Building Dwelling Thinking and Aesthetic Relations in Urban Spaces: A Heideggerian Perspective on Relational Pedagogy as a Form of Disclosure

This paper works with Martin Heidegger’s notion of building and dwelling as a way of being in the world with particular application to aesthetic constructions in urban spaces. Particular attention is paid to the way Heidegger uses language to unearth the potentials of meanings and how we can move beyond mechanistic thinking to reveal a clearing of Being. The questions raised by Heidegger to do with building, dwelling and thinking are brought into proximity with relations of aesthetics and technology. Bridging these relations are questions to do with the labouring subject. Cases of two cities are excavated to discover and discuss some recent culture-building strategies: Newcastle and Gateshead in England, whose buildings (as edifices and dwelling places) reveal a palimpsest of time, place and technology. Through two key texts by Heidegger the paper considers his perspective on how material things gather and reveal, focusing us on what things or entities do rather than what they are in the world as a pedagogical process of revealing the essence of technology as “disclosedness”.