Introduction to Dwelling in Place

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Editor’s Note: This is the introductory post in the Dwelling in Place series edited by Nicole Miller. You can read other posts in this series here.

To dwell means to stay, to have the interest in staying and holding something or somewhere in mind. Rather than to wander, untethered, constantly moving in a state of in-between-ness, dwelling gives the possibility to be still. And stillness in turn allows one to see movement in the surroundings. Through dwelling, we create a relationship with a place by being witness to its changes, to the passing of its time. But more than being a witness, dwelling implies an active intent. To dwell in place means to choose to shape, see, and remake our relationships and understandings within a location. Ecologies are made up of dwellers – agentic contributors that are connected. They are devoted to endurance that sustains, acknowledges, and at times affects a vision for what could be.

Architecture facilitates dwelling. The first make-shift canopies or coverings that allowed for one to be comforted and protected provided the opening for architecture to evolve into different structures. The environment became “the built environment” through this impetus. Buildings provide a stable axis from which to become aware of and to be part of the passage of time. Architecture is therefore one of the foundational mediators between humans and natures, through its intrinsic ability to insist on the balancing of a relationship between the two. And through every architectural work the human-nature relationship is negotiated, where humans and natures apply pressure, sometimes against each other and sometimes in coordination with each other, for agency, existence, and comfort. This series, Dwelling in Place, explores how the environment and architecture co-constitute each other through the dialectical process of dwelling through human and non-human actors. In that co-constitution it considers further expanding an understanding of dwelling and its implications. In architecture, a window can simultaneously be seen as an opening to the place outside, and it can be seen as a barrier to the place outside.

Heidegger expressed the entangled relationship between building and dwelling – “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, because we are dwellers.”1 Tied to his conception of Dasein, as the condition for being and understanding existence, he conceived of dwelling as the means through which we continue being. In other words, dwelling grounds our embodied presence, giving us a temporal center and relational connections that position us on earth. Dwelling is a meaning-making process.

In anthropologist Tim Ingold’s text “Towards a Politics of Dwelling” he criticizes his own previously coined term “dwelling perspective”. He used the term “dwelling perspective” to describe the human positioning which requires existing and being active within an environment, as an embodied term for being within place.2 A dwelling perspective incorporates Heidegger’s notion of time and relations coalescing through the act of dwelling. Ingold’s more recent work notes that he regrets the term dwelling, as it is “too cosy and comfortable” a term.3 In actuality, his intent was to highlight the relationship between agency, difficulties, and complexity that arises from dwelling, which in turn means that dwelling is a relational act within fields of power. This shift moves dwelling from a viewpoint that is only focused on a peaceful relationship with nature, but instead reveals questions that change the center of focus from only the perspective of a single individual human to a multi-perspective one, aggregated from its collective and differing viewpoints. Donna Haraway’s call for “Staying with the Trouble”4 is similarly related to this thinking. What Ingold and Haraway both assert is that dwelling (or staying) is not necessarily pleasant, it is not necessarily comfortable, and it is not necessarily without problems and complexity. It is not a purely aesthetic experience to dwell. Dwelling and staying with the trouble require a responsiveness to the actual conditions, whether good or bad, that exist in the place where one is. To dwell does not mean to give up or remove oneself if things change, but instead to acknowledge and participate in each day, as things change. To linger, stay, maintain, and sustain a presence. As a result fully accepting the potential and responsibility for dwelling requires attentiveness to: the history of a place, the perspectives outside one’s own which compositionally constitute a place, and the care needed to navigate the progression of time in a place. Despite dwelling as a literal effort towards permanence through its desire for “staying”, it simultaneously calls for acknowledging change and therefore temporariness.

The spirit of the place – the genius loci – is composed of its parts, yet greater than the sum of its parts. The collection of human and non-human dwellers from the past to the present are the place. Could we conceptualize that places are actually emergent “organisms”, continuously reorganizing from the properties and presencing of those that dwell? That the process of participating and being present is what makes and remakes places over and over each day. In that sense, dwelling not only is our means of existing but it is the collective act through which environments and places specifically communicate their unique sense of life. The responsibilities then attached to dwelling in place, and in turn the interventions of architecture, require consideration. Rather than only examine the ‘what’ – the buildings themselves which may facilitate or obstruct dwelling in its existential interpretation – dwelling could be considered and continuously practiced through the questions of who, how, why, and when. Who is dwelling and who has the right to agentic participation in dwelling. How is dwelling enacted and negotiated. Why and when does does it matter. These questions, if attended to seriously, require a recurring examination of existence, control, and intention, through which our engagement with these questions affords us the ability to – in some way – be present and stay.

Through those questions we come to a better understanding of the question of where.

“Landscape Near Rome During a Storm” by Simon Denis ca. 1786–1806 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. While painted in engagement with the idea of the sublime, the conceptual themes of both awe and unease inspired by nature can perhaps be translated to a contemporary conception of dwelling. A relational sublime would then include human and non-human interactions as potentially difficult storms which we must weather, navigate, and co-exist with in order to be present, creating a similar sense of both awe and unease.

Notes


1.Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 148.

2. Tim Ingold, “Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World,” in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 172–188.

3. Tim Ingold, “Epilogue: Towards a Politics of Dwelling,” Conservation and Society 3, no. 2 (2005): 503.

4. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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Nicole Miller

Nicole Miller is an artist and visual anthropologist based in Sweden working at the intersection of art, philosophy, and environmental history. She works at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Uppsala University and is an Associate Editor for the ASEH journal Germinate. She was Conference Manager for ESEH 2025 and Curator for the coinciding Climate Histories Art Interventions.

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