Landscape, Becoming and Time: Past, present and future uses of the dwelling concept in Human Geography and beyond
Owain Jones (Bath Spa University) and Dan Keech (University of Gloucestershire)
Dwelling was set out by Heidegger in Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1959). It was an intrinsically geographic concept, exploring being in-the-world through landscape, time, memory, culture, mortality, and spirituality. Dwelling accounts for enfolded space and time in qualitative, experiential terms of becoming-through-experience – ‘poetic habituation’ and challenged rationalism, modernity, scientism (Malpas 2008). Dwelling had an influence of the humanistic/ phenomenological geographies of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Tuan 1977, Seamon 1993) and was further shaped by Ingold’s use (1993, 1995, 2000, 2011), with foci on taskscape, practice, relationality, non-human agency. This refreshed version, which shed some of the more obscure/problematic aspects of Heideggerian dwelling, was taken up in new cultural geographies of the 1990s, which sought more performative and post-structurally infused accounts of becoming-in-place and landscape (Thrift 1999, Cloke and Jones 2001, Wylie 2003, Harrison 2007, Schatzki 2007). Ingold reconsidered his use of dwelling as a cornerstone of becoming (2011), but it remains in use as a concept across the discipline. Interpretations of dwelling seem relevant in relation to the normalisation of socio-political and ecological turbulence, geographical identities, (multiple-)belongings and ecological (co-) consciousness to be iteratively built up in lived layerings that are mobile, and even ecstatic forms of flourishing (Rigby 2010).