Domestic Boundaries: Transformación de la vivienda y la ciudad en relación a los nuevos modos de vida = Domestic Boundaries. Home and city transformations related to new lifestyles

Ongoing social, cultural, sanitarian and economic changes in western societies are affecting the way people experience both urban and domestic environments. Contemporary technologies, the gender revolution and the evolution of habits are among the factors that are leading to the emergence of new forms of urban life, of new commons, of emergent domesticities where the very ideas of home and city blur. This implies that the dualities such as man/woman, interior/exterior, public private, work/leisure, sedentary/nomadic, inside/outside, which were traditionally used to understand the human cultural landscape, are now dissolving. In fact, the domestic environment is opening up, adapting many of its uses and spaces to new forms of nomadic, post-human and digital life; its identity is changing, evolving into a hybrid environment difficult to define, where the pace replaced ubiquity while changing the way the common is measured. At the same time, the urban environment is being domesticated: many of the activities normally associated with domestic life, such as resting, eating, finding some intimacy, watching movies, or talking to relatives, are increasingly taking place in the spaces of the city. The same occurs for the digital sphere where it is possible to meet, work, dance, flirt, play, etc, outside the boundaries of the physical environment and into new virtual spaces. In the contemporary era domestic and urban life are slowly but inexorably merging. Home is increasingly understood, rather than as a fixed place enclosed within four walls, as a mental territory that extends into the broader context of the city and of the virtual space, fueled by the increased speed of action, growing individuality and the expansion of public relations. The very meaning of its architectures is transformed, and it needs to act on several layers between the material, the digital and the urban. This invisible territory, this new common space, is turning the urban built environment into an endless domestic landscape, that entails a profound rethinking of physical places and of the meaning of domesticity itself. With the rise of the diffused home, domestic spaces, on the other hand, have been driven to become more generic, reprogrammable in response to capital’s ever-changing needs. This blurring of boundaries between home and city is radically changing the way of thinking and designing private and public spaces, the way we live the common, the way we make them able to respond to emerging and future lifestyles. The purpose of this thesis is to introduce the main issues about the current blurring of the boundaries between domestic and urban space, as well as to explain how this is affecting the architecture of both the house and the city, resulting in a new common