Paper short abstract:

This article examines how the notion of space is conceptualized and subsequently enacted by residents of two old districts in the historical Almaty center in conditions of planned demolition of the buildings

Paper long abstract:

This article examines how the notion of space is conceptualized and subsequently enacted by residents of two old districts in the historical city center in conditions of planned demolition of the buildings. The article, in particular, explores how the mental conception of ‘home’ is significant for an individual resident in epistemological mediation of own experiential capacity and transformative agency. In other words, we explored how individuals through the notion of ‘home’ form their attitudes and choices regarding the future of an urban space (i.e dilapidated houses and their potential replacement). ‘Home’ is conceptualized as a cognitive frame, which contains a human sense of a personal place in the world and provides epistemological means to organize a personal taxonomy of meanings about social relations and connections, significant activities of everyday life and extraordinary circumstances, and in context of our study the uses and transformation of urban space. Simultaneously, we found that the conception of ‘home’ is not conceived identically by all surveyed residents of two districts. The locus of ‘home’, and consequently the realm of agency, is shaped differently by interacting planes of various ‘urban’ to ‘global’ spaces. The research findings are analyzed in relation to global-urban relevance of urban spaces, intricacy of human agency as positioned in everyday urbanism and substantiation of tacit knowledge structures. The theoretical bases for the study are derived from the sociology of knowledge, adding this sociological perspective to the socio-spatial paradigm in urban theory. Empirical components included the survey with the residents of two dilapidated buildings of Almaty and in-depth interviews in the situation of possible demolition of the buildings.