demonstrate continuing formal ownership of a specific property, or past occupation of it, but others are only able to claim that the region is, generally speaking, their home.
In Loizidou v Turkey, no. 15318/89, 18 December 1996, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights said that (para 66):
it would strain the meaning of the notion "home" in Article 8 (art. 8) to extend it to comprise property on which it is planned to build a house for residential purposes. Nor can that term be interpreted to cover an area of a State where one has grown up and where the family has its roots but where one no longer lives.
By contrast, the similar case of Demades v Turkey (no. 16219/90, 31 July 2003) was distinguished from Loizidou "since, unlike Mrs Loizidou, the applicant actually had a home in Kyrenia, albeit a secondary one" (para 35). He had not been there since 1974 and it was never his primary residence. But its past use as a holiday home, decades prior, was enough to engage Article 8.
It appears that if somebody has an actual foothold in respect of some property, then Article 8 arguments can follow. In that sense there would be no need to also claim connection with a wider locality. Absent that foothold, the Court has not been willing to say that your "home" can be some broad swathe of territory where you do not in fact live. In Demopoulos v Turkey (no. 46113/99, 1 March 2010), they summarized (para 136, citations omitted):
The notion of "home" has been interpreted dynamically by this Court; however, care must be taken to respect the intentions of the authors of the Convention as well as common sense. Thus, it is not enough for an applicant to claim that a particular place or property is a "home"; he or she must show that they enjoy concrete and persisting links with the property concerned. The nature of the ongoing or recent occupation of a particular property is usually the most significant element in the determination of the existence of a "home" in cases before the Court. However, where "home" is claimed in respect of property in which there has never been any, or hardly any, occupation by the applicant or where there has been no occupation for some considerable time, it may be that the links to that property are so attenuated as to cease to raise any, or any separate, issue under Article 8.
From other jurisprudence, a "home" can include a place where someone does not own the land, or even where their occupation of it is contrary to law - this has been tested in several cases involving Roma or Traveller people. In most instances that's been about people who have occupied land (whether owned by them or not) and where authorities have sought to evict them because of non-compliance with laws regarding planning permission, camping, environmental issues, etc.
For example, Buckley v UK (no. 20348/92, 29 September 1996) dealt with someone being forced to move her caravans from land which she owned, to a different nearby plot of land. The Court found that Article 8 was engaged from the fact that she had settled occupation of the original site, but that the government's action was proportionate in view of the "general interest of conforming to planning policy". What that shows in relation to this question is that even for someone who lives a semi-nomadic lifestyle, Article 8 is considered for their occupation of a specific place. If it were otherwise then a government might say: "evicting you isn't an Article 8 violation, because the whole surrounding locality is just as much your 'home' as this spot". So overall, a "home" for Article 8 falls to be argued on the basis of occupying some specific place, not a general area.
