ABSTRACT
The Dwelling Spaces of Individual Freedom The idea of the house as a means of separating the inside from the outside, nature from human beings, the public from the private sphere, has existed since antiquity. For Heidegger, the house is understood "as the most primitive drawing of a line that produces an inside opposed to an outside".2 The debate as to whether this line is (or should be) rigid and unsurpassable, or indeed, as to whether it should exist at all, also goes back to the antiquity. In Plato's Republic, the polis, the public sphere, is defined as the opposite of the private sphere. Again, in Statesman, Plato juxtaposed critically the public sphere of the agora to the private sphere of the household (oikos) and argued that both realms are eligible for political praxis. It was only from the Enlightenment onwards, that the construction of the private space of the modern (bourgeois) house as isolated, apolitical, and
separate from the public sphere was understood as a particularly positive development in the Western world. As the opening quote by Ruskin demonstrates, the right to a private space became closely linked to the idea of individual freedom (of the white Western male subject) that constituted the core of Enlightenment thinking, and access to an isolated private sphere became part of a broader social project of emancipation.3 Individual freedom became the sacred principle of the modernizing Western world, and the individualized space of the private house became its sacred space. Through this social process, the house (a material construction, an edifice) was turned into the home (a place imbued with cultural and ideological meaning). The dwelling space of the modern (bourgeois) individual became constructed not only as a line separating the inside from the outside (a house), but also as the epitome, the spatial inscription of the idea of individual freedom, a place liberated from fear and anxiety, a place supposedly untouched by social, political, and natural processes, a place enjoying an autonomous and independent existence: a home. In the opening quote of this chapter, Ruskin offers a definition of the "true nature of home;' by singling out two basic qualities that a house should possess in order to become a home. Both qualities have to do with the capacity of the edifice to keep outside: (1) social processes and social relations (crime, socially excluded groups, homelessness, undesired others, etc.), but also (2) natural processes and natural elements (dust, cold or polluted air, rain, dirt, sewage, smog, etc.)
Thus, according to Ruskin, the modern house becomes the modern home (an autonomous protected utopia) through a dual practice of exclusion: through ostracizing the undesired social as well as the undesired natural elements and processes. The social and spatial implications of the first of these preconditions for the construction of the autonomous modern Western home (the exclusion of social processes) have been analyzed and detailed in numerous studies in geography, architecture, anthropology and sociology.4 However, the socio-spatial implications of the second precondition (i.e., the exclusion of nature and of socio-natural processes) have not been adequately researched or documented.5 This is exactly the focus of this chapter. Following up on the analysis of the separation between nature and society in Chapter 2, and the investigation of the spatial implications of this separation in the city/nature relationship in Chapter 3, I investigate further the materiality versus ideological boundaries between the natural, the urban, and the domestic by using, again, one natural element-water-as a vehicle.
