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Vernacular transformations of underused places give shape to Ephemeral Urban Dwellings (EUD). By reading the spatial patterns of use of three of these buildings, this paper demonstrates that EUD replicate the way activities and ideas of privacy are related to space in the previous and permanent homes left behind by its inhabitants. The case studies are located in central areas of Bogotá and, although ephemeral, they have stayed for years. Personal interviews and mental maps drawn by the interviewees as well as on site drawings and photography by the author are the main sources of this study.

The paper recalls the processes of cultural appropriation that take place when people adjust to new cultural contexts. In the case of the dwellings studied, these processes give clues on how the ideas that shape the way people use space are translated into new places. The paper's conclusion calls for further research on EUD as an object of academic interest.

The balcony, an integral element in modernist housing, can be found in almost every Taipei apartment building. Even so, in Taipei most balconies have been enclosed by users of all social classes. This paper looks into the historical context of the enclosed balcony by arguing that the identity and origins of the Taipei balcony are inseparable from the 1960s birth of a modernist housing type—the Taipei walkup.

Balcony provision, governed by building codes inherited from a colonial past, has been incorporated into the system of speculative market housing. For builders, balconies are profitable floor areas that can be promoted as a symbol of modern living; for users, balconies are additional floor space that can be transformed into interior spaces. However, owing to the threefold combination of initial unfamiliarity of apartment buildings, underinvestment in the urban environment, and dire political circumstances, it is the balcony which has borne the brunt of the underdeveloped relationship between public and private life. In the context of this new housing type, the practice of enclosing balconies arose through the complicity of builders and users.

Mud architecture as one of the expressions of vernacular architecture illustrates the success of indigenous knowledge of traditional communities. Due to the pressure of industrialization, urbanization and globalization, the trend of using non-traditional measures guided by the Western-Euro-centric knowledge and technologies considers the traditional practices as expressions of backward past, under-development and poverty. Though mud as a building material is usually assumed as a fragile and ephemeral material that cannot survive against natural hazards, the surviving traditional mud buildings are needed to be investigated to know their performances during and after different types of natural hazard incidents.

This paper intends to study the available cases of mud architecture of Chattogram, Bangladesh to trace the history of their survival despite of experiencing multiple natural hazards and to understand their status and prospect of resisting hazards. Three individual homesteads are chosen as cases for conducting physical survey as well as engaging inhabitants and local masons of the locality in semi-structured interviews in a story telling mode to know the construction process and histories of experiencing natural hazards. Available literatures are reviewed, and experts are interviewed to understand the causes of their performances and possible ways to improve the quality.

Collected information on mud architecture demonstrates their quality of surviving against many natural challenges and this hazard-resilient quality can be enhanced through using contemporary building technologies and materials, promising to co-exist with the global trend.

This study as an attempt to reinvent the vernacular architectural heritage endorses the need of appreciating indigenous knowledge for enhancing community resilience against natural hazards.

An unspoken issue of increasing priority in architectural education is the under developed differentiation between architecture and technology. Almost all of the qualifications whereby an architect is prepared for and is permitted to practice professionally are technological parameters. But architecture is not technology. Architecture is, however, both protected by and obscured thru technology being in the forefront that means it is both of benefit and a hindrance.

Architecture being undifferentiated from technology and named in terms of technology thus allows the issue to stay safely within the pragmatic assertion of professionalism that is set up during an education mainly controlled by the profession. Within that is a nascent architectural impulse that resides largely unspoken but which is nonetheless evolved and evolving and shared. The unrevealed architecture generates an aura of the mysterious and the radical which that contributes a greatly to the intensity of mundane and well known work.

This paper examines how architectural technology obviates a space of differentiation within architecture, which may be examined phenomenologically in terms of the essence of humanity, whereby architecture has an original ontological correlation with human aspiration. This will be supported with the well known — for brevity — theoretical and practical examples around the work of Heidegger, Louis I. Kahn. Along with phenomenology, we will introduce philosophies of spiritual practice collectively called rajayoga. The latter is a millennia long experiment with well documented research into human aspiration. The paper concludes with examples of architecture presencing this space of differentiation and suggests the implications on the profession of an education that scan develop the super-ordinate program that is architectural practice.

This paper addresses the forms, renovation and retrofitting of the rural settlements in the North-western county of Setif in Algeria. This region has a major advantage of being able to have a representation of the traditional rural dwellings within a massive mountain resulted in a particular Berber culture. The study will allow us to understand the relationship of the frame built respecting the physical and socioeconomic constraints, including the ongoing retrofitting.

Many studies are based on the astonishing assumption that the village space is a continuation in another dimension of the urban space; this vision has marginalized village capacities in favour of an image of modernity (technical, social and political), leading to the lost of a whole cultural past. The new constructions care very slightly for ecology. The result is unsuitable houses, uncomfortable, ungracious sites and landscapes.

We shall study here the effects of changes in the construction methods, in terms of a spatial organization, materials and aesthetics. This fact affects the original essence of rural architecture in this region. Is it possible to restore the delicate balance between forms, meanings and functions of theses constructions?

One of the objectives of this work is deepening knowledge on this traditional crafts environment. There is also an interest in the contemporary manifestations of this habitat and forms of these contemporary changes. The data obtained during the field study (the Berber villages) are analysed and evaluated, and guidelines are proposed to improve the methods in intervening on rural housing in this region.

How do we make sense of urban life in the past? What do we do when we study urban history, and to what extent do our methods fully capture the complexities of historical city living? These are crucial questions for any scholar interested in the historical dimensions of urban experience. Notwithstanding the interest of most urban historians in the relationship between the physical form of urban space and its experience by inhabitants and visitors, very few scholars have written histories that systematically integrate these two areas of inquiry. In this chapter, we argue that such research requires a method and an accompanying tool that can analyze historical urban life in a more integrated, holistic way. We propose a way forward by introducing the Time Machine platform as a scalable data visualization and analysis tool for researching everyday urban experience across space and time. To illustrate the potential we focus on a case study: the area of the Bloemstraat in early modern Amsterdam. Unpacking a section of the Bloemstraat, house by house and room by room, we show how the Time Machine forms an instrument to connect spatial layouts to the arrangement of objects and to the practical and social use of the space by the inhabitants and visitors. We also sketch how this tool illuminates more dynamic spatial and temporal practices such as how people, goods, and activities are connected to locations in the wider city and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the combination of a qualitative shadowing method called “Commentated Walk” and an ethnographic approach, can be used to analyze the spatial dimension of practices, when space is considered as a co-construction and as an active dimension of individual and collective practices.

The approach is ethnographic and the empirical field work concerns the coordination in ephemeral organizations intended to manage emergent phenomena: the social “problems” often named “urban incivilities,” which occur in public and semi-public spaces in some suburban areas in France and are recurrent.

In these organizations, space appears to be part of individual and collective practices, and a key resource for coordination. Shared “spaces of action” between inhabitants and local institutions contribute to coordination. As a method of data collection, Commentated Walks offer relevant insight into how actors “deal with space” in their day-to-day life or their professional practices. Walking with while talking with – the method's principals – make it possible to capture the materiality of problematic spaces as well as the feelings that the space inspires.

The use of this method is still exploratory. In further research, it would be interesting to consider such Commentated Walks in other organizational contexts, in order to explore different ways of “dealing with” space and different types of spatial competencies that people develop in using space as a resource.

This paper proposes an original combination of methodological approaches which allows us to grasp the formation of spatial practices.