An Attempt at Thinking

To a very large extent, homelessness can be represented as the semantic contrary of home. Home can be argued to have at least six or seven dimensions of meaning, identified by the key signifiers of shelter, hearth, privacy, roots, abode, and (possibly) paradise. Each of these signifiers can be explicated in terms of its wider symbolic meaning, its evocation of a specific sense of security, and its characteristic mode of relating to oneself and to others. The selection of the signifiers is supported by Watson and Austerberry’s (1986) findings: for instance,

• i) shelter corresponds to decent material conditions,
• ii) hearth corresponds to emotional and physical well-being
• iii) heart corresponds to loving and caring social relations,
• iv) privacy corresponds to control and privacy,
• v) abode corresponds to living/sleeping place
• vi) roots corresponds to a sense of individual identity, involving a sense of security which is usually called ontological security because it is concerned with one’s sense of being-in-the-world ( Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962, (21)), and
• vii) paradise which corresponds to the ideal home as distinct from the home of everyday life.

All these signifiers taken together comprise the meaning of home
Appart from its key significance, home has symbolic status. Such status is expressed in

• i) design features (materiality);
• ii) mode of disposition and action towards neighbours, visitors, etc., (hearth);
• iii) pride of possession (heart);
• iv) degree of territorial control (privacy);
• v) degree of respectability and sense of niche (roots);
• vi) quality of domestic life (abode).

Therefore home is set in a complex context of social status relations. Also, as a building, the home could be identified as an extension of “”our natural protective organs (our skin and scalp)”” (Wigley, M., Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture, p.7, (24)), and “”a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease”” (p.24, (24)). Conversely, homelessness is distinguished by a lack of social status, invisibility (the suppressed frame), or a problem to others , with the homeless being seen as outcast and rejected, at the bottom of the social scale, disreputable and nicheless (Somerville, P., Homelessness and the meaning of home, p.534, (22)).

Explanations which attempt to make sense of the context of homelessness, however, deserve more detailed considerations, which could become the topic for another paper. For the purpose of this paper, however, it is enough to say that “”class relations and class organizations, especially when expressed through legal and political relations (involving, for example, processes of state centralization, policy residualization and professionalization ) are crucial in determining the general character of this social order”” (p.538, (22)).

In the age of technological revolution, when the explosion of computer-based communications happens at all geographical levels, from intra-building communications to global networks, state policies do little for the homeless : 2000-3000 people sleep on the streets of London, and their number there and elsewhere grows daily (p.537, (22)).

Therefore, we cannot talk about qualitative change in any element of the older capitalist system – as for example in architecture or urbanism – without beforehand a total revolutionary and systematic transformation : a social transition, according to which the emergent future, the new and still nascent social relations announce a mode of production that will ultimately displace the as yet still dominant one (pp.68-70, (12)).

A transcendence of the opposition building/city, is only possible after a revolutionary  transformation of social relations as a whole.

As for the city, the “”art is now called upon to give the city a suprastructural guise””. This art is indicative “”of the refusal to come to terms with contradictions of the city and resolve them completely”” (p.81, (12)).

In this society, within the closure of capitalism as a system, the practicing architect cannot hope to devise a radically different architecture : “”an architecture of the future will be concretely and practically possible only when the future has arrived, that is to say, after a total social revolution, a systematic transformation of this mode of production into something else”” (p.55, (12)).

Whether such a change will take place, nobody can tell. If it will, it will depend on how many men and women will be attracted by this new challenge to the human mind.

If this change will take place The City of God  and The Earthly City, as binary oppositions, will be dissolved : “”If the City of God and the Earthly City were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis is the only alternative to chaos: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval world and the development of rational thought and science since Renaissance. This synthesis is The City of Being”” (Fromm, E., To Have or To Be?, p.202, (23)).

But what – provided we really ought to ask such a question at all – what is Being?