Philosophy
Dwelling is not about shelter, but about meaning. Even in crowded cities, people still create sacred, lived relationships with places that defy planning maps and housing statistics.
What It Means to Belong
The German word wohnen, which Heidegger explores in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” carries connotations absent from English “dwelling” or “residing.” It suggests being accustomed to, being at peace with, being spared and preserved in a place. Heidegger mourns the narrowing of dwelling into merely having shelter, the reduction of habitation to housing units counted and allocated. When we speak of the “housing crisis” or “housing supply,” we already think in terms foreign to dwelling. We think of containers for human storage rather than relationships with place.
Dwelling establishes a fourfold relationship, Heidegger argues. We dwell when we gather together earth and sky, mortals and divinities into a meaningful unity. Earth names the material ground that supports and nourishes. Sky names the seasonal round, weather’s moods, and the celestial movements that measure time lived rather than time calculated. Mortals name our finite existence, our being-toward-death, that makes each moment precious because temporary. Divinities name the sacred or the meaningful that transcends immediate utility, whatever points beyond mere survival toward significance. To dwell authentically means honouring this fourfold, building and living in ways that preserve rather than devastate earth, that acknowledge rather than ignore sky, that accept rather than flee mortality, that create space for meaning beyond function.
Consider the woman’s tulsi plant against this framework. The earth appears in her careful tending of soil in a recycled container, her attention to the plant’s specific needs, her participation in the ancient practice of cultivating sacred plants at the threshold between home and world. The sky appears in her tracking of seasons through the plant’s growth, in her placement of it where light reaches, and in her adjustment of watering to monsoon and summer rhythms. Her mortality and that of everyone she loves appear in the ritual gesture, the prayer that acknowledges life’s fragility, the daily practice that marks time’s passage. The divine appears in the tulsi itself, a presence that makes the window ledge more than a mere architectural feature, that transforms her room into a temple, however cramped its dimensions. She dwells, even here, even in conditions planners describe as slum, even in space the machine city never intended for habitation.
But Heidegger’s account immediately raises problems for urban philosophy. His examples cluster around peasant farms, village churches, and Black Forest bridges. He describes a farmhouse built two centuries ago by craftsmen who knew the land, positioned to shelter from mountain winds, oriented toward the sun. Yet what of cities, where millions live compressed, where earth disappears under concrete, where sky narrows to the gap between towers? Heidegger views modern urbanism as fundamentally homeless, sees the city as the site of rootlessness and inauthenticity. Yet, the anti-urban prejudice must be examined closely. Most people now live in cities. The great migrations of our time move not back to villages but toward urban centres, seeking not ancestral rootedness but possibility, not tradition but transformation. We must ask whether dwelling can happen in cities, whether the fourfold can gather in metropolis’ density, and whether place can emerge from concrete and steel.
Mumbai’s gathering places emerge where we might least expect them. The Irani café gathers not through architectural grandeur but through ritual’s accumulation. Regulars arrive at known hours, occupy known tables, and order known dishes. The waiter knows each preference without asking. Conversations resume from yesterday, from last week, from years ago. The marble tabletops, the bentwood chairs, the yellowing mirrors create continuity with a Bombay fast disappearing. Time slows here. The café gathers a particular Mumbai, one where Parsi, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian communities overlapped in ways contemporary polarisation seeks to unravel. To drink chai at Kyani & Co. or Military Café, or Yazdani Bakery is to participate in a gathering that resists both the machine city’s efficiency imperatives and the watched city’s segregating mechanisms.
Or consider the unauthorised temple that appears overnight under a peepal tree at a road junction, transforming the intersection from a traffic node into sacred geography. The tree already gathered, its presence creating shade, its roots disrupting pavement, its branches housing countless birds. The shrine intensifies this gathering. Daily worship begins. Offerings accumulate. The municipality cannot easily remove what has become sacred. The sky appears in seasonal festivals that fill the intersection with celebration. Earth appears in the roots that buckle concrete, asserting organic persistence against urban hardscape. Mortals appear in the prayers for healing, for safe journeys, for life’s anxieties. The place gathers the fourfold at the machine city’s very heart.
The gathering happens most intensely in Mumbai’s informal settlements, in precisely the spaces that planning discourse treats as non-dwelling. Yet residents create places through years of incremental building, transforming shacks into homes, establishing networks of mutual aid, and designating spaces for worship and celebration. The lanes become known not by official numbers but by who lives there, what happens there, and what memories accumulate there. Heidegger would struggle to recognise this gathering. His aesthetics privilege the picturesque, the harmonious, the traditional. Yet dwelling happens here with perhaps greater intensity than in master-planned suburbs. The settlers dwell because they must create a place actively, because survival depends on cooperation, because the machine city’s abandonment paradoxically permits community-building that regulated developments prohibit.