Neonomadism

In our rapidly globalising world, cultures, as well as societies and identities, tend to be more fluid, less irreducibly different and less ‘territorially fixed’ than in the past (Schulze-Engler 2007, p. 27). Especially now, when cosmopolitan issues and pluralistic sensibilities – driven by transnational and transcommunal experiences – tend to become more relevant. It is within this emerging social context that a new generation of mobile writers, on the move across cultural and national boundaries, has started expressing a ‘transcultural’ sensibility and mode of being, fostered by ‘the process of self-distancing, self-estrangement, and self criticism of one's own cultural identities and assumptions’ (Epstein 1999, p. 307). In this paper, I argue that the main element that distinguishes these early ‘transcultural writers’ from their precursors and/or ‘cousin species’ (migrant/exile/diasporic/postcolonial writers) – albeit all belonging to the wider ‘genus’ of  ‘the literature of mobility’ – is their relaxed, neonomadic attitude when facing issues linked to identity, nationality, rootlessness and dislocation. An attitude that reflects itself also in their creative outputs, which can already be inscribed within the realm of transcultural literature, a literature able to transcend the borders of a single culture in its choice of topic, vision and scope, thus contributing to promote a wider global literary perspective (Pettersson 2006).

The present article suggests that a desirable model of creative writing in the era of digital communications and new media, growing transnational flows, neonomadic life patterns (both online and offline), and global mobility is transcultural auto/biography. By this term I identify a form of creative nonfiction particularly suited to recording and exploring the renegotiation of individual cultural identities and the reshaping of ever more complex subjectivities and collective imaginaries in their efforts to adjust to a new age of digital communication flows, transnational processes, and cross-cultural encounters. " Every contemporary life is a neonomadic journey which can be narrated through a creative nonfiction. " (A. Dagnino) We may conceive of transcultural auto/biographies as innovative forms of life writing, self-reflection, critical practice, construction and reconstruction of the self through a semi-fictional lens. 1 It is in their intrinsic practice not only to mix genres (from memoir to travel reportage, from literary biography to immigrant writing and literary criticism), but also to blend facts and fiction, truth and art, novelistic storytelling and autobiographical account. This form of " minor literature " 2 offers an enlarged sense of possibility, especially at this moment in time, amidst resurgent or, in some cases, crumbling grand narratives of nationalism, ethnic pride, and cultural allegiance. 3 By " fusing " self-inscription and self-representation with collective inspiration and engagement, and by blurring the contours between real facts and imagined reality, between the affective domain and rational analysis, transcultural auto/biographies are also instrumental in defining and exemplifying a new cultural paradigm and period. 4 The role of " creative transpatriation " in the life of transcultural writers In the present article I refer more specifically to Brian Castro's collection of essays (mostly referencing the personal), Looking for Estrellita, and to the transnational

Inhabiting implies necessarily leaving traces in the physical space: they are the authentic signs of its occupation. The internalization and the apprehension of the space involve the accomplishment of transformations, necessary for the full adaptation of the inhabitants to the above mentioned environment. These transformations provide the basis of an action in which chronological time acts as the determinant parameter in the regulation of the intensity of these adaptive processes. In this way, the act of inhabiting reveals its maximum expression within the domestic space.
The aim of this paper is to delve into the nature of the transformation process undergone by contemporary urban housing as a consequence of the increasing movements within the city and the metropolitan areas. The result has been a consistent reduction in the period of time individuals spend in the domestic space. This increasing social dynamic can be understood as a new version of nomadism which, unlike the traditional concept, only refers to the variability of the position of the individuals and not their material belongings. Drawing on this perspective, it is possible to state that this trend has increased urban life by reducing physical presence within the dwelling. This, therefore, has caused that the act of leaving traces as signs of occupation, has also been modified. At the present time, these traces are less intense and easily erasable.
From the analysis of two relevant cases, the GWL Terrain Housing from Neutelings Riedijk and the EDA Apartments from R. Nishizawa, this paper tries to disclose a research path about the architectural aspects characterizing this new way of producing the domestic space: dimensional reduction, functional atomization, optimization of the spatial layout, and efficiency of the urban facilities.

Final Paper I wrote when at Harvard Graduate School of Design for the STS-350 Social Study of Science and Technology | Couse taught by Stefan Helmreich at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 — I recalled this paper as I am preparing the writing of a book chapter…