Why Do We Want Houses?

Why Do We Want Houses? May 16, 2016

Peter King begins his Private Dwelling by posing what he describes as simple, silly, obvious questions about housing: What is its use? Who needs it? What is housing for?

Early on, he points to the “iconography” implied by our language about housing: “There is an iconography attached to housing that transcends the manner in which professionals and commentators conduct their discourses. This iconography is of that place which is mine or ours (where the ‘we’ in question is a family or small band of intimates). This is housing in the subjective sense of ‘a place of my/our own.’ But this has nothing to do with tenure – this book is not another paean for home ownership. It is rather about the recognition that the important thing we seek is a condition of privacy, security and intimacy, and this can only be achieved by housing of our own, or rather by what I shall refer to as dwelling” (6-7). In short, “usefulness is use for something. And that something is not defined externally, or collectively, but individually within the dwelling” (7).

Dwelling is not merely for the practical purpose of shelter and survival. Drawing from Heidegger’s essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” he notes that “for humans to dwell means they build structures for themselves. In turn, [Heidegger] defines building, through its etymological roots in Old English and German, as related to the verb ‘to remain’ or ‘to stay in place.’ . . . Dwelling as building is thus more than just mere shelter, but is a reference to the settlement by human beings on the earth. Indeed for Heidegger, dwelling is humanity’s ‘being on the earth.’ . . . Heidegger is prepared to see dwelling in the broadest sense, as human settlement in general. Dwelling is the house, the village, the town, the city and the nation in their generality – it is of humanity taking root in the soil” (21). Dwelling integrates individuals and families into a wider community, through the physical reality of location (22).

King plays with the ambiguity of the word, which can refer to the space we occupy or to the activity of occupying it: “We seek to do meaningful things and most things are meaningful because of what we do. Dwelling is that activity that contains this meaning, but what we do it in is a dwelling” (18). Dwelling in this sense “operates between two poles – the ubiquitous and the specific: the mundane and the unique. Dwelling is something we all experience, but it is not something that we necessarily experience together. For each of us dwelling is unique, in that it is something we do by and for ourselves. We all dwell, but each of us does it separately” (17-18).

In part, this definition helps King specify the limits of housing policy. It can (or may not) provide the brick boxes where we dwell, but he worries about “the introduction of policy into areas where it is not applicable, where housing practitioners are not, and cannot be, expert. This is the level of relationships within and outside the dwelling: with how we use our housing. Outside interference will either be arbitrary, based on the whim of the person intervening, or overly standardised, as a result of a general policy. But it can be no other: there is no possibility of policy or even an individual practice being so fine-grained as to actually articulate the varied needs and choices of all, or even many, households. Housing policy should then restrict itself to the provision of brick boxes and leave what goes on inside them to the users” (19). A one-sized policy for how we dwell violates the basic character of dwelling, which varies from dwelling to dwelling.


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