Residential Autobiographies

The residential autobiography is a research strategy that has been used to elicit individuals’ personal histories of the places they called home. An underlying assumption is that of all environmental experiences, the home is the most important. Researchers have used residential autobiographies to improve environmental decision making and as a source of data to theorize about how the personal and collective meanings of home are shaped, disrupted, and reconstructed over one's life path.

Researchers have used various techniques to encourage people to recall and share their memories and feelings about their homes. Clare Marcus Cooper, the practitioner and researcher most associated with this technique, guided people though visualization processes, role playing, and drawings to elicit and share memories of their past and present residences. Verbal and written narratives, free hand and architectural drawings, photographs and montages, and other methods have been used to record individuals’ recollections of their experiences of the places they have lived over their life span. People have been asked about their sensorial experiences—what was seen, heard, smelled, and touched; use of specific spaces; familial, social, and cultural life in the home; reasons to remain in place or for moving home and for choice of a new place of residence; organization and adaptation of the new home's physical surroundings; meanings associated with these various aspects; and the emotions that saturate all of these from the scale of spaces within the dwelling to the neighborhood and beyond.

Residential autobiographies were first used in the 1970s in architecture, landscape architecture, and planning to encourage and support user-sensitive design. These techniques were used in design and planning education to increase students’ self-awareness of their residential experiences and the influence these may have on their design ideas. By sharing their autobiographies of home with other students, students presumably would become more sensitive to the differences in individuals’ experiences, ideas, and feelings about the residential environment. Similarly, designers and planners used residential autobiographies to glean information about their clients’ needs and preferences.

Residential autobiography techniques have proven useful, as well, as a source of data to develop and support theories about the sense of home, the profound and deeply experienced relatedness with, or attachments to, one's residential environs that is developed over prolonged periods of time if not a lifetime. Phenomenologists, especially from humanistic geography, drew on personal residential histories as well as philosophical, historical, cross-cultural, and literary analyses to support conceptualizations of what they called rootedness and at-homeness. The notion that people develop deeply felt affective bonds or “place attachments” to home places—patterns of ideas, feelings, and behavioral tendencies that are developed and intensified over time—is a theoretical thread in the transactional perspective in environmental psychology as well. In a related line of inquiry, researchers theorized that through focused and repetitive transactions, we come to know not only the places of home, but also we come to know ourselves.

[Page 604]In all of the early lines of inquiry, scholars assumed that intimate and stable connections between people and their homes are positive and necessary to promote order and give meaning to one's life. Disruptions in these bonds caused, for instance, by residential mobility and professional design and development practices that result in placeless landscapes, were presumed to result in profound loss of the meaning of home in one's life. Subsequent research using residential autobiographies has found that a change of home place does not necessarily lead to a profound loss. Rather, a change in stage of life, for instance, moving from the parents to a home of one's own or retirement, may result in a change in both the materiality and meaning of home to support one's changing life world as well as sociocultural norms and ideologies about the appropriate type of home place at a particular stage in life. Moreover, residentially mobile people, even without a change in life stage, generally achieve order and continuity by choosing to live in a dwelling and neighborhood that is similar to a childhood home or another past valued home. And there are no data from personal residential histories to support the sweeping conclusions that they live in a placeless landscape.

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