Towards a residential socio-physical framework: positioning subjective experiences in physical environments

Abstract

We spend most of our time in and around buildings. The architectural design of the environment inherently affects our everyday subjective experiences. We refer to this connection between the physical environment and our experiences as the ‘socio-physical environment’. The residential environment, which is studied by different disciplines, ranging from design/spatial disciplines to social sciences, is fundamental in this regard. However, as they all approach the topic from different perspectives, there exists a need for a common language within this multidisciplinary research field. By analysing three commonly used frameworks in architecture and evaluating their constituent parts, we propose a new framework that is specifically tailored to the residential environment. Its typological categories are organised around an individual resident’s experiences and therefore include life environment, neighbourhood, dwelling, tectonics and personal stuff. The goal of the framework is to guide empirical or theoretical research on individuals’ housing experiences and to allow research on dwelling experiences to be explicitly rooted in their physical context and scale.