Using innovative theoretical concepts, this book develops a new approach to looking at dwelling and how we use it. Combining philosophical analysis and literary and film criticism, it puts forward an innovative and insightful new approach to looking at housing and explores issues of exclusion, isolation, anxiety, privacy and the relations between parent and child.

Most Americans take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling. In Dwelling in Resistance, Chelsea Schelly examines four alternative U.S. communities—“The Farm,” “Twin Oaks,” “Dancing Rabbit,” and “Earthships”—where electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation practices differ markedly from those of the vast majority of Americans. Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.

By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women’s magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.

The dwelling is a central setting in people’s everyday life. People use their dwelling and residential environment for a large variety of activities and purposes. The Meaning of Activities in the Dwelling and Residential Environment systematically relates activities, settings and meanings to improve the insight into people-environment relations which is called a meaning structure approach. Over 600 people, living in either a city centre, suburban or rural type of residential environment were asked about their everyday activities and the meanings thereof. The results show that meanings are important for the way in which people use their dwelling and residential environment. The meaning structure approach allows for a high level of aggregation identifying general meanings of the dwelling, such as a place to be together with family and friends. It also allows for a low level of aggregation, for example, using internet at home has for many people become part of everyday life, providing them with easy access to a wide range of information. This illustrates the usefulness of meaning structures as a tool for investigating people-environment relations.

This book philosophically discusses the educational challenges of dwelling poetically, which, according to Martin Heidegger, means learning from great poems how to live a worthy life and relate authentically to beings and to Being. The gifts of great poetry are carefully described and concrete approaches are presented that the educator can adopt.