Home

Somewhere in the midst of living in another country, writing a thesis based in residential neighborhoods characterized by immigration, and meeting people from all over the world I've noticed a theme in my thoughts and conversations lately - the concept of home. In the very global world of today, the question "Where are you from?" becomes more and more complicated to answer - in truth, I don't think it belongs in the introductory chapters of language learning books seeing as the reply nowadays is rarely as simple as "I am from city/country x."

An example of this phenomena - I recently made a new friend in my Oslo neighborhood - a woman originally from Vietnam who just so happened to also have lived many years ago a few blocks from my first NYC apartment on the Upper West Side. She generalized that in her adult life she has not stayed in any one place for more than three consecutive years - herself promoting an idea I have always loved - 'you need no more than two suitcases!'

This two-suitcase (or 100 item or however you'd like to phrase it-) mentality is one I find much tougher in practice than in theory. I even went through the exercise of dispersing (though not necessarily disposing) my New York apartment-life's worth of "stuff" down to two suitcases before I moved to Norway less than two years ago. Somehow I have since (jointly) accumulated a series of minimal yet substantial furniture and housewares that were deemed necessary when moving into an empty apartment. (I largely blame Ikea for making this possible.) After two moves with two suitcases and a bit of time in attempting to make a place into a home, clutter has amounted to the point that if and when we move next, there are certainly more than two suitcases to worry about.

The difference between having a place to live and a home is striking to me - particularly in the difficulty of defining what makes a home. One of my professor's here wrote a dissertation on re-housing displaced refugees and likes to quote John Berger's 'A Home is Not a House' that "Home was the center of the world because that was the place where the vertical line crossed with the horizontal. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to others." All religious connotations aside, I like the definition because there is an inherent amount of mobility - where ever one chooses to place their vertical axis is the place from which they identify themselves within the world around them.

I am, however, finding a bit of struggle with the concept of identity with the act of mobility. My readings on place identity largely link residence - real time spent in a place - with being able to have a personal identity and sense of stewardship over it. My own research is seeing the breakdown of that potential happening in the context of growing rental trends in Oslo - when people can easily move (away from neighborhood/building/apartment problems) they have little incentive to care about or work towards improving the place they reside. Simultaneously, the detachment of property owners understanding a place solely as an investment leaves little personal attachment or incentive - all in all creating a difficult cycle for those of us who seek to maintain quality or promote sustainability in the built environment.

So now I wonder, as more of the world's population increases the rate at which we move and change place, where will we consider ourselves most at home? And can our attention spans alter at similar rates to maintain and steward the concept of neighborhood despite this near constant flux?

Soldagen

Winter still feels like it will be a long time leaving, but the dark times are over in Norway. Living in Oslo this winter, the darkness was less dramatic with short days just a couple hours shorter than winter days in New York. But in the north, the return of the sun is both noticed and celebrated.

From what I understand, the holiday "Soldagen" can vary date-wise for different places, depending on how far north and how many mountains are around, but it is literally marking the appearance of the sun over the horizon, generally around the end of January. It is actually a noted holiday in the north - children have the day off from school and families bake special cakes/pastries for the sun's return. After Soldagen, it becomes more and more comfortable to drink the midday coffee outside and layers can be lessened on the ski trails - the sun directly warming you even while air temperatures remain below freezing.

It's interesting to me that this drastic, recurring phenomena of dark and light times remains so interwoven with the culture. Living here, I've also found a much greater recognition of and appreciation for the sun - never mind the vital need for Vitamin D in the winter months. It's nice to stop for a minute and remember that natural cycles impact us significantly - even when we inhabit cities and overlook the subtleties of season change.

Slightly cheating, this is still from my Copenhagen photos, one of many communal spaces I visited and have yet to write about. When the clouds lift in Oslo I'll get my camera out once again.

What a difference the sun makes..

I've never thought to ask Norwegians if they find an unhealthy tendency of staring into the sun when travelling to places more south during the winter. The darkness has been something I noticed but did not dwell on - it simply seems like a fact of winter life. That is, until you go somewhere with sun and are reminded. In this case, I didn't have to go very far - just hopped down to Copenhagen, but the sun here is stronger already - a few weeks before it really comes back up in Norway. I walked around yesterday squinting and seeing spots, but it's a wonderful feeling to recognize direct rays of light and a bit of heat from those.

The danes seem to have noticed the sun too - it's only around -4 C outside, but the sun on the benches by the water make public spaces habitable again.

Other notable first impression differences between Denmark and Norway..

The letter 'c' has returned to language, rendering words like center (Nor: sentrum, Dan: centrum) a bit easier to comprehend.

Wine and alcohol are sold at grocery stores - no more nationally regulated special shops with limited hours (guess it's harder to control when you share a border with Germany).

Everything is organic (or økologisk) - even the hot dog stands...

Topography and Weather

It's easy to be deceived looking at a map or in the experience of traversal, but the entire country of Norway (~149,000 sq mi) is a little smaller in land area than the U.S. state of California (~164,000 sq mi). Despite it's size, a 16 hour train ride (or drive) will only get you from Oslo in the South to about half way up its length (to Mo i Rana, just below Arctic Circle). This phenomena is attributable to a general lack of high speed infrastructure resulting from the wild topography and un-accommodating weather found throughout the land. The results of this have historically been the isolation of communities and the development of hundreds of drastically different dialects among the here).

On a "short" drive, just reaching three hours (110 miles) into Telemark's mountains from downtown Oslo, some sights illustrate these points.

GPS gave us this as a main highway.

Happened to be mostly a trucking route, and they were widening the road.

People actually live out here.

The sun reached this part of the valley around 11am.

This hydro power station started the town of Rjukan in the early 1990s - located in a valley that is too deep and steep for the sun to reach 6 months out of the year.

Core-ten and Concrete

A handicapped ramp turned public plaza at Schandorffsgate in Oslo. 

Oslo in the Autumn

Early Autumn in Norway finds a lot of colors - the most dreary of places on a dreary day can be beautiful. Above is an old cemetery for statesmen found while rambling around northern-central Oslo. 

Eventually the cold and wind take over and the city cleans up the leaves, leaving people trying harder to keep some color around. A small testament here to the either the huge consistency of taste in Norway, or perhaps to the limited variety for cold weather plants - at the city flower market, everyone is selling and buying heather now. A couple months ago, this plaza was covered in juniper and other evergreen shrubs. 

Identity

I've been doing research over the past few months, trying to understand what aspects deter (or can help) residents to identify with urban spaces. A weekend walk through of Oslo reminded me of a larger problem - the city, much as any other in the globalizing world, seems to have an identity crisis of it's own. Now instead of asking how we can identify space in a city as "our own", I ask instead, what are cities defining themselves as? What is Oslo?