Ways of Residing in Transformation

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Sten Gromark, Mervi Ilmonen, Katrin Paadam, Eli Støa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134808809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

Profound transformations in residential practices are emerging in Europe as well as throughout the urban world. They can be observed in the unfolding diversity of residential architecture and spatially restructured cities. The complexity of urban and societal processes behind these changes requires new research approaches in order to fully grasp the significant changes in citizens lifestyles, their residential preferences, capacities and future opportunities for implementing resilient residential practices. The international case studies in this book examine why ways of residing have changed as well as the meaning and the significance of the social, economic, political, cultural and symbolic contexts. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of perspectives to reflect specifically upon the dynamic exchange between evolving ways of residing and professional practices in the fields of architecture and design, planning, policy-making, facilities management, property and market. In doing so, it provides a resourceful basis for further inquiries seeking an understanding of ways of residing in transformation as a reflection of diversifying residential cultures. This book will offer insights of interest to academics, policy-makers and professionals as well as students of urban studies, sociology, architecture, housing, planning, business and economics, engineering and facilities management.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
From Housing to Residing: Conceptual Considerations

Katrin Paadam, Eli Støa, Sten Gromark and Mervi Ilmonen

Looking Back and Forward: Research and Realities

Research in housing has like in any other field its own ‘history’ with trajectories revealing the ways of our thinking and giving evidence of how we construct theories or conduct the research (after Kemeny in C. Allen 2005). The nature and profile of research at different phases of housing studies is nevertheless always informed by the changing practices in cities, localities or societies, as well as the state of the art in the research field, consequentially forming also the demand for research. It is generally acknowledged that the long-term empiricist and practice-orientated tradition in positivist paradigm is continuously dominating, in particular, the policy or market research, which by producing useful data for the practices contributes but little to the conceptual advancement of the research (Kemeny 1992; Jacobs 2002; Clapham 2005). However, the relatively recent ‘upsurge in theoretically aware’ research (Clapham 2005: 7), qualifying as an anticipated development ‘in any healthily expanding area’ (Kemeny 2005: 99) has by today established housing research on a diverse scale of topics in focus of different disciplines’ multiple interests (Clapham et al. 2012). We may consider this expansion of academic research to be a response to the perceived current and future creative quests for embracing the complexity of processes in the housing field. In-depth academic enquiry has proved to be able to offer explanations of problem areas as well as discovery of (unused) potentials of interconnected multifaceted residential phenomena.

Linking the considerations on the realm of residential life with the critical analysis of transforming social realities and the related concerns about sustainability on a broader scale of issues allows us to observe how, for example, the processes of individualisation, de-traditionalisation and global exchange have become reflected on a ubiquitous scale of structural changes and in human conduct. As is argued, this modern life situation with no traditional support structures sets individuals’ self-perception and the ways they construct their life-worlds and identities in a new perspective which ‘not only permits but also demands active contribution of individuals’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2009: 4). However, the era which relies on an individual and worships individuality has along with advancement of civic society, as is shown in the research on urban community and neighbourhood movements across countries (Manzi 2010) given rise also to new collective and sustainable ways of residing (cf. Barton 2000; Roseland 2005; McCamant and Durrett 2011; Fernández and Scanlon in this volume). As concerns the developments in the housing field, needs are continously changing related to new family and household structures, population age structures, employment patterns and leisure time activities. Along with this we observe increasingly diversifying individualised lifestyle-driven residential orientations, preferences and tastes. And finally modern modes of communication enabling access to impalpable volume of information, tend to reshape and diversify the demand for different type and higher quality of residences, (cf. Chaney 1996, 2002; Ilmonen; Krokfors in this volume). The clearly modified demand could, in principle, stipulate redesigning the future products offered at residential markets as well as services delivered by public providers. And more, with intensified cross-cultural global mobility of middle-classes as well as working class labour migration our time witnesses the transition from ‘place monogamy to place polygamy’ as pertinently put by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim in their seminal monograph (2009: 25). We may detect the phenomenon of place-polygamy also in an entirely different country-wise context of lifestyle-based multiple residences at families’ disposal (McIntyre et al. 2006; Aune and Støa in this volume). The spatial mobility ofthat degree shows the residential issues to have become literally transnational issues bearing on changes in both the local arenas of departures and that of destinations. However, on this background of opening up of opportunities for making individual decisions and freedom of designing one’s own biographies (cf. Miller and Day 2012) there remains severe structural differentiation between individuals’ and households’ solvency or investment capacities to live up to their residential preferences or even the needs, unfolding on further urban and regional socio-spatial segregation (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000; Kazepov 2005; Wacquant 2008). Some of these economic backlashes on the level of individuals and households, affecting also urban development on a larger scale might be directly linked with the consequences of failures of transnational economy (Kristjánsdóttir and Sveinsson; Vestergaard and Haagerap in this volume).

These social, economic, cultural and political tendencies, with strong symbolic connotations are manifested in specific spatial processes of densification like, for example, gentrification, conversion of former industrial buildings, upmarket new construction in central areas and beyond (Paadam, Siilak and Gromark in this volume) enabling the becoming of distinct identities; dispersal as the opposite to the former like, for example, the sprawling new detached housing areas as an escape from the collective to the imagined private; and dissolution like, for example, the emergence of gated communities which needs to be treated in regard to specific cultural and societal contexts, or persistently stigmatised poor estates (Dandolova; Landman in this volume). The processes which are transforming the residential and concomitantly the public spaces in cities are by nature controversial as are the conceptual accounts contextualised within different disciplines, theoretical perspectives or societal contexts (cf. Zukin 1989 [1982], 1995, 2010; Blakely et al. 1997; Gillham 2002; Lees et al. 2008; Haase et al. 2010; Rérat et al. 2010; Lynch 2014).

Regardless of apparent distinctions between the transformation of urban and residential spaces, the practices and actors’ experiences in the field, there tends to be a shared challenge which, when also driving the research conducted by different disciplines, seems to centre around an acknowledged need to manage the partly intangible cultural contradiction. Stemming, on the one hand, from two polar theses of individualised diversity of dispositions, and on the other hand, the challenge of social, economic, ecological and physical sustainability as collectively warranted opportunity for individuals’ well-being (cf. Pareja-Eastway 2004; Støa 2009, 2012). It is contended that meeting this challenge demands both, the complex approach of insights into the experiences of the involved stakeholders to build knowledge and revision of urban and housing policies as well as market strategies to change the practice.

Familiar ways of conceiving of residential life in cities are assumed to be profoundly challenged, as are power relations reinforced in popular and political discourses (Foucault 1972; Schmidt 2010; De Decker and Newton in this volume), and strategies on all levels of action. A possible strategy to combat the problems is renewal in a broadest sense by incorporating various modes of improvement of residential quality upon different typologies of residences by introducing innovative and explorative architectural designs for reconstruction and renovation of existing buildings as well as the best practices for restoring heritage buildings. However, these interventions intended to change the quality of life are hardly resilient unless the physical improvements are developed in close relationship with renewed planning strategies, managerial approaches and strategies for resident participation (Gromark and Paadam; Liias and Ojamäe; Landman in this volume).

Despite the demand for diverse and personalised design of new residential buildings, the market response rather tends to remain homogenised in supply (cf. Bourdieu 2005; Krokfors in this volume). Recent writings on housing and urban renewal suggest that the multiplicity of objectives related to this broad theme can hardly be tackled at one time, the more under the tendency of overarching neo-liberal ideological conditions (Turkington and Watson 2014) or under trends which point towards that direction. In these societal and mental circumstances, the individualisation thesis is in place as most influential in its universal character purporting individual freedom of choice in the conditions of limited choice together with increasing scope of responsibility of individuals.

On Close Methodological Grounds

The way we have presented our view on the relationships which evolve between the research and the interconnected residential practices, urban processes and generally transforming social realities reflected on them suggest that this collection of contributions seeks a deeper understanding of the construction of meanings in the context of diversifying residential experiences on urban scenes. It also attempts to scrutinise how expected or unanticipated processes of experiencing change affect individuals’ and households’ or professionals’ and institutional actors’ perceptions informing their future dispositions, actions or strategies, let alone the interplay between experiential and structural processes.

In this regard the contributions of this book belong to the interpretivist category of methodological approaches, according a greater need for the study of subjectivity, notably as Jacobs writes, in ethnographic discourse and social constmctivist perspectives (Jacobs 2002: 103; Clapham 2012).

The main assumption behind pursuing this approach is an epistemological understanding of the making of residential realities viewed, firstly, on the multiplicity of interconnected and dynamic dualities between agencies and structural circumstances. Secondly, this is to pronounce the relevance of approaching residential material and social realities, their limits and potentials, in ways they are perceived by different actor groups and projected on the perceptions of the others. Thirdly, this is to enable an in-depth understanding of the impact of these reciprocities on the level of perceptions and interactions and on ways they inform the dynamic of individual and collective behaviour, as well as professional and institutional actions. Fourthly, this is to emphasise the resourcefulness of applying social constmctivist approach on the study of discourse and representations of different actors’ subjective experiences and their role in constituting an understanding of residential qualities, residential relations and, altogether, residential cultures.

We second to Bourdieu by arguing that these individual socially embodied experiences cannot be blocked from our view (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:202) or ‘interpreted as a mechanical determinism of structures’ (Bourdieu 1999a: 95) but should rather be contextualised in an interplay between unique individual and collective histories genuinely interlinked with structural dynamics in the society, though increasingly across cultures. Further, paraphrasing Bourdieu (1994), we assert that the ways the game in the field is perceived, understood and acted upon by different actors present is deeply interrelated with the formation of the relations, symbolic order and stmctural constitution of the field which, however, purports continuously negotiated meanings as well as straggles between different interests played out upon distinct power positions the actors take in the social space. Bourdieu being a persistent proponent for learning about human conduct on the deepest subjective level throughout his works argued, without reservation, for any possible research tool be justified if it brings us closer to the truth about the social world (Bourdieu 1999b). However, he has been critical about the kind of social constmctivist approach which is blind to forces behind specific processes in the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The background to his critique becomes clearer when he attempts to deconstruct the dual relationship between the phenomena of the social genesis of individual preferences and the formation of housing markets, more specifically the formation of the demand and the supply (Bourdieu 2005). Dismantling the interconnectedness of the social and economic structures and policies in the empowerment of markets, Bourdieu highlights the symbolic power of the language of marketing housing, the use of emotional connotations of the messages surrounding the ‘mythopoetic’ (with reference to Cassirer) notion of a house (a central phenomenon already in his early ethnographic work on the theory of practice) appealing on lived experiences shaping dispositions towards ‘inhabiting /…/ a world of things that remains dissociable from the world of words necessary / … / to domesticate / … / them’ (2005: 24). For Bourdieu, the relationship between the words articulated (language) and speech is as if an equivalent to objective structures and the social practices experienced by agents (Bourdieu 1999 [1972]). He asserts that language in itself betrays an individual’s social position, because it is acquired and used in specific social situations characteristic of different categories of speakers (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 117). Bourdieu’s accounts on the discursive power of language as a means to direct consumer behaviour, and his relentless claim for the need to understand the structural forces behind the shaping of the relationship between the supply and the demand in residential markets, are not in stark opposition with what has been argued on social constructivism elsewhere. For example, Jacobs, Kemeny and Manzi (2004: 3) claim that ‘the strength of constructionism is its focus on broader social processes and its emphasis on the importance of social, political and economic context’ and there is no denial of the existence of an objective material world whilst the access to it is mediated by language and discourse (ibid.). As concerns the social constractivist research and the study of discourse and subjective accounts of actors in focus, Kemeny accentuates the need for creating a multifaceted understanding of the nature of ‘the processes’ as does Bourdieu in his theory of practice, by going beyond the traditional borders of research and applying in situ methods to observe closely the social situations where the actual interactions occur (2004: 64, 65). Such an approach and research procedures stand out as especially useful in multi-disciplinary or, indeed, inter-disciplinary studies attempting to make sense of the complex relationships between the material and social residential realities and the ways they are perceived, (re)cre...