Dwelling

This article explores how dwelling—a mindful unfolding of
thinking and being within the cosmos as a whole—can offer
a useful lens to look at the deeper layer of mental health
service users’ lived experiences, specifically in regards to the
feeling of ‘being at home’. To do so, this article reflects on how
dwelling has shaped design of a multi-modal research method
—Story Houses—that combines poem writing, working with
materials and interviews in a workshop environment.
Methodological implications of the method are considered in
regards to dwelling in the moment, abstracting time and
space, unfolding memories and thinking through metaphors.
A study with 18 mental health and wellbeing service users, 10
of which were interviewed, looks into the constant unravelling
of seeming opposites like alone/together and explores the
fantastical metaphor ‘sea’. It does so by adapting thematic
analysis to mirror a dwelling lens. As a method, Story Houses
can help create, open up and invite us to dwell in the nonliteral, evocative and ephemeral landscapes of human
existence.

Digital forms of sound manipulation are eroding traditional methods of sound development and transmission, causing a disjuncture in the ontology1 of music. Sound, the ambient phenomenon, is becoming disrupted and decentred by the struggles between long established controls, beliefs and desires as well as controls from within technologized contexts. I posit that music technologies are reshaping concepts of time and space, and digital mastery now appears to be the valued musical knowledge. It is necessary to consider a new paradigm for what it means to be musical-in-the-world. Virilio suggests that, rather than being democratic, technology “has hijacked democracy in a mediatized, claustrophobic world” (2005, 339), contributing to a posthuman condition through the destruction of embodied experience.

Mimarlık, doğa içerisinde doğayla birlikte bir yapma eylemi midir yoksa bütünüyle
doğaya karşı bir tavır mıdır? Doğadan bağımsız, münferit bir birey olmak için mi
mimarlık yapma eylemine ihtiyaç duyarız, yoksa onunla birlikte yaşayabilmek için
mi?
Toplumsal düşüncenin fiziksel karşılığı olarak nitelendirebileceğimiz mimarlık
ürünlerinin doğayla kurduğu ilişkinin temelinde, toplumun doğa düşüncesinin
olduğu varsayımı, çalışmanın ilk çıkış noktasını oluşturmaktadır. Doğa
düşüncesinde 16.-17. yüzyılda başlayan menfi yöndeki değişimlerin mimarlık
nesneleri üzerinde yoğun olarak görünür olduğu 20. yüzyıl modern mimarlığı,
çalışmanın tarihsel kapsamının ilk sınırlarını çizer. Bu tarihsel aralık, özellikle ev-doğa
ilişkisindeki kopmanın ilk örneklerini yoğun bir şekilde barındırması
bakımından da önem arz etmektedir. Bahsedilen kopuşun çalışma içerisinde
incelenen kesitini, mimarlık nesnesinin fiziksel olarak doğadan ayrışmasının yanı
sıra, kullanıcısının doğayla kurduğu ilişkideki ayrışma oluşturur. Bu filtrelemenin
oluşturulması, modern mimarlık pratiğinin, insanın tüm duyularını tasarım girdisi
olarak kullanmıyor olmasından ve kullanıcının doğayla olan ilişkisini görme
eylemiyle sınırlı kılmasından kaynaklanmaktadır.
Modern çağın, görme duyusunun hegemonyası üzerine kurulu olan yapısı,
mimarlık/ev nesnesini kullanan insan öznesi ile doğa arasındaki ilişkinin şeklini
belirlemiş/değiştirmiştir. Bu varsayıma göre, çok-duyulu tasarım anlayışından
uzak, sadece görme duyusunun ihtiyaçlarına yanıt veren bir ev kurgusu “insan”ı
bütünüyle bir tasarım girdisi olarak ele almaz. İnsan varlığının bütün ihtiyaçlarının
göz önünde bulundurulmadığı bir yapıyı mesken olarak tanımlamak güçleşir. Bu
noktada, modern evin ve kullanıcısının, doğayla kurduğu ilişkinin sorgulandığı bu
çalışmaya, başka bir parametre eklenmektedir: Modern çağda meskenin durumu.
Bu bağlamda; çalışmanın doğa, duyular ve mesken olmak üzere üç temel mesneti
vardır.
Çalışmanın temel amacı, 20. yüzyıl modern mimarlık ortamında doğayla ilişki kuran,
kullanıcısının doğayla doğrudan ilişki kurmasını mümkün kılan, mesken ve çokduyulu
mekân olma niteliği taşıyan evin varlığını, günümüz mimarlık düşünce ve
pratiğine referans oluşturması için sorgulamaktır. Ev kurgusunda aranan bu
nitelikler, çalışma içerisinde kavramsal okuma yöntemi aracılığıyla Le Corbusier,
Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright ve Richard Neutra’nın ev mimarlığı üzerinden
incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın sonucunda Neutra evlerinin; modern mimarlık ev
pratiklerinin arasında; doğayla ilişki kuran, kullanıcısının doğayla doğrudan ilişki
kurmasını sağlayan, kullanıcısına çok-duyulu mekân deneyimi yaşatan, klasik
manada özne-nesne kurulumunu sağlayan ve mesken olma özelliğini taşıyan
modern ev örneğinin temsilleri olduğu belirlenmiştir. Neutra’nın insanı ve doğayı
önceleyen mimari tasarım prensiplerinin, düşünce ve eylem düzleminde, günümüz
ev mimarlığı için kavramsal bir temel olarak kullanılması önerilmektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Modern Ev, doğa, mesken, duyu, Richard Neutra

Wandering as Pathscaping, by Vanessa Grasse, presents a practical and theoretical enquiry into a walking and drawing practice grounded in a somatic and dance improvisation informed approach. This is articulated through the author’s experience of walking through two cities without destination, questioning: how to allow a state of wandering, the perceptual processes involved in this state, how these affect navigating, and how the research could reveal an open-ended methodology of practice. Drawing on the notion of ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold, 2011)  and  an ‘active line on a walk’ (Klee, 1953), it proposes wandering as an embodied improvisational practice that engages in a dialogue between welcoming multiplicity and finding containment, as a method to navigate perception, the urban environment and the creative process. Drawing on the attention practices of Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson and Pauline Olivero it looks at the role of attentional and orientational dynamics in wandering; introducing attentional wandering in relation to permeability and responsiveness to indeterminacy. The extent of our here is proposed as a key orientational process in wandering, in which ground is seen as a perceptual model for the visual and aural fields through emphasizing edges and a towards me perception. Through articulating a walking-drawing practice it then proposes wandering as pathscaping; a journeying that, like drawing, welcomes, channels and scapes multiplicity into a path. The paper moves on to consider how the dialogue between flux and containment was reflected in developing a methodology of practice, revealing how the findings layered into three different modes of attention: Ground-Scape-Edges, Inner-Outer Line, Encounters-Synchronicity. These, combined with a selection of scores, are presented as a frame and an open-ended proposition for the practice. It concludes with the proposal that wandering resides in surrendering to both multiplicity and our here, and allowing a flow of inner and outer attentional dynamics in dialogue with our ground orientation to scape our emergent, wandering and unknown path.

Hér er sjónum beint að áhrifum þess áreitis sem felst í daglegu lífi nú á tímum og þeim vanda sem af því skapast. Í því samhengi er fjallað um mikilvægi afdrepa inn á milli í erilsömum heimi hversdagsins og hvaða hlutverki þau gegna í baráttu einstaklingsins fyrir tilvist sinni. Byrjað verður á að greina viðfangsefnið, hvað felist í tilveru mannverunnar, hvað geri hana að sérstæðum einstaklingi og hvað í módernísku samfélagi ógni þessarri sérstöðu. Það leiðir að mannverunni sem einhverskonar mælitæki sem tekur mið af veröldinni í kring um sig samkvæmt eigin skynfærum og fösum og skapar þannig veröld sína út frá sjálfri sér. Ferli sífelldrar endurmótunar sem gengur skilvirknislega fyrir sig ef einstaklingi gefst tóm til að fylga sínum fösum. Að lokum verður komið inn á dvalarstaði, einhverskonar helgistaði sjálfsins, sem gefa kost á að dvelja ljóðrænt, ímynda sér og láta sig dreyma og um þá tekin dæmi sem ljá þessu ferli endurmótunar einstaklingsins gagnvart samhengi sínu umgjörð. Markmið ritgerðarinnar er að freista þess að gera grein fyrir hvað á sér stað í þessum rýmum og þá hvort mögulegt sé að skapa þær aðstæður í samhengi daglegs lífs sem lausn á vandanum. Hvaða eiginleikum staður þurfi að búa yfir svo einstaklingurinn geti fundið þar afhvarf og horfið frá erli samfélagsins.

Matti Suuronen presentó en 1968 el prototipo de casa “Futuro”, un proyecto de cabaña realizada en poliéster reforzado con fibra de vidrio y cuya forma ovalada se enmarca dentro de la corriente artística de los años 70. Con un tamaño de 8 metros de diámetro por 4 metros de altura, la casa podía ser transportada fácilmente gracias a su reducido peso, llegando a ser distribuida a varios de sus destinos mediante helicóptero. De igual manera, las 16 piezas modulares que la componían podían ser cargadas en un camión o tren para ser ensambladas posteriormente en su destino.
El artículo analiza la casa Futuro como paradigma de la arquitectura sin lugar cuya relación con el entorno, tanto por su forma cuasi extraterrestre como por la levedad con la que sus patas se posan en el terreno, es mínima. Su cuerpo de níveo plástico brillante destaca entre el paisaje que la rodea como una nave aterrizada, a veces literalmente, en medio del bosque. Las unidades que a día de hoy siguen en pie son testigos vivos de la primera casa de plástico vendida alrededor del planeta.

Even starting from the purpose of restoring the damage caused by a natural disaster, the post-earthquake reconstructions imply the risk of triggering a set of social disasters that may affect the public health sphere. In the case of the L’Aquila earthquake this risk seems to emerge within the urban planning on two levels of dwelling: at a landscape level, where there has been a change in the shape of the city towards a sprawling-sprinkling process; at an architectural level, on the problematic relationship betwe- en the politics and the poetics of cultural heritage protection and the goal to get restoration works capable to ensure the citizens seismic safety.


Pur partendo dalla finalità di risanare i danni causati da un disa- stro naturale, le ricostruzioni post-sismiche sono esposte al rischio d’innescare una serie di disastri sociali che possono ripercuoter- si sulla sfera della sanità pubblica. Nel caso del terremoto dell’Aquila questo rischio pare delinearsi urbanisticamente su due livelli dell’abitare: a un livello paesaggistico, dove si assiste a un mutamento della forma della città verso la dispersione abitativa; a un livello architettonico, nel problematico rapporto tra le politiche e le poetiche di tutela del patrimonio culturale e l’obiettivo di pervenire a dei restauri che garantiscano la sicurezza sismica dei cittadini.

The book: Non-home. Asociologicalmonograph ofmigrant dwellings is devoted to the phenomenon of migrant dwelling, understood as an apartment usually lent and shared by several unrelated inhabitants. Its social, economic and interpersonal characteristics contrast this phenomenon not only with a typical family home but also with cohabitation, a commune, or a pension. Such a dwelling configuration gains recognition in different countries and perhaps has a chance to become an alternative for typical, omnipresent bourgeois-based standards housing also in Poland. In order to scrutinize a migrant dwelling we try consciously to go around the idea of home (private, familial, comfortable, etc.); the strategy of going-around differs from deconstruction used in art and feminist attempts. Our endeavor consists of seven chapters in which – consecutively – we reconstruct the idea of home, track its presence in sociological researches, and introduce a concept of an non-home which allows us to empirically study migration of social support, space formations, housing practices and self and new communication technologies within and in relation to a migrant dwelling.

"Rozpatrywane w poszczególnych artykułach problemy z zakresu
socjologii zamieszkiwania nie są wyraźnie obecne w polskiej socjologii, co wydaje się, należałoby zmienić i redaktorzy tomu oraz osoby w nim piszące właśnie w tym kierunku zdążają. (…) Przedstawiona do recenzji książka jest jedną z nielicznych publikacji w polskiej socjologii, która porusza problem społecznych praktyk zamieszkiwania. Z tej perspektywy jest to praca potrzebna i winna znaleźć się na polskim rynku wydawniczym”.
(z recenzji prof. nadzw. dr hab. Anny Śliz)"

Identity, place, and a sense of belonging to a specific region are factors which have shaped most twentieth and twenty-first century nature writing throughout Europe. This article argues that German-language nature writing is, however, a special case. Due to the appropriation of the aforementioned concepts in the Nazis’ Blood and Soil doctrine, relations to a national landscape have become problematic for most post-Shoah generation writers. Born into a nation for which belonging and Heimat once were used as a means to justify the genocide of non-Aryan groups, access to an innocent, identificatory approach to nature is cut off. It is therefore no coincidence that both W.G. Sebald in The Alps in the Sea and Peter Handke in Lesson of Montagne Sainte-Victoire turn towards foreign landscape. Instead of pondering upon a specific German or Austrian region they belong to, they describe walks through Corsica and France. By linking their experience of these surroundings to other regions, to history and art, they create a truly European panorama and establish an aesthetics of transient dwelling. The form of the literary essay for which digressions, lengthy contemplations and sudden changes of discourse are typical enables them to combine a set of different perspectives on nature.

Itinerant boat-dwellers ('boaters') on the waterways of London speak about their lives as occurring in a time zone that is separate from the sedentary world around them. 'Boat time' , as boaters call it, is simultaneously slow and unpredictable. The slow aspect of boat time is said to provide a much-needed contrast to the fast and highly choreographed movements of the city surrounding the towpaths. It becomes part of the boaters' rhetoric of difference from, and resistance to, the state and other sedentary elements surrounding them. This article suggests that temporal experiences are a constitutive part of identity, a strategic component of resistance to the sedentary order, and a thread that links the disparate aspects of boaters' own lives aboard.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

This book,  A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), focuses on a wide-ranging phenomenon labelled everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which they live. By geographical world is meant the everyday places, spaces, and environments in which people find themselves. The source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups, small focus groups of students and other interested participants who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience such themes as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of the more than 1,500 personal observations offered in these environmental experience groups, the study identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on movement examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s final section on encounter considers the multifaced ways in which people make attentive contact with their world. Group observations indicate that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer, at least metaphorically, feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

The last section of the book examines lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

This article contributes to phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s call for topoanalysis by examining houses and inhabitation depicted in two works by American writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). The first work considered is “The Hands of God,” a 1939 short story that recounts the defilement of a 300-year-old Basque farmhouse. The second work considered is Bromfield’s last novel, the 1951 Mr. Smith, which depicts the unraveling, pre-World-War-II home life of Wolcott Ferris, a conventional Midwestern, middle-class husband and father. These two works demonstrate how, regularly in his creative efforts, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inhabitants mutually sustain and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times, in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social dissolution.
        The article concludes by considering implications for phenomenological research on houses and homes in the 21st century. The argument is made that, on one hand, inhabitation involves a lived whole unified by its total character. On the other hand, inhabitation involves a lived dialectic founded in a twofold significance involving internal diversity versus external connectedness. In both these inner and outer relationships, there are “sustaining” and “undermining” situations—e.g., the home as a place of comfort and regeneration versus the home as a place of unease, vulnerability, or conflict. Most broadly, the perspective argued for here looks inward toward the uniqueness of particular homes and inhabitations but also recognizes that they are integrally related outwardly to the world beyond, including other places, the broader societal context, and global interconnectedness.

How does food restore the fragmented world of migrants and the displaced? What similar processes are involved in challenging, maintaining or reinforcing divisions between groups coexisting in the same living place? Food Identities at Home and on the Move examines how ‘home’ is negotiated around food in the current worldwide context of uncertainty, mobility and displacement. Drawing on empirical approaches to heritage, identity and migration studies, the contributors analyse the relationship between food and the various understandings of home and dwelling. With case studies on sushi around the world, food as heritage in the Afghan diaspora and Mexican foodways in Chicago, these chapters offer novel readings on the convergence of food and migration studies, the anthropology of space and place and the field of mobility by focusing on how entangled stories of food and home are put on display for constructing the present and imagining the future.

Negli ultimi quindici anni si registra una ripresa di interesse sul tema dell’abitazione collettiva con uno spostamento di attenzione dal dato quantitativo agli aspetti qualitativi e alla sperimentazione architettonica. L’Housing ruota oggi attorno ad alcuni temi prevalenti: la diversificazione dei nuclei familiari, il prevalere della trasformazione sulla realizzazione ex-novo, la moltiplicazione di usi ed esigenze che spingono sempre più alla creazione di spazi flessibili nel tempo. La riflessione su questo tema non si limita all’analisi di qualità e prestazioni del singolo edificio ma considera l’alloggio nel quadro più ampio dell'abitare contemporaneo. Il volume raccoglie e confronta trenta recenti progetti di abitazioni plurifamiliari, estraendo da essi una serie di principi tipologici e spaziali ma anche insediativi e morfologici. Nella prima parte del volume si inquadra dunque la residenza collettiva nei suoi aspetti più generali: dal significato dell’abitare, alla relazione tra housing contemporaneo e storia dell’abitazione popolare, dal rapporto dell’alloggio con lo spazio aperto, al tema del quartiere residenziale. Nella seconda parte si entra invece nel merito del come si affronta oggi un progetto di residenza collettiva, ordinando e sistematizzando invarianti e singolarità di specifici progetti, attraverso la classificazione, la scomposizione di spazi e schemi distributivi, l’integrazione ambientale tra contesto e architetture, descritte analiticamente nella terza parte.

La musique, pour les Autochtones au Québec, joue un rôle fondamental pour l’expression et la consolidation identitaire, la mise en relation interpersonnelle, interculturelle et spirituelle ainsi que pour exercer un pouvoir d’action et de transformation sur soi et le milieu environnant. Cette thèse dresse un panorama de la scène musicale populaire autochtone contemporaine au Québec, en s’attardant plus particulièrement au milieu algonquien du Nord, tout en démontrant un lien de continuité évident avec le sens des traditions musicales et des rassemblements ancestraux. La musique populaire autochtone y est considérée comme un mode d’affirmation identitaire et de relation au monde, la scène de la musique populaire autochtone au Québec comme un réseau relationnel, et les événements musicaux comme des points de rencontre et de convergence (foyers) d’une communauté autochtone s’y reconnaissant et s’y reliant de façons différenciées. Le cadre théorique arrime les concepts de scène dans le contexte de culture populaire, des politiques/poétiques de l’identité, d’intersubjectivité, de résonance, de nomadisme, d’ontologie relationnelle, de poétiques de l’habiter (of dwelling), d’indigénisation et de transformation des identités et des modes d'être au monde autochtones dans le contexte contemporain. Selon les traditions algonquiennes, les actes musicaux servent à s’identifier en tant que personne particulière et membre d’une collectivité et du cosmos ainsi qu’à entretenir des relations avec les autres personnes du cosmos (humains et non humains) afin de vivre bien et de se donner du pouvoir sur soi et son environnement. Cette thèse démontre que les musiques populaires contemporaines et ses événements associés, bien que sous d’autres formes, poursuivent ce sens relationnel et identitaire des traditions musicales ancestrales et de leurs contextes de manifestation. Le réseau contemporain de la scène musicale populaire autochtone est ainsi formé d’espaces investis par les Autochtones de différentes nations, où ils se créent un chez-nous, un « espace à nous » et se redéfinissent des identités. Chanter, notamment dans leur langue, est ainsi un acte d’« habitation » du monde, de cohabitation, de communication, une inscription identitaire dans un environnement ainsi habité et senti.

For Aboriginal people in Quebec, music plays a fundamental role in the consolidation and expression of identity in interpersonal, intercultural and spiritual relationships, but also in terms of personal empowerment. This thesis provides an overview of the contemporary Aboriginal popular music scene in Quebec, focusing more specifically on Algonquian communities and demonstrating continuity with musical traditions and ancestral gatherings. Aboriginal popular music is considered as a way of asserting identity and a relationship to the world; the aboriginal popular music scene in Quebec is presented as a network of relationships, and musical events are seen as focal points of an aboriginal community that connect individuals and groups in differentiated ways. According Algonquian traditions, musical acts are used to identify oneself as a particular person and member of a community and the cosmos as well as to maintain relationships with others in the cosmos (human and
nonhuman). Different forms of musical practice are desirable in order to live well and to empower the self in a particular environment. This thesis demonstrates that contemporary popular music and its associated events, albeit in other forms, are continuing a relational sense of ancestral musical traditions in various performative contexts. The contemporary Aboriginal popular music scene network is forged through spaces invested by Aboriginal people of different nations, where they create a "home", a "space for us", and redefine identity in unexpected ways. Singing, especially in Aboriginal languages, is an act of dwelling and cohabitation in an environment that is lived and felt.

What is the opposite of home? Is it necessarily something 'negative'? Similar questions, far from having a self-evident answer, make for a fruitful entry point for research into the social experience of home. Central to this article is a novel conceptualisation of non-home, against the background of the pre-existing criticisms of the normative, romanticized and de-politicized understandings of home. This article draws from fieldwork on the everyday dwelling experience of migrants and asylum seekers to illustrate the volitional dimension of non-home. Not attaching a sense of home to a dwelling place or set of relationships is not merely consequence of poor housing conditions. It may also involve an active choiceat least at some points of the life course, in certain household conditions. In this sense, nonhome is more than a matter of absence, dispossession, reconfiguration or implosion of home. In questioning the normative view of home as inherently positive and desirable, this conceptualisation highlights the reciprocal interact ion between home and non-home as mutually interdependent constructs.

In recent decades research on migration has taken a “diversity turn”, which focuses on exploring new complexities of social differentiation, people’s competences for getting along in everyday life despite growing differences, and the role of space in shaping these encounters. Recent scholarship, however, has also questioned some of its limits and oversights, particularly around how differences and space are studied and conceived. This article centres on an examination of boundary-making processes and proposes a “dwelling lens” for constructively engaging with these different critiques. It builds on in-depth ethnographic accounts of housing discourses in Istanbul’s Kumkapı neighbourhood, a place deeply impacted by migration driven population changes. In exploring what differences matter today in housing access and why, the article examines how dwelling, as both method and concept, contributes to a better understanding of the social and spatial impacts and dynamism of migration driven diversity in the contemporary city.

Il saggio Bauen Wohnen Denken è, a parere di chi scrive, un condensato del pensiero “maturo” di Heidegger: in queste poche pagine, si concentrano infatti i temi essen- ziali della filosofia del nostro autore, attorno alla do- manda “qual è il senso dell’abitare?”

"paradossalmente e con abbastanza plauso, non pochi architetti non resistono a trasformare qualche 'cellula di tessuto' (per vocazione, salvo momenti di rottura, opportunità inestimabili di una ricostruzione dell'anonimato) in oggetto singolare, o preteso monumento. Ma non può esserci monumento senza un tessuto compatto e ripetitivo. L'uno e l'altro valgono per il senso delle proporzioni, pietra di paragone dell'Architettura" (A. Siza). Questo volume si occupa proprio del tessuto compatto e ripetitivo della città europea, della regola piuttosto che dell'eccezione, della residenza più che dell'edificio specialistico. La scansione dello spazio urbano in isolati, che fin dall'antichità ha costituito lo strumento più efficace per lo sviluppo degli insediamenti umani, rappresenta oggi un antidoto sia al modello della città diffusa, diseconomica e insostenibile, sia alla crescita della città moderna, dove l'abbondanza di spazio pubblico a disposizione si è scontrata spesso con l'impossibilità di gestirlo in maniera efficace. Ma progettare l'isolato della città compatta vuol dire anche – e sempre più nei prossimi anni – lavorare sulla sostituzione, sul completamento, sulla trasformazione di manufatti dismessi, sulla densificazione e sull'innesto di nuovi frammenti nell'esistente, tutte pratiche che sono alla base dei processi di rigenerazione urbana. Dopo vent'anni di dissennato consumo di suolo la città europea torna oggi a trasformarsi prevalentemente crescendo su se stessa, riusando le proprie strutture, reinventandone gli spazi e gli usi.

Introduction.

Dwelling approaches life as a process of being-in-theworld which is open to the world. Human and nonhuman life is read as an immediate, yet also enduring, relational process of bodies-in-environment (space and place) which are (with variation) mobile, sensing, engaging, responding, exchanging, making, using, remembering, and knowing. This process-based, vitalist view of life is closely linked to phenomenology, and stands in opposition to dualized, rational Cartesian-based approaches.

As Tim Ingold suggests when setting out Heidegger’s foundational work on this concept, dwelling encompasses the whole manner in which one lives one’s life on the Earth; thus ‘‘I dwell, you dwell’’ is identical to ‘‘I am, you are.’’ For Heidegger, to be a human means to be on the Earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. This offers analternative to Descartes’ cogito – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – the foundation of rationalism which helped set up/ reinforce a series of persistent, related dualisms including those of mind–body, subject–object, society–nature, and human–nonhuman. These, some argue, are impediments
to understanding the relational nature of life, not least in terms of important questions of humans in nature/environment/place, and environmental sustainability.

The main distinction in the conceptualization of space in George Simmel's work is the opposition between the activity of the spirit and nature. Nevertheless, the work of art, as the result of the activity of the spirit, uses the material borrowed from nature, but in most cases makes it indistinguishable in itself. Architecture, on the other hand, is a special kind of art, in the sense that the material in it begins to act according to its essence. As a result of this fight between nature and the spirit, nature prevails and the building collapses and turns into a ruin. The Simmel's ruin is a turning over of the relationship that is familiar to the aesthetic object: nature, not a man, is endowed with creative power. The tragedy of Simmel's ruin shows that the aesthetic dimension of architecture reveals itself to us in the absence of human dwelling, which invariably turns out to be finite, opposing the infinite and immortal nature.

The image of home has a central place in the thought of both Heidegger and Hegel. In Hegel, being at home (Beisichselbstsein) is central to Hegel’s reformulation of Kantian freedom. The notion of home and dwelling is also a central notion in Heidegger’s thought, especially his later thought. This paper examines their respective uses of the term and argues that the different ways they conceive the problem of home or dwelling reveals their different conceptions of modernity.