Building Events in Inner-City Gdańsk, Poland: Exploring the Sociospatial Construction of Agency in Built Form

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the ways in which buildings interact with the social fabric of everyday life. My main argument is that agency in the built environment is practised and performed through a dynamic relation between households and the built fabric, among other actants. The paper is based on an ethnographic study of forty-two inner-city households in the Polish city of Gdańsk, combined with archival research. I investigate the forces that constrain and enable the transformation of residential dwellings over time, with the aid of Jacobs's concept of ‘building events’. I wish to provide a more elaborate theorisation and operationalisation of the building event, while applying it to the interrogation of relations between buildings and households in the given context. The paper explores the different modalities through which buildings have been forced to create new allies and associations—allowing for the interpretive flexibility of their technological frame—in order to keep surviving and functioning in different sociopolitical circumstances.