Are Residential Dwellers Marking and Claiming? Applying the Concepts to Humans Who Dwell Differently. (August 2014) - Schelly, Chelsea
Mitch Rose's paper in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (volume 30, issue 5, pages 757–771) arguing that dwelling involves acts of marking and claiming offers bountiful conceptual tools for understanding the dwelling experience. Here, I apply Rose's ideas to the modern residential dweller and use this application to assess Rose's claims. Specifically, the typical and mainstream modern home dweller is contrasted with several different empirical case studies of people who dwell differently, using alternative technologies, practices, and forms of organization in residential dwelling. These case studies are explored using the language of 'marking' and 'claiming' as put forth by Rose (pace Martin Heidegger) to illustrate what these concepts offer for understanding the experience of dwelling in a home. The observations of residential dwellers who dwell differently suggest that Rose's concepts do help to elucidate the dwelling experience, but that intellectual assistance from other sources, including classical and contemporary pragmatist thought and the work of Marcel Mauss on the relationship between action and thought as well as Paul Harrison's claims regarding relationality and variation in dwelling, helps to further develop Rose's abstract formulaic and connect the dots between conceptualization and the empirical experiences of residential dwelling.