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Scandinavian Housing and Planning Research

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House, home and the place of dwelling

a
Pauli Tapani Karjalainen
a
Department of Geography and Regional Planning , University of Joensuu , P.O. Box 111,
Joensuu, SF‐80101, Finland
Published online: 15 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Pauli Tapani Karjalainen (1993) House, home and the place of dwelling, Scandinavian Housing and Planning
Research, 10:2, 65-74, DOI: 10.1080/02815739308730324

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 Scandinavian Housing & Planning Research 10: 65-74, 1993

House, Home and the Place of Dwelling

PAULI TAPANI KARJALAINEN
Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Joensuu

Karjalainen, P. T.: House, home and the place of dwelling. SHPR 10: 65-74, 1993.
In the article the nature of human dwelling is discussed. In its innermost sense, dwelling is seen
as a process in which the environment is drawn into the sphere of human activities. The
emphasis is on the experience of dwelling. This is analysed, firstly, by utilizing the concept of
place. While metrical points on maps are abstracted and universal expressions derived from the
systems of measurement, the places of a living context are concrete and particular sites of
human involvement. Secondly, a distinction between house and home is analysed. As a place of
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dwelling, house is a referential complex receiving its character in the encounter between the
dweller and the house. In a house made familiar, the dweller lives intimately. If fused with
emotions, the house becomes a home, a creation difficult to portray from the outside.

Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Joensuu, P.O. Box 111,
SF-80101 Joensuu, Finland

PROLOGUE
Silver-grey light envelops
the little house
in the expanse.
And now, already dusk,
the trees, memories surround us
as we drive in the yard, evening
(Nummi, 1986: 141).

It is a plain truth of human existence that everyone has to live somewhere. To inhabit
a place of dwelling is a perpetual part of the human condition. In this sense the theme
I deal with concerns us all. And because everyone should be the master of his/her
own habitation, my aim cannot be to determine any final solutions but rather to evoke
associations for reflection.
The great majority of people around the world are used to living in houses of some
sort. In the following I shall consider the way in which the materiality of a house
becomes the experience of a home. It is by marking out the essential points of this
process that some of the complexities of human dwelling can be revealed.
Human dwelling takes place in a locality. The discussion of house, home and
dwelling, I believe, is closely related to the analysis of the concept of place. My pre-
sentation, however, is not exhaustive. First, I consider the question of place and dwel-
ling from the Western point of view. In this way the many social and cultural relativities
which give the phenomenon its specific nature in other environments are not dealt
with here. Second, since I draw mainly from the human geographical and architectural
literature, the discussion will be restricted to specific fields of thought. Even in these
fields my main source is the humanistic literature approaching the question of dwell-
ing from the existentialist-phenomenological point of view. Of course the question
of home and dwelling cuts across disciplines, as it were. In addition to the domains
of thought mentioned, there is also an interest in different aspects of dwelling
 66 P. T. Karjalainen SHPR IO (1993)

in psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, not to mention art and

literature, in which the question at hand has been a perennial one.1 As evocative
illustrations, extracts from creative literature will also be utilized here.
In concrete terms, "to dwell is to make one's abode: to live in, or at, or on, or
about a place" (Oliver, 1987: 7). For some people, dwelling "implies a permanent
structure, for others a temporary accommodation, for still others it is where they live,
even if there is little evidence of building" (Oliver, 1987: 7). In a characterisation like
this the place-bound nature of dwelling is stressed. To dwell is to have a location
made for dwelling: we are dwelling here; here is our dwelling. This is close to the
everyday sense of the word: dwelling is usually understood as "having a roof over
one's head and a certain number of square meters at disposal" (Norberg-Schulz,
1985: 12).
But seen in this way alone, dwelling becomes reduced to a purely material
phenomenon in which the existential dimension giving it a qualitative and genuinely
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human nature remains hidden. Dwelling means more than just preparing a location,
a physical site, for human use. Dwelling, however, is the process of living at a
location and the physical expression of doing so, but it is "more than the structure,
as the soul is more than the body that contains it; for untold millions of people the
bond between themselves and their dwelling-place transcends the physical limitations
of their habitation" (Oliver, 1987: 7). Dwelling is a process which implies "the
establishment of a meaningful relationship between man and a given environment"
(Norberg-Schulz, 1985: 13), in which case to dwell means to make one's environ-
ment known; it means drawing the environment into the sphere of living through the
meaning-granting activities of the dweller. The shift is to the experience of dwelling,
in which, as Korosec-Serfaty (1985: 65) writes, the dweller is "an acting subject who
confers meaning upon the world but also an individual acted upon by the world of
which she or he is a part".
It is the transcendence of the mere physical nature of dwellings that makes them
a human phenomenon. As such, some aspects of dwelling can be scrutinized by
means of the concept of place.

PLACE: FROM METRICAL POINT TO LIVED ENVIRONMENT

The concept of place has been widely discussed in human geographical literature during
the last twenty years. One may even say that the concept of place has been the central
one in much of the so-called humanistic geography seeking to highlight the basic struc-
tures of the human-environment relationship (Relph, 1976;Tuan, 1977;Seamon, 1979).
Here one of the main points has been the distinction between what may be called
the universal or objective and the situational or subjective aspects of human spatiality.
To take a closer example, the existential (experiential) nature of spatiality can be
made visible by asking the following: what kind of space is a roomi If we think of
our workrooms the question becomes: how do we encounter this little piece of the
environment in which we are used to working? If creative at work, we do not see
the room in a geometrical-spatial sense as a container of, say, some forty cubic metres
filled with the various items we are working with. Primarily, most of the time, the
workroom is a sort of paraphernalia, a 'collection' of things constituting our
'accompaniment': the desk, the book shelves, the books, the pens, the computer and
the like. When involved in working, the room is not thought of at all but is only lived
as the medium of working.
 SHPR 10 (1993) House, home and the place of dwelling 67

In a situation like this all the things we need are 'ready-to-hand', not objective.2
The spatiality, or the place character, of one's workroom is in the things having a
relation to each other (chair-desk-PC-notes-books- . . . ) and, in the end, to
one's intentions, in accordance with the 'project' one is pursuing. The spatiality of
a room, because ultimately dependent on the intentional acts of its user, is a human
creation. If we feel there is not space enough, that the room is too small, it is
because the action we are then performing demands larger equipment, as it were.
The scarcity of space is not an absolute fact but related to the needs and desires of
the user of that room.
The place, in phenomenological terms, is "the arrangement and order of objects
which at present appear to me [and] which indicate me as the reason of their order"
(Sartre, 1977: 629). This is the case with all kinds of places at their various 'levels',
i.e., not only of rooms but also of houses, towns and countries, albeit through
differing 'channels' of intentions (Relph, 1976: 20-22; Norberg-Schulz, 1971).
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Experientially, shifting from the local level to the global one is to move from direct
concern to increasingly indirect assignments. The streets and sites of one's home
town can be experienced bodily, but the global questions concerning the future of
mankind, for example, are graspable only through the press, TV and other media.
Understood in this way, places are not neutral and objective segments of physical
space but sites of concrete human involvement. Here the notion of place provides
an organizing principle for what can be termed a person's engagement or immersion
into the world around him-/herself. In a more definite way, places can be taken as
the 'pieces' of the terrestrial-spatial reality that have been claimed by human
intentions. As Relph (1976: 43) puts it:
The basic meaning of place, its essence, does not therefore come from locations, nor from
the trivial functions that places serve, nor from the community that occupies it, not from
superficial and mundane experiences—though these are common and perhaps necessary
aspects of places. The essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that
defines places as profound centres of human existence.
As a concrete term for the lived environment, place is a qualitative phenomenon
grounded in the act of referencing and born out of the living context. As qualitative
phenomena* places are not rationalized in an objective manner, but are lived
through. Metrical points on maps, for instance, are abstracted expressions for the
convenience of measurement, and as such they are estranged from the living
context. Contrary to this, the 'placeness' of a living context is not universal and
abstract, but concrete and particular (Karjalainen, 1991). The situation can be
described in the following way:

Space as measured
Cartographic: universal, objective
62.36 N, 29.46 E = 'Joensuu for everyone
capable of reading maps'
Space as experienced
Existential: situational, subjective
At home: 'Joensuu for a dweller'
Visiting: Joensuu for a visitor

To explicate the existential nature of space a bit further, we can think of people
living in a given town and of those just visiting that site. In regard to the physical
 68 P. T. Karjalainen SHPR IO (1993)

attributes, the locality is the very same for both, but due to their different
referencing situations the place character the locality obtains differs considerably.
Because the site has been their home place, the town dwellers know the streets
intimately; they are familiar with their environment; it has become a habitual part
of their everyday living. As they know their place, the town dwellers normally do
not have to 'objectify' it. For them the town has a self-explanatory character, and
in this sense the town dwellers are very much inside their place. But visitors have
their homes elsewhere; in this town they are outsiders. As tourists, for example, they
will roam through the town for just a short period, and the environment thus
encountered can be only 'looked at', not made intimate. For visitors, the architec-
ture and the things of the town the dwellers simply take for granted may become
the main subject. And many a time the dweller may see a tourist consulting a map
of the town in order to be able to find his or her way. For the dweller this would
be exceptional.3
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If we now think of the differentiation between space and place to be the one of
abstractness contra concreteness, we may write the following:

Space: abstract
Place: concrete

In relation to this differentiation Walter (1980-81: 173) writes that "space

against place contrasts abstract representation with the pulse of life feeling", which
is the point explicated above. Another way of drawing the distinction between space
and place comes from etymology (Jager, 1976; Gould, 1981). In this case the setting
is the following:

Space: expansion
Place: constraint

Space is contrasted here with place as room, in such a way that space refers to
something that allows spreading or progression, to something that yields to an
expansionist effort permitting speed and making possible expansive feelings and
hope. In contrast to this, place refers to a site of habitation. In this sense space
appears as something that permits growth, expansion, and freedom, whereas place
becomes a room, a constraint and designated location. Space means outward-
spreading motion without the friction of walls, whereas place has the character of
concretely appropriated habitation and enclosure. "If we think of space as that
which allows movement, then place is a pause; each pause in movement makes it
possible for location to be transformed into place" (Tuan, 1977: 6). 4 Place is closely
tied to its landscape. We inhabit the place, and the place is always 'wrapped' by a
landscape. As a matter of fact, many a time it is the landscape of a place that comes
to one's mind if asked to depict the place. Landscape is a means of placing oneself
somewhere, an image of one's environment, even a mark of identification. For the
resident, an insider, the landscape is known by lived familiarity; for the visitor, an
outsider, it is a more superficial thing, a mere scene to be looked at.

HOUSE AND HOME: FROM A TANGIBLE BUILDING TO EXPERIENCES

The arguments of place expressed above aid in analysing the question of house and
home. To dwell is to have a place of dwelling and a house is a place to live in. In
 SHPR lo (1993) House, home and the place of dwelling 69

a literal sense, a house is a building serving as an abode, a building for habitation.

As a place of dwelling, however, a house obtains a special character. In the same
way a 'mere' room was shown to become a workroom through the items of working
and the intentions of the worker, the house too can be said to form an 'instrumental
complex'. Armajani (1991: 26) writes about a fanner's house in the following way:
The farmer has made room for the house. He has cleared the place, so there is room within
which the house can be met, can be encountered. (...) We enter the house, not as a thing
between four walls, in a geometric spatial sense, but as a tool for sitting, eating, talking,
reading and sleeping. Each structure as a tool is in a line of reference from one to another:
from roof to arch, arch to wall, wall to chair, chair to table, table to porch, porch to fence,
fence to location and location to places near and far from the house. Each one implies the
other.
House as a place of dwelling is a reverential totality, a system of assignments
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receiving its specific nature in the encounter between the dweller and the house. The
placeness of the house is generated in the things the dweller points out, locates and
makes specific. If well organized, a house (or a flat, a tenement, for that matter)
becomes essentially inconspicuous, because every item of the inter-reverential
system making up the totality of the house—chairs, tables, walls, staircases,
entrances—has its proper place according to its function, which, ultimately, is
possible only in relation to the intentions of the dweller, the user of that house. In
a house made familiar, the dweller 'knows' the places intimately. In one's own
house, because of the close familiarity, one can without difficulty walk from the
bedroom to the kitchen even in the dark—provided that everything on the way is
in its proper place, i.e. that the position of things (doorways, thresholds, furniture)
is the same as one has learned it to be. In this sense, the house as a building for
habitation is lived in a habitual way.
For the dweller the house is a small world, but one not without relations to its
surroundings. In the citation above there is a reference from "porch to fence, fence
to location and location to places near and far from the house" (Armajani, 1991:
28). The connections of a house to its surroundings are not only physical but also
social and economic. The house has its history, and the changes in the history of a
house are results and reflections of the biographies of the people living in it and of
the changes in the social and economic sphere of the society. The different
connections of a house with its environment are masterly pointed out in a poem by
Lassi Nummi:

The house has its interiors:

the cellar, the boiler,
a set of pipes for the circulating water.
The new sauna was built beside the house, bathroom,
cold room.
Flowering raspberry flourished near its wall, the thicket,
I loved it.
The rear building looks aged.
It's just a matter of painting,
really well preserved, sound at the core.
Stalls and cribs have long been empty
—the cow shed was rather a question of
principle:
surely, there should be a couple of cows in the
 70 P. T. Karjalainen SHPRIO(I993)

household. It's not right for a teacher's wife

to be doing nothing,
not even as a pensioner. What would the neighbours
think, anyway?
- But it wasn't very practical any more
in the nineteen fifties, children long since away.
So the cows were sold,
meadows and fields hired out. Gradually the natural
economy was left behind.
Around the cow shed, under the same roof
stock room, woodshed, granary,
the old sauna on the other side, the walled iron pot.
Apple trees protected by the outer yard in two
directions. Courtyard.
And then the garden. Because there is no scope for
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sentiments here,
I won't say more than this.
(Nummi, 1986: 143)

The house described in the poem has become a home for the people living in it.
As a home the house is a creation having special properties accessible only to the
people who made it their home. These properties—sentiments, emotions, feelings of
security, inter-personal relations, sociality, relations between the different genera-
tions and all of them with their positive and negative aspects—are difficult to
portray from the outside. This is because in its deepest sense home is always
something personal and private.

FROM HOME TO HOUSE: MAKING A COMMODITY OF EMOTION

Homes need not be only houses—a miserable shack may be a beloved home for
someone living in it. On the other hand, houses do not always become homes, even
if intended as such. Sometimes it is impossible to begin to feel at home. Bordessa
(1989: 34) writes about the process of home-making by arguing that "houses
become homes only by some process that culminates in the locking together of self
and artifact". In other words, houses made homes are material objects fused with
human values.
In trying to find out the difference between house and home, the following
distinction in a dictionary of confused words (Room, 1985: 122) is full of meaning:
house Ihome (place to live in)
The distinction was once more clear-cut than it now is. A 'house' was a building for living
in. A 'home' was a 'house' (or fiat or any family residence) seen as not just a place to live
in but a place of domestic comfort and family happiness. Today the two words are—at
any rate in the jargon of estate agents—one and the same thing: "new show 'homes' for
sale". (Not that the estate agents do not use the word 'house', they do—extensively. But
when they say 'home' they simply mean 'house'.) In senses other than 'house', however,
'home' remains a highly emotive word, as in 'homeland', 'homesick', "'home' town" and
even the 'Home Guard'.
As houses are increasingly sold and bought in the systems of housing markets by
means of the image of the home, the meaning of the two words is likely to be
blurred even more. (A glance at the relevant pages of newspapers will demonstrate
 SHPR io (1993) House, home and the place of dwelling 71

this.) In the above differentiation, however, 'house' is clearly contrasted with

'home'. If we think of the two words, we may say that the former is tangible and
the latter intangible, and because of this, 'home' is a more difficult term than
'house'. House is a material object, but home is a relation. As has been indicated,
home is best conceived of as a kind of relationship between people and their place
of habitation. In Dovey's (1985: 34) words, home "is an emotionally based and
meaningful relationship between dwellers and the dwelling places". Moreover, a
house is a commodity, but the home is not; home, rather, is a result of the human
activity giving meaning to the whole of one's lived environment. In this way, home
is a relationship that is "created and evolved over time; it is not consumed like the
products of an economic process" (Dovey, 1985: 54).
V. S. Naipaul's autobiographical work The Enigma of Arrival (Naipaul, 1987) is
a profound description and self-analysis of the process of coming home, the search
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for identity, and the embodiment of the lived environment. In Naipaul's case,
though, the search is more for a cultural home than a geographical one, but the
metaphoric use of home in his text also has concrete implications. The writer, "a
man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in
cottage of a half neglected estate, an estate full of its Edwardian past" (Naipaul,
1987: 19), lived some ten years near Stonehenge, the oldest stretch of countryside in
England. During his prolonged stay in that area, the writer says he was able to see
the beauty of the place and develop a great love for it, greater than for any other
place he had known. The times were changing, however, and so was the place in the
countryside. After Jack's death—Jack was a somewhat unique man whose life the
writer came to consider a part of the place—new people moved to his house. As
Jack's home, the house with its tenderly cared for garden was a condensation of
Jack's whole life. Now occupied by a young couple, the house was treated quite
differently:
Now part of the hedge and the wire fence was taken down, so that the car of the new
couple could be parked off the public road. The car was important to the new people,
more important than the house. They were young people, without children; and they
handled the house in a new way. It was a place of shelter, no more: temporary shelter for
a temporary job. The wife sunbathed in the front garden whenever she could; and perhaps
this was why the front door was often open. That open front door was very unsettling
(Naipaul, 1987: 55).
For the writer observing all this was an expression of the changing spectrum of
values and the prevailing way of life. In Jack's house many alterations were carried
out, dividing walls torn down, the garden made a lawn. The house was stripped of
its atmosphere of home and sanctity. Now the house, once intimate with its
atmosphere of home, was nothing but a shelter:
The house as a place of shelter, not as a place to which you could transfer (or risk
transferring) emotions or hopes—this attitude of the new couple to the thatched house
seemed to match the more general new attitude to the land. The land, for the new workers,
was merely a thing to be worked. And with their machines they worked it as though they
intended to turn all the irregularities of nature into straight lines or graded curves
(Naipaul, 1987: 55).
This was a result of the new way of farming and, more generally, the new
technologies of production taken to extremes. All this, the writer maintains, was
also mirrored in the new people's superficial relation to the place. For them the
 72 P. T. Karjalainen SHPRIO<I993)

house was a temporary stop and "to invest more in it emotionally would have been
a waste" (Naipaul, 1987: 70). A home to one is but a house to another.

EPILOGUE
The questions discussed above are by no means new. Moreover, in such questions
no single answer can be more than just cursory and provisional. My text implies
that an attachment to places and sentiments for homes are positive values to be
supported. But what about the future? Should we not think of the problem of home
and place, in the way discussed here, as only a bit of nostalgia or a remnant
whispering from the past but finally melting away in this age of postmodernism?
In his imaginative enquiries into the nature of human spatiality, Georges Perec
(1992: 85) contrasts two positions in regard to place. First, we could gain a really
firm footing somewhere, find or invent our roots, organize the place as being ours
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forever and be totally there. Or we could possess just our clothes, save nothing,
continually change our residence, city and country and not feel being at home
anywhere in particular but, as a positive consequence of not being rooted too
firmly, be at home nearly everywhere. In Perec's view we should have got used to
changing places freely and easily quite a long time ago. Of course, he admits,
moving elsewhere is always a laborious task.
In our time as the result of transport and communication technologies, all
distances in time and space have been shrinking. The elimination of the friction of
distance vitiates most existing spatial theory. The 'frictionless' world, at the same,
time, opens the door to alternative spatial theories (Abler, 1975). What has this to
do with places? Very concretely, by plane we can now reach places overnight which
formerly took weeks and months. "Man puts the longest distances behind him in
the shortest of time", Heidegger (1971: 65) writes. "He puts the greatest distances
behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the shortest range"
(Heidegger, 1971: 65). Yet the furious abolition of physical distances will not per se
bring nearness, for nearness does not consist of the shortest distance as such—the
situation being analogous to the one made between house as materiality and home
as emotion. In existential terms, what is near to us in point of physical distance may
remain far from us in point of experience and vice versa. Even though we are able
to step across all horizons and reach every place with maximum ease, there still
would be an existential difference between them.
To consider another vision, could we not learn to dwell in the timeless (placeless)
present produced by the media's overproduction of information leading to an
implosion of meaning and creating a world of simulations (Baudrillard, 1987). In a
hyper-space of pure presence we would live beyond normativity and classification in
our "aesthetic hallucination of reality" (Featherstone, 1991: 33) and not quest for
an authentic presimulational reality but would have "the necessary dispositions to
engage in 'the play of the real' and capacity to open to surface sensations,
spectacular imagery, liminoid experiences and intensities without the nostalgia for
the real" (Featherstone, 1991: 60). The touch of the 'real' reality of places will
finally melt away. To what degree our cultural realities of the future will really be
postmodern in this sense is of course hard to foretell.
Very likely in the foreseeable future the meaning of place and the experience of
home will not be annihilated by shrinking physical distances. For humans to have
a secure site of dwelling will perhaps become even more important. Here a
 SHPR 10 (1993) House, home and the place of dwelling 73

space-traveller, a representative of our technological age, is a revealing case in

point. When asked to describe his leisure-time activities during his long stay in a
space-ship, a cosmonaut answered: "I didn't want to use my time in reading books
or listening to music. Up there I wanted to do what there was to do: to stare at the
Earth and its oceans. I never got weary of watching the Earth" (Squillante, 1992).
The Earth with its places is the home of mankind. In some place on the Earth
there is,

A house somewhere.
Light around it.
Unceasing
breath, heartbeat
under its roof.
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(Nummi, 1986: 153)

NOTES
1. Relevant inter-disciplinary collections of essays are Altman and Werner (1985); Seamon and
Muegerauer (1985); Buttimer and Seamon (1980).
2. This argument derives from Heidegger's analysis of things as pragmata, that is, things as utensils
which acquire their meaning only so far as we engage them in our concrete everyday living, in our
'primordial praxis'. Heidegger (1962: 96-97) understands the primordial praxis to be constituted by
our 'concernful dealings', that is, intentional acts in which we meet with the equipment for writing,
building, journeying, eating, etc. In primordial praxis the pragmatic (pre-reflective) character of
things is revealed concretely, in a lived-through manner, prior to the theoretical (objective) knowledge
of them. In the Heideggerian sense, "the world is a particular mode of comprehension which enables
us to apprehend things in our environment in their specific purposefulness and meaningfulness"
(Karjalainen, 1986: 95).
3. For the dweller, the place involvement may obtain different intensities. Rootedness means being
completely at a place, living unreflectively in a particular locality. When at a place in a rooted
manner, people may become totally taken by the boring routines of their everyday lives. In this sense,
Tuan (1980) maintains, too deep a rootedness is not a condition to be celebrated. In contrast to this,
the sense of place is created by overcoming the ennui of rootedness: curiosity towards one's
environment is a necessary condition for the sense of place to emerge. In Broek's (1965: 22) words,
"he who has never lived beyond his place of birth accepts the familiar landscape without question.
Knowledge of other lands provides the perspective necessary to view one's own". This is a device that
has a deep metaphoric content, too.
4. Sometimes there may not be 'room' enough, so that the 'walls' must be torn down and the quest for
openness begun. Jack Kerouac's On the Road can also be read from the perspective of young people
in search of a place, people en route: "(...) crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in
the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without
getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars"
(Kerouac, 1973: 28). For these people space is freedom, place is enclosure.
5. In his collection of poems Matkalla niilyn yli (On the way across the meadow) Lassi Nummi, a
Finnish poet, has a fascinating and emotionally intense section of thirteen poems called Tab
lakeudella (The house in the expanse) in which he writes "the house empty, longing farther". The
house, close to the narrator, is being vacated and left for new dwellers to move in:

The house gets empty. Chairs, lamps, books.

That dark cupboard in the drawing room,
a part of the house, was taken away yesterday.
We all collect something—bits of life,
times gone never coming back.
Time consolidated into objects.
(Nummi, 1986: 150; all translations from Finnish by the author.)
 74 P. T. Karjalainen SHPRIO(1993)

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