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Domestic space has been neglected by social sciences, and especially by Geography. This space is an anthropic, differentiated and private one, which has to do with the family and the body, and constitutes a basic territory. As a geographical space, it is both produced by society and social values, and involved in the social reproduction of everyday life. Domestic space is an important scientific and epistemological issue in so far as the people who live there behave as geographical agents and build their domestic space, at a bodily and individual scale unfamiliar to most of the geographers. Trying to overpass the methodological and epistemological reluctance of Geography with the topic, modernity is proposed as a key to a better understanding of the recent changes in domestic space.

Domestic space has been neglected by social sciences, and especially by Geography. This space is an anthropic, differentiated and private one, which has to do with the family and the body, and constitutes a basic territory. As a geographical space, it is both produced by society and social values, and involved in the social reproduction of everyday life. Domestic space is an important scientific and epistemological issue in so far as the people who live there behave as geographical agents and build their domestic space, at a bodily and individual scale unfamiliar to most of the geographers. Trying to overpass the methodological and epistemological reluctance of Geography with the topic, modernity is proposed as a key to a better understanding of the recent changes in domestic space.

In the late 50's and early 60% the Inuit people of Canada settled down in permanent villages under various pressures. One of the major changes related to this move to the settled way of life was the shift from igloos — and summer tents — to permanent houses, at first very simple one-room units called "match-box houses" and later multiple-bedroom ones. Houses are a powerful expression of cultural values. Identity is first nurtered inside of them, and one learns there the basic spatial rules of his community. Therefore, one can expect exposure to an architecture carrying values of an alien culture to have important impacts on its dwellers. Yet so far, both geographers and Arctic anthropologists have neglected domestic spaces issues, the former not feeling at ease with the micro-scale and the later focusing their attention on the newly formed communities, at the settlement scale. This paper discusses the results of a study conducted among the Inuinnait people (Western Central Arctic) about the way they have been dealing, for over 30 years now, with the shift from vernacular dwellings to social housing ones. Information was collected through both observation over nearly 15 years (1986-2000) of Inuit's modem homes and their spatial organization, and formal semi-directive interviews conducted with elderly women — who experienced the shift as mothers — in the spring of 1998. The research revealed that adaptation has been more than difficult, but also that, if the Inuit culture is put at risk in the new dwellings, it is inside of them too that the Inuit are creating mediations between their culture in transition and the Western one. Building from this case study, the conclusion insists on the importance of domestic spaces as geographical spaces through which we can get a better understanding of the dynamics of cultures and identifies.

Based on in depth fieldwork conducted with anthropological methods and perspective, the paper aims to describe some aspects of the modernization process in a rapidly developing society, by focusing on the transformation of housing that occurred in South Korea between the 1960s and the 1990s. In the early 60s, most Korean families used to live in detached or semi-detached dwellings, which setting recalled that of the traditional Korean style house or hanok; but in the 1990s, the pervasive Western style apartment house is the dominant housing model. In Seoul, for more than a third of the city inhabitants, the functional LDK (Living-Dining-Kitchen) model replaced the traditional polyfunctional and gender-differenciated space of the hanok. However, the specificity of the Korean housing culture still remains vivid in the apartment, through the « reformulation » of particular structures of the hanok, such as the courtyard. As for the practices, the westernization promoted by the new housing model is only partial, since gestures characterizing the way of life in a hanok still can be observed in apartments, such as taking on and of shoes and carrying the low table (sang) during meals. The article eventually concludes that the westernization promoted by the transformation of housing, although partial, means much for the informants, since apartments are perceived by them as the symbol of Korean modem housing and thus, are for them an important symbol of status.

Lafayette Park, Detroit, is the largest residential district that architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and planner Ludwig Hilberseimer realised in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Its highly abstract language of architecture — concrete floored, flat roofed « glass houses » and balconiless glass towers — proffers an in-teresting basis from which to launch a questioning of the meaning of domestic space. The architecture's sparseness, free plan, precise dimensions and transparent outer walls, contrast with the spatial qualifies of the traditional American home. The ways in which the architecture is inflected by its occupants, and reciprocally, residents' responses to the architecture, are here examined with a view to yielding insights into the character of modernist spaces. We know modernism's ideals but less of its realities. In sharp distinction with Mies's Chicago works, Lafayette Park does not house an exclusively upper income public educated in modernist design aesthetics ; its population is racially and economically diverse and includes subsidised tenants. This unusual situation renders the question of modernism's reception ail the more meaningful.