Our most philosophical tutorial yet, the class was posed with a series of questions that provoked discussion over the different meanings attached to neighbourhoods and these meaning often extend beyond the physical components of architecture and location. At the heart of today’s tutorial, we established that neighbourhood experiences can vary depending on scale, meaning the size of the neighbourhood geographically and distance. In addition, the identity we ascribe to a neighbourhood – or the characteristics that become innate to a neighbourhood – usually becomes more embedded depending on the amount of time that a certain community has stayed in the one place. However, this point was contradicted when we established that neighbourhoods, and the different connotations we associate with them, can change depending on the people who populate their area of residency.
We later discussed neighbourhoods in relation to ‘home’ – how the idea of ‘home’ is actually intangible, it is something that can be taken with you or change and develop as you do. It is a completely personal and subjective definition that can only be defined by the individual who has the power to ascribe the meaning of ‘home’.
