Institute of Geography. The School of Geosciences.The University of Edinburgh
Abstract
The scale and extent of human mobility in contemporary times has added a new
inflection to a question that has long pre-occupied scholars: this being the matter of
‘what is home?’ or, more precisely and following Agnes Heller (1995), ‘where are we
at home?’. These questions are both minor and major. They implicate something as
ordinary as ‘the house’ and as extraordinary as our sense of belonging. Martin
Heidegger’s well known essay from 1951, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, provides
one starting point for thinking about how a building like a house is attached to an
experience like dwelling (Heidegger 1975). He investigates how dwelling requires
building (as a process and as a thing) and how, in turn, building helps constitute our
sense of dwelling. Heidegger draws at one point on the example of a farmhouse in
the Black Forest, which he uses to illustrate how building both cultivates and
expresses dwelling. His conception of ‘proper dwelling’ relies, then, on the example
of a house that is embedded in its place of origin -- where building and dwelling and
location are co-constitutive. Through an architectural diagnostic, a dwelling such as
Heidegger’s farmhouse might occupy the category of ‘the vernacular’. Through a
sociological diagnostic, we might think of it as a type of ‘ancestral home’. Such
models of ‘proper’ dwelling are being radically transformed in contemporary times.
Not least, current levels of mobility act as a force of compromise. Mobility compels
our lives to be full of radical open-ness, proliferating differences and multiplying
loyalties. It produces flows of information, people and things that do away with, or
render residual, what might be thought of as monogamous modes of dwelling. Within
this restructured world, both vernacular architectures and ancestral homes come to
assume new positions and are sutured into our modes of dwelling in quite different
ways