Imag­in­ing the Space-In-Between

The space-in-between, or the ​“greater real­i­ty of the doorstep [i.e., thresh­old],” as the Dutch archi­tect Aldo van Eyck put it, cap­tures to a great extent the muta­tions of the archi­tec­tur­al debates, which took place after World War II and through the 1950s. In a peri­od of destruc­tion, uncer­tain­ty, but also vast num­ber of changes,1 the imagery and spa­tial­i­ty of the thresh­old fur­nished archi­tects with a scale and cer­tain coor­di­nates to inter­ro­gate and re-nego­ti­ate rela­tion­ships fun­da­men­tal to the mod­ern project: between the dwelling unit and the city, the indi­vid­ual and the col­lec­tive, the for­mal and the infor­mal, the new and the his­tor­i­cal. Trans­ferred from ethno­graph­ic stud­ies of forms of liv­ing in tra­di­tion­al and small-scale set­tle­ments to the core of the archi­tec­tur­al debates on the mod­ern city, the realm of the thresh­old pro­posed a par­a­digm. It pre­sent­ed itself as alter­na­tive, if not cor­rec­tion, to the ratio­nal­is­tic views and sci­en­tif­ic tech­niques appre­hend­ed as char­ac­ter­is­tic of archi­tec­tur­al func­tion­al­ism. Locat­ed with­in the sphere of the inti­mate, it expressed the urge to recon­sid­er and stress human agency in the mean­ing­ful con­struc­tion of the world as we see and live and act with­in it. Pass­ing through a door, how irrel­e­vant­ly banal came to stand as a con­densed expres­sion of human life itself. On a dif­fer­ent scale, the one of the city and the region, of geog­ra­phy and his­to­ry, the macro became noth­ing but an exten­sion of the micro. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]

Limen (or limes), mean­ing in Latin thresh­old, door­way or lim­it, has always been a site for the con­struc­tion of alter­na­tive social and dis­cur­sive pat­terns. The term, used to char­ac­terise mul­ti­ple areas and forms of expe­ri­ence, has a long his­to­ry indeed. While the con­cept of lim­i­nal­i­ty becomes much cel­e­brat­ed in social and cul­tur­al the­o­ries, in par­tic­u­lar over the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, it does acquire a more pro­found pres­ence in archi­tec­ture, since the lat­ter presents itself through the econ­o­my and appa­ra­tus of the bound­ary. Does not the labyrinth, in its arche­typ­al sta­tus, beto­ken the con­di­tion of the lim­i­nal sig­ni­fy­ing at once the mark­ing of an enclo­sure and the descrip­tion of a route? Between the myth-ground­ed arche­type and the crit­i­cal con­struct, the con­cept of lim­i­nal­i­ty, as Zyg­munt Bau­man said, is deeply ambiva­lent. Yet the ways, in which var­i­ous under­stand­ings of it are expressed and mate­ri­alised, pose ques­tions, which are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly spa­tial, polit­i­cal, juridi­cal, per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal. In the phys­i­cal world, archi­tec­ture defines spa­tial lim­its, cre­ates mate­r­i­al enclo­sures. It is impos­si­ble to design any­thing with­out think­ing the bound­ary itself first. But in so doing, con­cep­tu­al enclo­sures become man­i­fest as well. What is the space of home, the city, the com­mon, the nation­al, the local, if not attempts to iden­ti­fy and cir­cum­scribe areas of inte­ri­or­i­ty and prox­im­i­ty? There is no inte­ri­or­i­ty, how­ev­er, with­out the mark­ing of a cer­tain lim­it, trace of the rela­tion­ship between here and there, the famil­iar and the unfa­mil­iar, the inside and the out­side, the inti­mate and the shared. The ways, in which, these instances are marked is nec­es­sar­i­ly a polit­i­cal ques­tion, an inter­ro­ga­tion of the pol­i­tics of inhab­i­ta­tion. This is not to imply a cer­tain polit­i­cal way of appro­pri­at­ing and inhab­it­ing spaces or describ­ing that inhab­i­ta­tion, but an attempt to exam­ine and under­stand the com­plex of effects writ­ten into the expe­ri­ence of spaces that seem at first iso­lat­ed from these effects. Nonethe­less, to cov­er all spec­u­la­tions on the sig­nif­i­cance and mul­ti­ple func­tions of the lim­i­nal would be beyond the scope of this text. Instead, the enquiry here cen­tres into the ways in which expres­sions of the lim­i­nal re-engaged in the archi­tec­tur­al and urban debates of the 1950s, steer­ing and push­ing ideas and design prac­tices in new direc­tions, and in fact antic­i­pat­ing recent argu­ments and emerg­ing issues.

But where is the ​‘space-in-between’ to be locat­ed? Can it be delin­eat­ed and described? What are the mate­r­i­al and func­tion­al aspects of such space? Does it demar­cate an inter­rup­tion, a tran­si­tion, meet­ing of oppo­site cat­e­gories or a con­flu­ence of mate­r­i­al ele­ments, scales, per­cep­tions and expe­ri­ences? The var­i­ous read­ings and uses can hard­ly be reduced to a sin­gle sys­tem­at­ic state­ment. Nonethe­less, what per­tains in the var­i­ous inter­pre­tive and design strate­gies is the impor­tance of the prin­ci­ple of rela­tions and a mode of oper­at­ing from with­in; hard­ly a new ques­tion, but one that has become cen­tral to debates of recent decades. 

The term lim­i­nal appears in Col­in Rowe’s and Fred Koetter’s Col­lage City prob­lema­tis­ing the con­cep­tion of space as undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed plane, upon which, spa­tial, visu­al and pro­gram­mat­ic ele­ments are laid out.2 Though pub­lished in 1978, the authors refer to Vic­tor Turn­er, the British anthro­pol­o­gist who re-dis­cov­ered the con­cept of lim­i­nal­i­ty in 1963 and extend­ed it to the roots of human expe­ri­ence. The con­di­tion of lim­i­nal­i­ty, in Turner’s writ­ings and the anthro­po­log­i­cal notions of the rites of pas­sage, marks out ​“actions and reac­tions between the pro­fane and the sacred,” the cross­ing by the sub­ject (the ​“pas­sen­ger”) of ordi­nary cus­toms and dai­ly rit­u­al to open to the unac­cus­tomed.3 Most inter­est­ing­ly, Turn­er con­nects the state of being-on-the-thresh­old with the notion of com­mu­ni­tas.4 ​“We are pre­sent­ed,” he writes, ​“in such rites, with a ​‘moment in and out of time,’ and in and out of sec­u­lar social struc­ture, which reveals, how­ev­er fleet­ing­ly, some recog­ni­tion (in sym­bol if not always in lan­guage) of a gen­er­al­ized social bond.” In fact, it is with­in the ​‘betwixt and between’ that ​“the gener­ic author­i­ty of tra­di­tion” is effec­tu­at­ed, and it is pre­cise­ly this tem­po­ral dimen­sion, which Rowe and Koet­ter invest­ed the term lim­i­nal with. Crit­i­cal of mod­ern architecture’s ​“fail­ure to rec­og­nize the com­ple­men­tary rela­tion­ship,” they used the term to depict the city in terms of a fluc­tu­at­ing ground ​“for the joint exis­tence of per­ma­nent ref­er­ence and ran­dom hap­pen­ing, of the pri­vate and the pub­lic, of inno­va­tion and tra­di­tion, of both the ret­ro­spec­tive and the prophet­ic ges­ture.”5 Every build­ing is for the authors at once a project of ​“prophe­cy” while bring­ing togeth­er ​“the known, per­haps mun­dane and, nec­es­sar­i­ly, mem­o­ry-laden con­text from which it emerges.”6 Rowe and Koet­ter imbed­ded the anthro­po­log­i­cal approach in the attempt to rethink the city in terms of a ​“sol­id and con­tin­u­ous matrix or tex­ture,” with­in which the build­ing func­tions at once as dis­tinct object, a ​‘fig­ure’ car­ry­ing the Geist of its time, and part of the ​‘ground’, that con­tin­u­um of spa­tial, visu­al and his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ships, which is cease­less­ly acti­vat­ed and trans­formed by ​“gen­er­a­tions of con­no­ta­tions, asso­ci­a­tions, sense expe­ri­ences.”7 The city/ground is thus being analysed as a ​“leg­i­ble struc­ture” (the ​“gen­er­alised social bond”), which gives ​“ener­gy to its rec­i­p­ro­cal con­di­tion, the spe­cif­ic space.”8 The mul­ti­ple inter­faces, delib­er­ate­ly unspe­cif­ic, take cen­tre stage for the user to imag­ine, nego­ti­ate and occu­py.9 This also explains the use of the term ​‘col­lage’, espe­cial­ly as defined by Max Ernst in his book Beyond Paint­ing; a ​“mech­a­nism” for ​“the exploita­tion of the chance meet­ing of two dis­tant real­i­ties on an unfa­mil­iar plane.”10

The under­stand­ing of the city, or indeed any spa­tial organ­i­sa­tion, as lay­er­ing of for­mal and mate­r­i­al con­fig­u­ra­tions and human asso­ci­a­tions had been expressed in ear­li­er archi­tec­tur­al argu­ments, mere­ly from a social point of view. Catal­ysed by the extreme mate­r­i­al and human destruc­tion of the Sec­ond World War, the urgency of recon­struc­tion in par­al­lel to the on-going process of mod­erni­sa­tion, archi­tects in the 1950s turned their atten­tion to the space of human encounter, which, in var­i­ous expres­sions, cap­tured the core in the process of reassess­ing the role of archi­tec­ture. The shift of per­spec­tive trans­formed pre­vi­ous con­cep­tu­al assump­tions and meth­ods of design on mul­ti­ple fronts. One of the most crit­i­cal was that the sense of build­ing embod­ied in its three-dimen­sion­al geom­e­try was grad­u­al­ly com­bined with the idea of a struc­ture that responds to and extends social and envi­ron­men­tal needs. For exam­ple, human habi­tat, the theme of the 1953 CIAM meet­ing (Con­gres Inter­na­tionaux d’ Archi­tec­ture Mod­erne), beyond pro­vid­ing a cri­tique of the stan­dard­ised and mass-pro­duced dwelling unit, framed the ques­tion of dwelling as ​“a scale,” which, in the words of Team X, ​“would be real­ly effec­tive in terms of the modes of life and the struc­ture of a com­mu­ni­ty.”11 [ 3 ]

Migrat­ed across dis­ci­plines such as ecol­o­gy and social geog­ra­phy, at that time young sci­ences, the term habi­tat was used to sig­ni­fy the whole of human rela­tions, and delin­eat­ed dwelling pri­mar­i­ly as place (rather than func­tion) of liv­ing embed­ded in a broad­er geo­graph­i­cal and cul­tur­al sys­tem. The whole here is not to be under­stood as an aggre­gate of dis­tinct objects, fixed iden­ti­ties or forms but an entan­gle­ment of oper­a­tions, forces or events. In these terms, any inter­ven­tion, from the scale of mate­r­i­al detail to the scale of land­scape, becomes the locus of cer­tain respon­sive­ness to the exist­ing and the empha­sis in the design is placed upon the study of rela­tions between pro­ject­ed forms of liv­ing and the con­di­tions – topo­graph­i­cal, cul­tur­al, social, in which they unfold. As the British archi­tects Ali­son and Peter Smith­son put it, what is impor­tant is ​“the way, in which the new part is orga­nized plas­ti­cal­ly to give it mean­ing with­in the whole com­plex. As the com­plex changes with the addi­tion of new parts, the scale of the parts must change so that they and the whole remain a dynam­ic response to each oth­er.”12 The aes­thet­ic and social dimen­sion, which is sug­gest­ed here, is of a very dif­fer­ent order restat­ing the part with­in the whole and the indi­vid­ual with­in the com­mu­ni­ty.13 Para­dox­i­cal­ly the strik­ing pho­to­graph­ic mate­r­i­al of tra­di­tion­al set­tle­ments and close-up views of human activ­i­ties, jux­ta­posed with dia­grams out­lin­ing urban growth, project an ethics of see­ing, in which the inter­min­gling of the nat­ur­al, the human and the social, the past and the future are por­trayed as aspects of the same project of mod­erni­sa­tion and urban evo­lu­tion.14 [ 4 ]

A sim­i­lar play with great con­trasts in scale is also in place when pho­tographs of chil­dren play­ing in the street are set off against a dia­gram sug­gest­ing expand­able infra­struc­ture sys­tems. While these visu­al and graph­ic frag­ments seek to pro­vide an inci­sive recod­ing of the quo­tid­i­an dimen­sions of space, the empha­sis is on a more glob­al and of greater com­plex­i­ty scale of oper­a­tions yield­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of moder­ni­ty. For instance, Ali­son and Peter Smith­son, for whom ​“a town is by def­i­n­i­tion a spe­cif­ic pat­tern of asso­ci­a­tion, a pat­tern unique for each peo­ple, in each loca­tion, at each time,” intro­duced the term clus­ter (CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik, 1956) to sig­ni­fy any group­ing togeth­er with no indi­ca­tion of scale and hence replace such group con­cepts as house, street, dis­trict and city. The group­ings described in terms of ​“a close knit, com­pli­cat­ed, often mov­ing aggre­ga­tion, but an aggre­ga­tion with a dis­tinct struc­ture”, were accord­ing to the archi­tects ​“as close as one can get to a descrip­tion of the new ide­al in archi­tec­ture and town plan­ning.”15 Draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from sci­ences as well as an emerg­ing cul­ture of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions, mobil­i­ty and dynam­ic process­es, the idea and imagery of clus­ter not only turn the dis­course toward infra­struc­ture sys­tems and a new visu­al order; they sug­gest the archi­tec­tur­al project pri­mar­i­ly as a process toward the elab­o­ra­tion of a method, which, resolved on to ​“plans (struc­tures)” can ​“appre­hend and extend exist­ing pat­terns,” but also enables the ​“pos­si­bil­i­ty of muta­tion in scale and inten­tion.”16 [ 5 ]

Con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous with the Smith­sons, the Dutch archi­tect Aldo van Eyck was more con­cerned with ele­men­tary rela­tions. In his view, the build­ing is pri­mar­i­ly ​“a con­fig­u­ra­tion of inter­me­di­ary places” to receive ​“the shift­ing cen­tre of human real­i­ty.” This way of think­ing brings the thresh­old and the most evi­dent aspects of ​“the greater real­i­ty of the doorstep” linked to human expe­ri­ence at the core of the archi­tec­tur­al project.17 Doors, win­dows, recess­es, pas­sages, steps func­tion as mark­ers of the con­ti­nu­ity of expe­ri­ence across a zone of tran­si­tion rather than bound­ary. It is this instance, expressed in a series of archi­tec­tur­al fig­ures that becomes the most active ele­ment of the com­po­si­tion, a gestalt that appears to be both inside the build­ing hold­ing it togeth­er, and man­i­fest­ly, out­side.18 These inter­me­di­ary places not only artic­u­late spa­tial and visu­al tran­si­tion but also receive human trans­ac­tion. The scale of human ges­ture and chance encounter, and the scale of the land­scape are brought togeth­er to con­fig­ure the built envi­ron­ment as a con­tin­u­ous fab­ric. It is indica­tive that in one of his ini­tial draw­ings for the Orphan­age (Ams­ter­dam, 1960), van Eyck begins by sketch­ing out areas of move­ment and activ­i­ty. The sketch is not a ges­ture that encom­pass­es the uni­ty of inten­tion but seems to want to cap­ture a frag­ment of inhab­it­able ground, as a means to devel­op a method of design. That which appears as expres­sion of the spon­ta­neous, and per­haps inten­tion­al­ly impre­cise, is but one stage in the process of the devel­op­ment of an archi­tec­tur­al and for­mal sys­tem. These inti­mate topogra­phies become ​“a state­ment about ter­ri­to­ry and occu­pan­cy,” while pro­ject­ing ways of think­ing and engag­ing with the urban, an approach, which, far from assum­ing a form a pri­ori, entails con­tin­u­ous explo­ration of pos­si­ble rela­tion­ships and func­tion­al asso­ci­a­tions rather than adja­cent bound­aries. [ 6 ]

The dis­course of the mod­ern trans­forms to accom­mo­date, or bet­ter, to claim the com­mon and the banal, to cel­e­brate the ordi­nary and spon­ta­neous ges­tures. This amounts to noth­ing less than lim­i­nal­i­ty erupt­ing from with­in the core of pri­ma­ry socia­bil­i­ty.19 Yet, while pay­ing the utmost atten­tion to every instance and encounter, there is a mov­ing back and forth between micro­scop­ic details (tex­tures, colours, shapes) and the larg­er pic­ture (social struc­tures, uni­ver­sal pat­terns), a form of belong­ing and a form of glob­al cit­i­zen­ship. Anthro­po­log­i­cal insights in the the­o­riza­tion of the archi­tec­tur­al project, com­ing from an encounter with a non-West­ern cul­tur­al con­text become the plat­form from which to devel­op a cri­tique of func­tion­al­ism and instead estab­lish a new uni­ver­sal­i­ty, the uni­ver­sal rules of the ​‘human con­di­tion’.20 The ques­tion is whether the lat­ter reflects a uni­ver­sal and tran­shis­tor­i­cal par­a­digm or it con­sti­tutes a dis­guise for a tem­po­ral, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic pro­gram. In many ways, archi­tec­tur­al nar­ra­tives seek­ing to assim­i­late their tech­niques to the reeval­u­a­tion of the human and the local, often fell with­in the larg­er dis­course on colo­nial and indige­nous forms of modernity. 

While the Smith­sons and van Eyck resolved their inves­ti­ga­tions in what they described as ​“open aes­thet­ic,” in which ​“form is a mas­ter key […] capa­ble of rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing the con­stant change of life,”21 the intu­ition that the archi­tec­tur­al project needs to take into account the his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive opened up a slight­ly dif­fer­ent frame­work in post­war Italy. A ​“sense of his­to­ry” was ful­ly pro­pound­ed in the pages of the mag­a­zine Casabel­la. In a series of edi­to­ri­als between 1954 and 1955 (“Respon­si­bil­i­ty to Tra­di­tion,” ​“Pre-exis­tence of the Envi­ron­ment and Prac­ti­cal Themes,” ​“The Tra­di­tion of Ital­ian Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture”), Ernesto Rogers (direc­tor of the jour­nal between 1953 and 1965) returned fre­quent­ly to tra­di­tion as inte­gral to the now and indeed to moder­ni­ty itself. Accord­ing to Rogers, ​“there is a present that comes from the past and a past still linked to the present.” 22 The terms con­ti­nu­ità (con­ti­nu­ity), which Rogers added to the title of the mag­a­zine (Casabel­la-Con­ti­nu­ità), and preesisten­ze ambi­en­tali were set forth as a con­nect­ing ele­ment between his­to­ry, exist­ing fac­tors and mod­ern move­ment.23 In his view the city is a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non (rather than his­to­ry as ele­ment of the city), and any inter­ven­tion is but an open-end­ed search, a method of enter­ing into this expe­ri­ence of cul­ture, to ensure the con­ti­nu­ity through estab­lish­ing a dis­course on the city as his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. As Gian­car­lo de Car­lo point­ed out dur­ing the last CIAM meet­ing in Otter­loo (1959), his­to­ry is ​“the acqui­si­tion of an exact knowl­edge of the prob­lems.”24 It is pre­cise­ly here that Rogers iden­ti­fies the valid­i­ty of the archi­tec­tur­al project, which, in his words, con­sists in a ​“method­olog­i­cal process” (proces­so metodologi­co) which aim is to look at the devel­op­ment of the ​“most salient qual­i­ties” (emer­gen­za più saliente) of the exist­ing and bet­ter cap­ture its ​“spe­cif­ic essence” (essen­za speci­fi­ca).

These rumi­na­tions may bring to mind Hen­ri Focil­lon in his ear­li­er study on the his­to­ry of art and ques­tion of style, and in par­tic­u­lar, his idea of art as sys­tem in per­pet­u­al devel­op­ment of coher­ent forms as well as the idea of his­to­ry as a super­im­po­si­tion of geo­log­i­cal stra­ta that per­mit us to read each frac­tion of time as if it was at once past, present and future. A work of art, accord­ing to Focil­lon, is ​“an attempt to express some­thing that is unique, it is an affir­ma­tion of some­thing that is whole, com­plete, absolute.” Yet, ​“it is like­wise an inte­gral part of a sys­tem of high­ly com­plex rela­tion­ships.”25 There­fore forms (alike build­ings in Rogers’ dis­course) acquire in their strat­i­fied evo­lu­tion a life, which fol­lows its own tra­jec­to­ry and can be gen­er­alised only on the lev­el of method. 

How the above ideas can expand to the dis­cours­es and prac­tis­es of today is rather beyond the lim­i­ta­tions of this text. The par­tic­u­lar argu­ments dis­cussed, while mov­ing with­in dif­fer­ent reg­is­ters and ref­er­en­tial frame­works, put for­ward an under­stand­ing of the build­ing and the city less in terms of an autonomous form than in terms of a man­i­fold sys­tem of rela­tions – per­cep­tu­al, social, mate­r­i­al and cul­tur­al, some­thing which seems rel­e­vant for today too. It is of course a his­tor­i­cal fact that at the heart of these debates there was a desire for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of archi­tec­ture to nego­ti­ate the realm of the human scale set against plan­ning poli­cies, mas­sive imple­men­ta­tions of func­tion­al premis­es and the con­cep­tu­al pover­ty of archi­tec­ture in the 1950s. They sought for a method of design capa­ble of form­ing an expand­able spa­tial and social con­tin­u­um whilst main­tain­ing a coher­ent rela­tion­ship with exist­ing struc­tures and dwelling pat­terns.26

These ques­tions have been frag­men­tary and took on var­i­ous for­mu­la­tions, yet they are indica­tive of a stance and a method. The con­cern with how things relate, how they work togeth­er shifts the empha­sis from the object and the design of the build­ing as a self-con­tained unit to the con­sid­er­a­tion of built space as part of a larg­er ter­ri­to­r­i­al, social, visu­al envi­ron­ment. Expressed in mul­ti­ple ways – geo­graph­ic or cul­tur­al milieu, pre-exist­ing con­di­tions, his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, region, habi­tat — the cat­e­go­ry of envi­ron­ment seems to pro­vide a theme that weaves togeth­er most of the threads of asso­ci­a­tion sug­gest­ed. Ros­alind Krauss’s argu­ment in the essay ​“Sculp­ture in the Expand­ed Field” (1979) seeks to resume some of these threads.27 For Krauss, sculp­ture is a ​“cat­e­go­ry that result­ed from the addi­tion of the not-land­scape to the not-archi­tec­ture.” And this hap­pened because these terms (‘not-land­scape’ and ​‘not-archi­tec­ture’) were to ​“express a strict oppo­si­tion between the built and the not-built, the cul­tur­al and the nat­ur­al, between which the pro­duc­tion of sculp­tur­al art appeared to be sus­pend­ed.” Krauss then argues for an ​“expand­ed field” where ​“there is no rea­son not to imag­ine an oppo­site term – one that would be both land­scape and archi­tec­ture,” which she called ​“the com­plex.” It is pre­cise­ly the idea of the ​‘com­plex’ that may throw a dif­fer­ent light into the the­o­ret­i­cal, design and for­mal chal­lenges, which many archi­tects in the 1950s encoun­tered in their attempt to graft their strat­e­gy onto the exist­ing (no mat­ter how ​‘the exist­ing’ was to be under­stood and con­sid­ered), a chal­lenge that remains as great as ever. 

What does it mean to redis­cov­er an inhab­it­able ground in a world order, marked by what Bruno Latour describes as the ​“New Cli­mate Regime” think­ing “‘cli­mate’ in the broad sense of the rela­tions between human beings and the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions of their lives”?28 Propos­ing the term ​‘ter­res­tri­al’ to draw togeth­er the human and the nat­ur­al, the local and the glob­al, Latour writes: ​“each of the beings that par­tic­i­pate in the com­po­si­tion of a dwelling place has its own way of iden­ti­fy­ing what is local and what is glob­al, and of defin­ing its entan­gle­ments with the oth­ers.”29 If the descrip­tion of the cur­rent scale of being in the world and oper­at­ing is accu­rate, the ​“ter­res­tri­al,” or, the ​“plan­e­tary” scale oblig­es us to reopen inhab­i­ta­tion as a social ques­tion while inten­si­fy­ing it through new forms of appro­pri­a­tion of resources and pol­i­tics of land which do not con­fuse the lat­ter with what the local is often inflict­ed upon — iden­ti­ty, pat­ri­mo­ny, eth­nic homo­gene­ity, nation­al and per­son­al immu­ni­ty, which allow the erec­tion of all kinds of bor­ders whose mere exis­tence is to exclude. In this con­text, one of the urgent ques­tions which should be asked is the fol­low­ing: Who and how will define thresh­olds which might open up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics, a dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics of inhab­it­ing the Earth.