searching for living place

254 Pages·2016·24.07 MB·English

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
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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