Abstract

The ubiquity of immanent change and movement in contemporary urban landscape seems to exceed the present cognitive and sensitive abilities of our species and changes the relation between people and the environment. The emergence of the metropolis affects our sense of home. In Eurocentric architectural discourse, this is more often than not referred to as a general shunning of place that results in an experience of homelessness. In contradiction to the negative connotation of deterritorialization and displacement in Euro-centric discourse, in Asian discourse there are alternative sensibilities. In Beijing's tradition of community building, this fluid concept of home is visible in the courtyard typology (in historical order: fang (坊), danwei (单位), and superblock). Social interactions, based, respectively, on family relations, work, and lifestyles, are the key to the conceptualization and experience of feeling at home. In Japan, this is further conceptualized in the word ma (間). Normally translated as ‘gap’ or ‘interval’, ma describes the ‘pregnant nothingness’ with which the contemporary experience of home resonates. In this way, the concept of ma interferes with the Euro-centric philosophy of difference and inspires us to look at the modern urban environment from a different perspective, as a potential ‘fifth dimension’ in architecture.

Keywords: architecture, Japan, China, homelessness, ma (間), community Building

Contemporary human beings have been fundamentally deterritorialized. Their original existential territories—bodies, domestic spaces, clans and cults—are no longer secured by a fixed ground; but henceforth they are indexed to a world of precarious representations and in perpetual motion (Guattari 2015: 97).