How is ho me viewed when it is an incosistent space? Is it possible to understand or identify home as a temporal spot? During the semester we’ve viewed home as a sound structure. We move in, we inhabit, we create and some how the home lives on. This is such a fixed perception. Really home is fluid and moving, for some literally. Communal living specifically in a squatter setting is an interesting part of temporal living. Going through change in home in a group is comforting. Perhaps the love of a community is cherishd in place of the feeling of love in your home.

I think the idea of nationalism vs. individuality is a very common dichotomy that we have experienced. My essay is going to be about the experience of creating a space to identify as permanent over transitional. This idea is brought up in Utehkin’s essay about communal apartments. Often in those situations it is the youth who feels temporal and not connected to the history of a particular apartment and is not hesitant to move on if something better is offered to them. What I hope to explore is that given an immigrant identity, one who not only does not identify with site specific places, but also the country itself, what creates permanence? Often, in contrast to the CA’s these immigrants can grow to be much older by the time they feel established, and will move from place to place following job opportunities or expanding/shrinking family size.

I think what is explored in all of these essays was the idea of creating home space in different methods, whether shared or not. And in the case of Spencer-Wood’s essay, creating a comfortable niche, or home, within the community instead of just the home. These are all applicable to the idea of developing oneself and measuring the appropriate amount of assimilation versus cultural individuality within a community to create a home which is both financially and sentimentally permanent.

A similar idea is explored in John Leland’s “A Prefab Utopia’, which examines the BoKlok housing in Sweeden.  These L shaped dwellings were designed in such a way to “force greater contact among building residents”(391).  One individual states that “The BoKlok idea is that you have to be as close to your neighbors and have dialogue”(391).  

This insistence of interaction between neighbors is something I find quite strange.  Frequent meetings with your neighbors is all well and good provided you get along, but what might happen if neighbors were to have a falling out, yet the design of the residential area made it almost impossible for them to avoid each other?  Is this kind of forced communal atmosphere really healthy for a neighborhood and does the neighborhood lose anything of great worth when it does not exist?

http://www.sub-studio.com/architecture.html

an example…

Borrow a window detail here, a roofline here, and before you know it Mr. potato head is starting to look like a house. (395)

I really liked Tuan’s piece. I thought that this sentence, ” Home is at the center of an astronomically determined spacial system. (409)” His analysis of the home in cosmic terms was extremely refreshing and gave me a new perspective on how I view my own house. It truly does seem like “the focal point of a cosmic structure.”  The fact that the stars are always under your home, no matter what, supports this subconscious and obviously false ideal. We know that our homes and houses are not “the center of the world,” yet we still view them in like that in some ways.

I thought the Solnit and Schwartzenberg piece went farther in providing me with new information. I had learned a little about Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in a class I took about Utopia. But it is always interesting to gain further context on the social phenomenons that the world has experienced. The People’s Temple was located in the Western Addition and as the mass “relocation” occurred many African Americans turned to the temple in a vulnerable and “home”less state. It was really intense and shocking to realize all the connecting implications of mass relocation. Even the People’s Temple and the incident in Guyana was one particular situation in which things went very very wrong, it is important to think about the many negative lasting effects that relocation can have on masses of people. And to remember that relocation is NOT a choice much of the time, but a necessity.

It was also an interesting to read all of these pieces together because I felt like it reflected the many manifestations of mobility and transience within every community. As we were talking about low income housing and development, I often thought about the monumental task of creating housing for the homeless or disenfranchised that becomes permanent over transitory. I think that is one of the greatest feats that the Nancy Biberman’s Bronx housing projects accomplished.  I think data collected around modern migrant lifestyles in the United States could be very applicable to the development of successful housing and low-income housing in the future.

Check here first, on freegan.info
Hope that works, or try here

I have been reading a book outlining the different stages of thoughts and theories of Otto Neurath.  I have only read a small amount of it, but he is a old-goon urbanist active in the early 1900′s and advocated for a communal or cooperative economy, one that “capiutalized on the bureaucratic infrastructure of the modern metropolis while still leaning heavily on the power of grassroots organizations and informal squatter communities”.  I think its really interesting, he is from Vienna but worked more mainly in Germany, and was influenced greatly by the way gypsies interacted with the city.  Another thing he starts to talk about is something called “gypsie urbanism” and “self-help urbanism”, but I haven’t gotten too deep into that. Also, his biggest influence academically is Tonnies, who himself was inspirational during the formation of the Garden City Movement in Germany.

Neurath, in general, seems to agree with the Ravets/Turkington reading in the importance these squatting, transient groups play in the urban sphere.  The reading ends by noting the differences between self-help housings provisions, one being getting homes for people the system does not serve and the other for people with alternative lifestyles.  From what I read in Neurath, he has the same point (except he was writing in the 1920′s) that gypsies were important groups to pay attention to for the same reasons.  He takes it further, and talks about how to learn from the rpactices of gypsies and how gypsies communities also can hurt the city.  So, he takes the good and bad from both.  Surely, city governments can learn from self-help housing and learn to provide housing for these different groups of people.  But there must be a way that the market and the communities can meet and balance.

Here is a little example.

“man was a symbol-making animal long before he was a toolmaker”

These photos differ slightly from her reading where she believes “the high-rise apartment building is rejected by most Americans as a family home because, I would suggest, it gives one no territory on the ground, violates the archaic image of what a house is, and is percieved unconsciously as a threat to ones self-image as a seperate and unique personality”.  I would argue something differently with these pictures.  While not high rise apartment buildings, they are 3 and sometimes 3 family apartment buildings that represent different family values then the normal “archetype” American house.  Many of these apartments are owned by Chinese families or landlords, so that the front door is used by multiple families.  This means that sometimes these front steps represent more of a community or a culture then they do an American ideal.  Other of these apartments are owned by white or other minorities, and when they are it is almost clearly shown.  An American flag delineates a white family in one of my photos not shown.  The photos also make me think about how we cannot see inside of them, not very many picture windows here, and perhaps how the different manifestations of culture show a threatened-proud duplexity in relation to the outside world.