1951
"To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth. [147] ... The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. ... [Dwelling] is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist. [158] ...
"The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. [143-4] ... However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell ... [159]" - Heidegger 2001 [1951]
"The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. [143-4] ... However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell ... [159]" - Heidegger 2001 [1951]
1999
"We do not have to decide on our own, as one did under the old speculative metaphysics, about the furnishing of the world; we have only to define the equipment, instruments, skills, and knowledge that will allow experimental metaphysics to start up again, in order to decide collectively on its habitat, its oikos, its familiar dwelling." - Latour 2004 [1999]: 136
2004
"In a late poem, Hölderlin suggested that 'poetically, man dwells on the earth' (1961: 245-246). For Heidegger, this notion of dwelling, wohnen, is precisely this way of inhabiting the world in a lived, experienced manner instead of one of calculative planning (see, for example, 1971: 213). Indeed, this notion of dwelling is the direct opposite of the understanding of technology that Heidegger thinks holds sway in the modern world." - Elden 2004a: 92 (see also Elden 2004b: 188)
2011
"An ecological perspective on the city does not just involve symmetrically accounting for the multiple intermingling of human and nonhuman entities, but also, as Ingold (2000) has suggested, requires us to restrain from the common 'building perspective' that assumes that 'worlds are made before they are lived in, that acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of worldmaking' (p. 179). A dwelling perspective instead involves focusing on the dynamic and transactional unit formed by an organism-in-its-environment (we could be quoting Dewey here). Thus, instead of explaining how 'the' socio-natural environment of the city is historically constructed, the focus is rather on the multiple ways of dwelling in the city, in the understanding that these involve multiple ways of constructing the city." - Farías 2011: 369
2012
"Without an insistence upon political–economic transformation, the affirmation of urbanism can easily degrade into cheerleading for conspicuous neighborhood consumption, 'smart' technocracy, or renewal-as-gentrification—the sort of policies that a segment of planners, politicians, and real-estate developers pursue everywhere in the name of 'livability' and the 'creative' city. Today, precisely when older critical perspectives have been abandoned, discourses about dwelling, inhabitation, the right to the city, indeed urbanism itself, always threaten, as if by radioactive decay, to lose their critical content and sink back into a neoliberal lifestyle politics." - Madden 2012: 783, see also 774-5
