‘gewohntes’ Exploring the specific and non-specific of housing and everyday practice

The home is a stage for the everyday. Directly and in many ways, determined by habits and rituals, sometimes unremarkable, sometimes quite conscious. The dimensions of the meaning of housing are manifold. Housing is a basic need - housing is individual. At the same time, housing is a product with huge speculative potential.

The cyclically recurring housing issue in Germany is a constant topic of political discourse, currently relevant in major cities and metropolitan areas. Over the decades, the basic functions of housing as shelter and protection space and the supply of infrastructure have remained unchanged, but the shifting, individual needs, and housing desires of the inhabitants usually do not find a direct translation into architecture. Supply and demand mechanisms are inadequate to regulate the housing market and differentiate the qualitative housing supply (Häußermann & Siebel, 2000). Housing empiricism can make quantitative statements about needs and desires without including the direct architectural and spatial context.
In this context, the apartment, as the 'corpus delicti' of the crisis, merely represents a shell, which only through the appropriation of the occupant, thus in relation to its user, allows its shape as an apartment to become visible. Thus, the housing design inevitably stands in a relationship of tension - between the specific of each dwelling, be it the spatial configuration, materials, or the surrounding context, and the non-specific, empty space that awaits its appropriation. A process that cannot be planned, so it is important to provide these multiple appropriations with an adequate space of possibility (Hubeli, 2009). For this to be adequate, an awareness of the multiple possibilities - the lived realities of the inhabitants - must be generated, beyond the 'standards' defined by norms.

How can the appropriation of the dwelling in its wholeness, diversity, and plurality, and thus the functional capacity of the dwelling, be made visible?

It requires an examination of the what and the how of dwelling.
Along with the mentioned research question, a research project for hypothesis generation in preparation for a Ph.D. on potentials in housing, appropriation strategies, and housing needs was initiated within the AULET Research funding at the Faculty of Architecture of Leibniz Universität Hannover.
Under the title 'gewohntes', in German, both an expression for something familiar and habitual, a research project with a multimedia survey format, and an exhibition were initiated.

Methods and design

Corresponding to the unpredictability and multifaceted nature of appropriation, retrospective traceability of methods and findings seemed appropriate. The work thus positions itself in the field of thoughtful methodology of artistic spatial research. The applicability of the methods and the possible gain of knowledge were explored in a self-reflective and -adjusting process during the execution (Haarmann, 2021). The overarching goal was to collect, reflect on, and experiment with living space, including its inhabitants - to make the hidden and the individual spatial appropriation visible.

Since (almost) everyone dwells, no delimitation of the field was formulated in advance. The type of questions and the design of the survey media were supposed to stimulate reflection on one's living situation. For the collection of data, different media and formats were experimented with. The aim was to obtain a broad spectrum of qualitative data, verbal (written) as well as visual. For this purpose, a catalog with 6 open questions and a questionnaire was developed. In this, the own housing situation can be evaluated and put to key figures of the apartment and the residents, as well as to statements about positive and negative aspects of the apartment.

The survey was conducted both digitally and analogously through various media and formats. For digital distribution, the website gewohntes.org was created, which contains the questionnaire in addition to the 6 questions. Besides the written answer, there is also the option to answer the question visually through an image file.
Postcards were designed for the analog distribution of the questions and to draw attention to the project and the website. The medium of the writable postcard allows for maximum openness in answering the question, both in writing and through drawings visually or in a combined form.
Instead of presenting the results in a completed exhibition or booklet as initially planned, the survey was continued within the exhibition. Thus, in addition to filling out the postcards and participating in the analog questionnaire, the exhibition offered an additional opportunity for dialogue and exchange.

Questionnaire

Six questions to be answered openly were developed to get closer to the signification of living, the needs of the resident, and thus the everyday practice of living and to query wishes and visions.
Particularly relevant to the research question are, on the one hand, the topics of housing reality and everyday practice, their perception, needs, and the discrepancies between housing desires and reality, on the other hand, strategies of appropriation, the influence of the residents on the apartment and, conversely, the influence of the apartment on the residents.

• How do you live?
• How do you want to live?
• What is particularly important to you when housing?
• What does living mean to you?
• How does your home influence your everyday life?
• What makes your home your home?

Qualitative analysis of the over 450 collected open-ended responses is currently in process. The collected data will be coded to form clusters and make cross-cutting themes visible. Processing of the data within a relational mapping is also planned to make the capacity of the apartment’s tangible and definable, as well as to shift the focus from the sociological aspects and ways of working back to the architectural-spatial starting point and thus to the design practice.

Résumé

The openness of the field "everyone who dwells" holds great potential, as a wide variety of people could participate regardless of age, place of residence, and life situation - not even that one dwells is a compulsory condition for participation, as part of the questions aims at visions and needs that one can have without them currently being fulfilled. At the same time, the large and open field brings difficulties in focus and scope. Thus, the survey has no claim to be representative, but it is rather about exploration and the first approach to capture motives and emotions, the feeling of living, which finds no room in the established housing statistics, in the query of parameters and numbers, such as the so-called 'zensus'. The open questions proved to be particularly revealing since they were able to generate a wide range of answers, as mentioned above. Some of them seem quite banal at first glance, but turn out to be essential upon closer examination, since they form the basis of the respective everyday life. Other answers are less personal, but more universal or critical of society. 'gewohntes' shows that an appropriate examination of the what and the how of living, in-depth on personal wishes and needs in the consideration of all facets - also spatially - is necessary to recognize and release potentials in housing.