The time of the city-the time of wage hours-dominated these “private” spaces, and, one could argue, all post-war “homes”: “The home never contained the fruits of labor, a surplus of either goods or time,” says Berger, and earned wages were exchanged for the unlived time encapsulated in the purchase of the tv set (an iconic “eternal present”), the “speed” of cars, and the time “saved” by modern appliances. The barely-habitable spaces of tenement housing were no different from overcrowded peasant housing: what made tenements different was their dissolution of the line between “store” (commodity exchange) and “home” (personal dwelling). Īrt critic John Berger cites the mid-century rise of tenement housing in Manhattan as having radically reshaped domestic spaces that reflected the increasing scarcity, and thus increased value, of space as a commodity. The creation of “inner space commensurate with inner being” was Rilke’s forte, he claims Rilke was also a master of showing “inside” and “outside” as one dynamic continuity, rather than a geometrical opposition. Intimate space, for Bachelard, was the inverse of undetermined space. The flats of Paris have no roots, he explains, and the sky-scrapers, no cellars: “From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city” Post-industrial homes have become “mere horizonality”: as a result, the different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lacking the fundamental principles for distinguishing the values of intimacy.

The architecture of urban life makes sustaining a dwelling place for the cultivation of subjectivity difficult, says Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space.

Urban Poetics: a Call from (and To) the Wild

Bachelard the poetics of space