Domestic as Belonging: Spatial Reappropriation through Transformative Practices

This research investigates dwelling as an existential, political, and ecological nexus, reconceptualizing the domestic beyond its material and functional dimensions. In a context shaped by housing financialization and commodification (Appadurai 2012; Samuel 2023), dwelling is framed as a relational and generative practice structuring belonging, temporality, and identity (Rampazi 2007; Gambardella 2010). Responding to the fragmentation of dwelling studies (Clapham 2009; Ruonavaara 2017), the study develops an interdisciplinary framework integrating visual arts, architectural theory, cultural geography, democratic critique, and enactive neurophenomenology. Through a neurophenomenological lens, dwelling emerges as an embodied mode of being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1927; Merleau-Ponty 1945; Varela et al. 1991), where space, body, and memory are co-constitutive of habitability (Bachelard 1958; Malpas 1999). This perspective unsettles binaries between subject and world, private and public, redefining the domestic as a dynamic relational field in which identities and institutions are continuously renegotiated (Relph 1970; Seamon 2009). Positionality and embodied experience become central to processes of semantic and political transformation. Contemporary artistic and participatory practices are examined as dispositifs of resistance that challenge institutionalized spatial models and commodification (Colomina 1994; Mouffe 2005; Caleo 2021). Temporary occupations and experimental spaces function as laboratories of collective living, exposing both the limits and potential of agency under neoliberal precarity (Lefebvre 1974; Lorey 2015). Drawing on the notion of non-reformist reforms (Gorz 1990, 2005), the research advocates structural transformation in housing and urban governance. Ultimately, the domestic is articulated as both site and practice: a performative and political arena embedded in socio-ecological networks. Reinstating the home as a social good rather than a commodity (Madden, Marcuse 2015; Gainsforth 2025) becomes essential to fostering ecological intimacy, democratic participation, and inclusive futures beyond neoliberal constraints.