When I use the word "home" I mean two things at the same time, and I usually don't say so.
I mean the physical place — the door, the key, the bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, the address you write on documents.
And I also mean something else, harder to name: the point in the world where someone, or something, recognizes you. Where you don't have to introduce yourself. Where you can take your shoes off.
These two things don't always coincide. That's the interesting part.
The full houses that empty out
Over the last few years I've spoken with hundreds of people who live in large, well-kept apartments, in convenient cities, and tell me they feel without a home. At first I thought it was rhetoric. Then I understood it wasn't.
A 68-year-old woman in Rimini told me: "I have a 110-square-meter home. I know it by heart. There's no one to share it with. When I come back in the evening, I greet no one. When I leave, I greet no one. After a while a place like this isn't a home anymore. It's a warehouse for my things."
A 29-year-old man in Milan: "I pay 950 euros for a room in a shared apartment. I know the names of my flatmates, but I never see them. Each one closes their bedroom door. The home is a corridor."
In both cases there's a roof. There's an address. There's no home.
(These are composite examples based on recurring conversations with residents, applicants, and people exploring new ways of living.)
The wrong dictionary
We have a vocabulary problem.
We use the same word — "home" — for two very different things: the building, and the experience of being in a building.
When the real estate market says "I have a home to rent," it's only talking about the first. When an eighty-year-old says "I want to go home," they almost always mean the second.
Confusing the two is the reason we build many houses and produce little home. You can buy square meters. You cannot buy the feeling of being at home. That depends on who's inside, on how people speak to each other, on what is shared, on the habits, the familiar sounds, the glances exchanged in the morning before going out. None of that fits inside a deed.
What Maslow actually meant
When Maslow's hierarchy is taught, the home tends to land at the bottom — under the heading of safety, with food and shelter. It's a useful summary. It's also incomplete.
A home, the real kind, sits on three levels at once:
- Physical safety. A dry bed, a door that locks, a working bathroom. Without these things, nothing else can be discussed.
- Belonging. Knowing whom to come back to, who is waiting, who notices if you're missing. Without this, the first becomes furnished solitude.
- Recognition. Feeling that someone knows who you are, what you're going through, what makes you ridiculous or proud. Without this, the first two become grey routine.
When one of the three dimensions is missing, what's missing isn't a detail. What's missing is home.
When we stop calling a home a home
I've taken to asking people, very directly: "Where you live now — would you call it home?"
The answers reveal a lot. The word disappears in the moments when:
- people don't feel safe (the physical home exists, but there's violence, conflict, or an eviction looming);
- nobody knows whether they are doing well, or doing badly;
- people are ashamed to invite anyone over;
- they come back late at night knowing the place will be empty, cold, and that it will be empty and cold tomorrow too;
- they sense it's a temporary solution that has lasted too long.
Under any of these conditions, people stop using the word "home." They start using words like the place where I am, where I sleep, the apartment, the room. The dictionary changes before the contract does.
The contemporary housing problem
Over the last forty years, in the West, we've specialized the first dimension (physical safety) and dismantled the other two.
We've built smaller, more isolated, more independent apartments. We've imagined cohabitation as a sacrifice and autonomy as an achievement. We've treated the neighborhood as a finished era. We've accepted that you can live next to someone for ten years without saying hello.
We know the result: more expensive housing, more declared loneliness, condominiums that work like long-term hotels, cities that empty out at night, elderly people dying alone, young people who can afford neither autonomy nor company.
It's not an architectural failure. It's a failure in the way we defined "home."
A house empty of relationships is called isolation
A room is there. A home, no.
A home without someone who notices you isn't a smaller home. It's a different thing. It works less, rests less, counts less.
This isn't a judgment of people who live alone — living alone can be a healthy choice, and for many it is. It's a judgment of the kind of place in which choices are made. If today the only available option is "live alone or build a family," we've left an enormous third of anyone's life out of the market.
What I'm trying to build
The work I'm part of tries to start from one simple idea: that home means two things, that both matter, and that they can be built back together.
Not as a romantic gesture. As a design choice.
In practice, that means:
- designing spaces where people can be alone when they want to and meet without being forced to;
- building light but clear rules that protect the dignity of everyone;
- thinking of home as a place that produces relationships, not only a place that hosts them;
- accepting that a home is also a service — cleaning, maintenance, welcome — and not a burden to dump individually on the resident.
What doesn't go out of fashion
A home is more than a roof. It never was.
The eras in which we treated it that way have been, each time, the emptier eras. We need places where we can take our shoes off and say "I'm home" knowing the sentence has a complete meaning. Without settling. Without adding "well, at least I have a roof over my head" as if that were the maximum to ask for.
It's worth asking, each of us: where do I feel truly at home, today? And if the answer is "nowhere," it isn't an individual problem.
It's a design problem.
We can try to redesign it.
Closing
I write here on the margin of practical work — most of which happens in Rimini, where I run CoLivingOne as the place where these ideas get tested with real residents and ordinary days.
The writing is the why. The work is the what. They feed each other.
If a sentence here recognizes you, or if you build places where people might one day take their shoes off and feel home — write to me.
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If you're rethinking what home means — for yourself, for a project, for a city — write to me. One short email is fine.