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searching for living place PDF

254 Pages·2016·24.07 MB·English
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JONATHAN GRANBERG & HAMLET MIRJAMSDOTTER SEARCHING FOR LIVING PLACE SOCIO-SPATIAL EXPLORATIONS FOR SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH COLLABORATIVE RESIDING THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE SEARCHING FOR LIVING PLACE Socio-spatial explorations for sustainability through collaborative residing JONATHAN GRANBERG & HAMLET MIRJAMSDOTTER Department of Architecture CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Gothenburg, Sweden 2016 Searching for Living Place Master Thesis 2016 Jonathan Granberg ABSTRACT Accelerating urbanisation and demographical transitions are currently overturning the capacity of the planet and urban societies to provide sustainable living conditions for its inhabitants. The metabolism of our built environment and urban lifestyles fail to reassure individual and societal needs, while resulting in detrimental externalities. Humanity must transcend the current ways of residing into a more sustainable living place if we are to succeed through our time’s closing window of sustainability. This study argues that there might be leverage within the unsustainable living space of the urban residence. Based upon a theoretical development of interdisciplinary research, qualitative interviews and socio-spatial explorations, this study has conceptualized models and socio-spatial frameworks to advice for an alternative and more progressive design approach. A promising potential is found in the capacity of a meso-domestic living place, an application of collaborative residing that might afford quality of life through a more sustainable use of residential space based on accessibility rather than ownership. Keywords: sustainable development, residential space, living conditions, urban residing, home, socio-spatial affordances, meso- domestic living place III ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people: Our tutor Pernilla Hagbert gave us very helpful feedback and support, despite the Sisyphean task she had to make sense of our ever changing drafts and ideas. We would never have managed this without her. Our examiner Sten Gromark allowed us to do this thesis the way we wanted and also gave us input into the project. Our opponents, Emílio da Cruz Brandão and Chrisna du Plessis, have provided useful critique which has helped us improve this thesis. Tove Wennberg and Maria Wikström helped us during the fnal seminar and have also provided us with information from their research. Yang Emily Huang also deserves a thanks for giving us relevant feedback at the midcritics, even though it probably wasn’t an easy task given the state of our work at that time. Tina Hansson helped us bind our thesis that was displayed at the exhibition. Finally, big thanks to the respondents who participated in interviews, both those who ended up in this thesis, as well as those who helped us develop the interview in the early stages. IV THE AUTHORS The authors of this thesis have a common background in the bachelor programme Architecture and Engineering and the master programme Design for Sustainable Development, both at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. They have previously collaborated in projects in the courses Building and Climate and Sustainable Building: Competition. They are currently residing in Gothenburg. Hamlet has during his master studies delved into the issue of social sustainability in the studio Design and Planning for Social Inclusion. He’s also studied heritage and conservation in the studio Architectural Heritage and Urban Transformation and at Uppsala University in Visby. His take on the feld of architecture and sustainability is founded on the questioning of prevailing lifestyles and views on success and consumption. He is born in Sundsvall, Sweden. Jonathan has attended the studios Sustainable Building and Sustainable Building: Competition. He has a bachelor degree in Human geography from Gothenburg University. He strives towards an interdisciplinary understanding of architecture and planning where humanities, natural and social sciences interact. With earlier studies and interest in the feld of design systems he aims at a holistic approach towards sustainability and the complexity it holds. His previous projects and research has an emphasis on the social aspects of urban sustainability. He is born in Umeå, Sweden. V SEARCHING FOR A LIVING PLACE Living place is the entitling word for this thesis, and the description in the oxford dictionaries reveals a strong connection to the notion of a habitat: “The living place of an organism or community, characterised by its physical or biotic properties.” Notable is that “living place” is only present in the dictionaries of zoology, ecology and plant science, it’s not included in any anthropocentric discipline, not within the dictionaries of humanities, social studies or even architecture. A specifc habitat upholds prosperous living conditions for a certain species that thrive within, and many habitats have been resiliently sustained since long before humanity arose. The delicate systems are interlinked with surrounding ecosystems and withhold a stability that’s been balanced through the vast time of evolution, creating the biodiversity that differ our planet from other that we know. The living space on the other hand is a strictly anthropocentric concept. The word is concluded in the oxford English dictionary as: “land needed by a group or people to live in” or specifcally: “space within a building in which a person or people may live”. Or even more delimited as: “the place in which a person lives, in particular the part of a house or fat excluding the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom.” Now we might ask ourselves; have the place in which a person lives been reduced to specifc rooms within specifc buildings, i.e. the living room? And even if we may reside within comfortable living rooms in acquirable dwellings, even if we may achieve the ideal home as promoted in lifestyles magazines, even if we may afford those square meters equally valued as an average lifetime salary; does the possession of such a living space hold the capacity for us to thrive? Does our current notion of residing really provide settings that assure prosperous living conditions, and are they resilient enough to supply a long term quality of life for oneself, others and the planet as a whole? Could we imagine a living place that is something more than our present living space, something else that could afford more value in our lives? VI VII CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Background 3 Academic framing 5 Methodology 10 Disposition 13 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE SPACE The need for a new course 19 Holdbacks to change 23 The unsustainable urban living space 25 Salient aspects of urban residential space 30 SPACE COLLABORATION Collaborative consumption 41 Alternative motivations 43 Sharing space 46 THE LIVING PLACE From space to place 57 Between places 64 The common creation of place 70 The concept of home 72 Living place and quality of life 79 CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT SOCIO-SPATIAL AFFORDANCES The variables of Socio-Spatial Settings 89 Spheres of socio-spatial attendance 95 A topological model 98 Amenities 102 Socio-spatial affordances 104 THE MESO-DOMESTIC LIVING PLACE The domestic living place 107 The meso-domestic approach 110 VIII

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