The art of dwelling as tacit philia

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2024

Authors

Carvalho, Tiago Mesquita (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: Rethinking the city: reconfiguration and fragmentation

Pages: 167-180?

ISBN: 978-1-032-59097-4 (hbk); 978-1-032-59099-8 (pbk)

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-003-45292-8

Publisher: Routledge

Other information

Abstract (EN): This chapter deals with the art of dwelling and its implications for the fields of professional urban planning and architecture. The basic assumption is that the built environment has a bearing on human flourishing and thus has normative import. Dwelling is an art by which both places and communities are sustained and which proceeds through collective, unintended action that uses tacit knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be “picked up” but not formalised in guidelines. This is in stark contrast to current practices that rely on general, rule-like guidelines and procedures, in line with philosophy and science’s overall commitment to the universal, the analytical and the ahistorical. In the course of the history of urban planning, the site-specificity of places has been made irrelevant, and dwelling has become commodified. Nevertheless, in marginal and forsaken neighbourhoods, dwelling continues to thrive. The question is thus whether and how professionals can design places that favour dwelling. For this task, I will draw on concepts from the philosophy of technology to ground dwelling as a hermeneutical task by which communities interpret the built environment in its multifarious meanings and unfold other uses beyond the primacy of function.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific