Lifestyle as Habitat of Tomorrow Coexisting Models of Housing in the City

Abstract

Living in a time of uncertain future, the home is in a constant process of re-thinking; from pluralization and individualization in the society and discontinuation with historical models, to social and spatial mobility, rational choice and availability of resources, leisure time and changing socio-demographic characteristics and the buildup of social fragmentation, there is a need for a re-qualification of the home as a way of identification.

The term lifestyle, way of life or style of life in the contemporary society is often used in mainstream culture, media and marketing, but the term has a long theoretical background in early social research. From the individual psychology research of Alfred Adler’s style of life, through Pierre Bourdieu’s hierarchical models, lifestyles constitute the entirety of the actions of man in given conditions of the context. Can lifestyles emerge from the static and dynamic processes of social stratification, or can they transform their properties in the contemporary society of globalization?

The research of the social structure (the way of life) and the material structure (architecture) of chosen areas of the city of Skopje in which we can find the idea of collective form, from the traditional Novo maalo neighborhood and living in the house, the courtyard and the street, to the community living in the atrium building of the Railway workers, the vertical dwellings on the bank of the river Vardar, emerging from the horizontal structure of the open and transit City Trading Center, to the small ring of the center of the city defined by the blocks and towers of the City Wall. The research is carried through 182 questionnaires of inhabitants in these areas, operationalizing lifestyles in empirical research.

Can lifestyle become an analytical and in the same time generative tool for the future habitat models?