I came across this whilst reading for my Dissertation. I think it links to my work.
“David Seamon (Seamon, 1979) has also argued that the home is an intimate place of rest where a person can withdraw from the hustle of the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space. Home is where you can be yourself. In this sense a home acts as a kind of metaphor for place in general.
The centrality of home to humanistic approaches to place owes much to the Heidegger’s focus on ‘dwelling’ as the ideal kind of authentic existence and to the work of another continental phenomenological philosopher - Gaston Bachelard (1994). In Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space’ he considers the house/home as a primal space that acts as a first world or first universe that then frames our understandings of all the spaces outside. The home is an intimate space where experience is particularly intense. To Bachelard the interior arrangement of the house constitutes not one homogenous place but rather a series of places with their own memories, imaginings and dreams. Thus Bachelard distinguishes between the attic and the basement where the attic is a place of the intellect and rationality and the basement is the place of the unconscious and of nightmares - ‘The unconscious cannot be civilised. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar’ (Bachelard 1994, 19). To Bachelard, then, the house/home is a particularly privileged kind of place that frames the way people go on to think about the wider universe.”
Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Quotes from the Poetics of Space
