ON DOMESTICITY: THE PUBLICNESS OF THE PRIVATE

The -Otla- / Pol Houses in Ahmedabad

The notion of privacy is not universal. Privacy is not a need but a cultural outcome of the established canons of a society. In a Darwinian sense, privacy is the result of the slow but relentless adaptation of the human being to a particular climate, place and culture. Technology, with innovations like the toilet or the washing machine, plays a key role in defining the boundaries of privacy, but to link the notion of privacy just to the technological evolution is too reductive.

India is a particular interesting case that challenges the conventions of the notion of privacy. The historic city of Ahmedabad provides a wonderful case study.  The walled city is divided in neighborhoods (-Pur-) that in turn are divided in clusters of houses ( -Pol-). Ahmedabad is the sum of Pols. The Pols are clusters of houses grouped along dead-end streets sometimes separated from the city by historic gates. There is a strong sense of community in each Pol that comes from caste, economic activity or religion. Any citizen living in a Pol has to accept its particular rules of behavior and the interaction between the members of a Pol takes place in the dead-end street where the boundaries between private and public become blur.

The Pol Houses are a typology of housing that respond to this sense of community.

The typology is characterized by the “otla”, an elevated platform at the front of each house that serves for multiple purposes. Elevated at different levels from the street, not only it provides protection against floods but becomes a real extension of the house in the street. The difference of level demarcates its degree of privacy. Despite its small dimensions (sometimes no more than 1m width), the otla houses a great range of domestic activities that, externalized in the street, become the space of interaction between the neighbors. The interesting point here is that the activities externalized are precisely those related to water: laundry, bathing, etc. There is not only a technical reason (water sewage) why precisely such tasks as bathing and doing the laundry are the ones externalized. These tasks are deeply rooted in the Indian tradition, where public bathing in tanks and rivers has always had a sacred connotation.

The Pol Houses challenge every notion of privacy as they make public precisely the tasks that Western societies have condemned to isolation in the name of efficiency.