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This morning I walked to the new flyover near where I live. Finding no place to build it, as the ground was completely taken over by slums clinging to the edges of a river, those in charge have made this flyover twist and turn along the river itself. The columns stand in the middle of the murky water. Huddled on the central divider of the flyover was a man sleeping as the morning traffic rushed by on the way to the highway. He had wrapped himself head to toe in an old blanket to protect him from the cold. There were no possessions in sight. No edge to this bedroom that was tangible. But yet there was a sense of domain that allowed him to give up the protection of his body to the city. Between the slum below the flyover where he kept his belongings and that narrow strip of divider where he slept he had inscribed for himself a house. If “public space means leaving home”* then where does the home end here?
We tend to imagine the home as the bourgeois family’s retreat from the anxiety of the outside. There is within its walls an idealized world built on a very particular form of domesticity- with specific ideas regarding gender and privacy. These notions permeate every single aspect of the home - the configuration of its individual parts and the relationship that the interior makes with the exterior- the place for women affects the relationship of the kitchen to the house, while living room interiors are imagined and designed as interfaces between the outsiders and insiders. They become masks worn to protect and pretend, making and strengthening particular notions of power and identity.
There is a sense of stability and surety in these imaginations, reinforcing a desire for an entrenched sense of ‘belonging’ to a family with its own traditions and value systems.
But what happens when these relationships begin to fracture? When modernity tears at the seams of the traditional home? When lines of individual desire break out from the imagined stability of the home and reach out towards new terrains?
Cities are built on these desires: individuals leaving the confines of familiar spaces to find themselves anew in places of opportunity and freedom. Here they find meager footholds, new forms of family, new kinds of community, new notions of privacy and public life. These are the homes of the urban inhabitant. They are shaped by vectors whose thrusts outwards and inwards destabilize the security that we expect out of the imagined home. The boundary in between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ is transformed. The architecture of the home is re-formed.
But here lies the contradiction - architecture seems to base itself in notions of order. These are unable to comprehend these re-formations. As we attempt to superimpose a sense of order and clarity upon these forms of living they appear as mutations- odd, deformed and illegible. We tend to imagine the bourgeois family and the way in which it inscribes sense of home as the norm. However, a closer look reveals not only that this form of family accounts for a small percentage of the city population, but also that this assumption of a stable identity is itself a fallacy. Very few of us city dwellers really ‘belong’. All of us are displaced from a place where we feel ‘at home’.
Rather than using the contradictions to reframe our lenses of seeing, we tend to use preconceived ideas of beauty and order to disparage them, or lament the state of a society that makes them. To be able to reconstruct a responsible relationship of architecture with the everyday life of individuals, our tools to understand the urban home need to change. These tools need to be able to map these vectors of desire.
These displacements take many forms, each leading to particular ways in which the idea of home is inscribed in urban space. This is an inventory of some of these displaced inhabitants, the migrant who travels to a new place in search of opportunity, the nomad who knows no permanent domicile but is forever in between, the alien who feels like an outcast, the exile who is evicted from a place he calls home and the refugee for whom the city is a temporary caretaker- whose power is forsaken to become a child in the care of the city-mother.
alien
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin alienus, from alius
Date:
14th century
1 a: belonging or relating to another person, place, or thing : strange b: relating, belonging, or owing allegiance to another country or government : foreign c: exotic 12: differing in nature or character typically to the point of incompatibility
Allegiance is an ambiguous thing. Sometimes it is chosen, other times it is enforced. We are made alien through what is considered with’in’ and what is considered with ‘out’. Every society makes its own aliens. These are etched into the very fabric of the built form. The alien has two choices in making of the home. The first is revolt and the other is camouflage.
Revolt: Along the railway tracks during the festival of holi one has to be careful when one sits by the window in the local trains. Some slum dwellers living in the interstices found in between the precisely drawn tracks and the fuzzy edges of fields celebrate the festival by throwing sewage water on the passing trains. Although almost any compartment might be the target of their ire, they really aim for the first class.
But are all revolts this violent. Don’t we play out displeasure and dissent everyday in what we possess and disclaim?
Camouflage: I know a couple deeply in love and living together in an apartment in Kandivili. It all sounds rather hunky-dory except that Kandivili East is soon becoming the location for the upwardly mobile middle classes of the city and the couple has committed the sin of being both men. The only course they have left to continue living in this city is by creating and living a fiction for the outside world. They live as cousins and not brothers to the rest of the neighborhood. This explains the strange fact that there is no family resemblance between them. Naturally a view of the Borivili National Park hills is what they desire from their bedroom window.
nomad
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Latin nomad-, nomas member of a wandering pastoral people, from Greek, from nemein
Date:
1579
1 : a member of a people who have no fixed residence but move from place to place usually seasonally and within a well-defined territory 2 : an individual who roams about
— nomad adjective
— no·mad·ism nō-ˌma-ˌdi-zəm\ noun
Who are these nomads in the new city; the people who make home where they lay down their bags? We tend to imagine them as those who live on pavements, below flyovers, or those construction workers living in gunny sack shelters, warmed by a fire at night. Nomads these may be, but there are nomads living even in the high rise residential towers. As work is more and more mobile and internationally so, single women travel to hotel rooms, serviced apartments and company flats in different cities- carrying their lives in a suitcase. The city recognizes this and has made a system of spaces that facilitate them. These spaces are intentionally banal, removed from all references to the context. They provide basic needs – a place to lay ones head and maybe a place to eat. Everything else is brought by the nomad.
As much as the construction worker on the street, this persons home is also made up by the few clothes that she carries and tokens of other places that she accumulates through the years. Some of these she leaves behind making place in the bags for others. The most precious are the ones that will remain with her at the end of the journey.
migrant
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Latin migrant-, migrans, present participle of migrare
Date:
1760
: one that migrates: as a: a person who moves regularly in order to find work especially in harvesting crops b: an animal that shifts from one habitat to another
— migrant adjective
Every winter on the eastern shore of the island city of Mumbai flamingoes wait for winter to pass. They go back to where they came from when it’s over. It is a question of survival. A migrant’s life is spent oscillating in the perpetual in-between, in the space between two non-homes – if home is stability or permanence. Unlike nomads the home is not one they carry on their backs though- it lies in remembered fragments of each of the poles of their existence.
The mythology of the home is a mythology of building identity. There are showcases in living rooms around the city collecting these signs- photographs, statuettes, flower vases, idols. These inscribe in the home my desire, my history. This archive of objects is what I make my home. These fragments help me define myself in the city, construct my identity and community, and provide me with a tribe to belong to. This tribe in turn has its codes, its legends, its rituals and ceremonies through which it is perpetuated. This is my safety net and protective shield. But the home is not only a place for comfort. Haven’t we seen many a compromise in exchange for the glittering space of the designed way of life? Where living rooms tables and sofa sets float over white marble floors, where the clutter of the domestic everyday is exiled from being seen. What about this other home? Modernity does dissolve older systems of belief and replace them with its own.
As much as one is involved in the rituals of constructing a tribal identity, one is also straining against its border- struggling to break free, in turn subscribing to codes of another. A dual life becomes the norm with contradictions that stay unresolved forming the real space of the home. In between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’.
refugee
Function:
noun
Etymology:
French réfugié, past participle of (se) réfugier to take refuge, from Middle French refugier, from Latin refugium
Date:
1685
: one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution
— ref·u·gee·ism \-ˌi-zəm\ noun
But, what of the refugee? This is the individual whose power has been forsaken and has been made into a child. Fleeing persecution or danger the definitions says above. But the refuge is merely another word for home. It assumes a threatening outside. The new home is anything but benign. In the clutches of the caretaker the child will never be free. The act of making home is an act of inscribing a personal desire- it cannot be dictated by an institutional other – as generous it may assume itself to be. The city might be the mother suckling this child, taking care of him but some time this child will and must break out of the mothers embrace (or tightening vice) Though he is given crutches and treated as disabled, the house is often provided, never the home. The making of the home would be an act of growing from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. As all of us know, this is never an easy process. Rebellion is necessary.
exile
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English exil, from Anglo-French essil, exil, from Latin exilium, from exul, exsul an exile
Date:
14th century
1 a: the state or a period of forced absence from one's country or home b: the state or a period of voluntary absence from one's country or home2: a person who is in exile
— ex·il·ic \eg-ˈzi-lik\ adjective
The exiled have no rights in space. They do not even exist in the fringes- they exist only in the space where no one can perceive them- a darkness that shrouds over their every move until they become symbols of the eternal ‘other’. This darkness is what we use to construct society – making valid and invalid claims to existence. Where they once were is now a void that is filled up seamlessly. This exile is rarely self imposed. It is an act of submission to a higher order- a greater power. The question of building ‘home’ elsewhere is not a possibility because ‘home’ was not a place they left with a choice. They were removed. The exiled can only hold on to the idea of home as a desire that will never be fulfilled even as a fragment. It is a figment.
In many parts of the city there are people being removed forcibly from historic neighborhoods, from places where they have lived for generations. In a meeting an official once said that “the problem with the city is that there is a contradiction. Rich people live in areas of low real estate value while poor people live in areas of high real estate value.” This reduction of the idea of home to economic balance sheets naturally makes exiles of all of us until we choose to lay claim to space through acts of defiance and possession.
In this inventory lie almost all of us urban inhabitants. Our homes do not exist until we inscribe them in the terrain of the city. These acts of writing are territorial claims made through the act of living, sleeping, working, playing. Through these we define the walls of the ‘home’ as a shifting boundary of domain as against the precise edges of the ‘house’. Everyday life is our tool to make the home.
Can we begin by looking at the urban dwelling through the places and the modes through which these inhabitants find themselves in the city? Is this the real architecture of the urban home?
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