A nexus of time and space, or on the ordinary and extraordinary everyday in a tenement courtyard

Abstract

The everyday is located in a space-time filled with various practices, problems, non-human creatures; it relates to human beings and places in which they exist. In the article, I reconstruct the ways of experiencing and practising the everyday in tenement courtyards. I present the image of the ordinary everyday as revealed by interviews with tenement dwellers of Maribor in Slovenia, as well as the image of the extraordinary everyday as reported in the diaries and memoirs of the residents of Warsaw tenements during the 2nd World War. Taking the “courtyard everyday” as my example, I demonstrate that the everyday has more than one shape, that it is relative and situational in nature, and that its contents and structure change depending on, among others, people’s biographies, modes of behaviour, objects of which they make use, and their involvement in the constant process of constructing a place.