An outdoor living room

Abstract

The rising numbers of balconies is a significant architectural change in the city of Copenhagen. Through an architectural-anthropological study of three case-buildings, the chapter explores how balconies intervene in the social relationship between city dwellers by adding new angles of exposure and new surfaces for contact. Differences between neighbours become increasingly manifest as material boundaries become blurred. As architectural attributes, balconies affect the social forms of urban housing and city life, enabling new ways of behaviour, and challenging the norms of co-existing on the boundaries between private homes. Balconies thus take part in social life in ways resembling social media: They pave way for new ways of being private and new ways of being public. Rather than the anonymous façade that neutralizes how citizens appear in public, the balcony-façades expose who live behind them, but such exposure entails both possibilities to stand out and social pressure to fit in. The chapter further develops current understandings of domestic–urban boundaries, and zooms in on what architecture does. It thereby demonstrates that architectural anthropology is not just about combining disciplinary methods but also about approaching the built environment as taking part in our social life and ways of dwelling in the city.