Attachments to the common-place: pragmatic sociology and the aesthetic cosmopolitics of eco-house design in Kyoto, Japan Open Access

In this article, I explore the role of ‘attachments’ in the politics of eco-house design in Kyoto, focusing on the way urban actors in a local partnership known as heisei no kyō-machiya² seek to reposition the vernacular architectural style of wooden townhouses for new future-oriented purposes. In a provisional sense, the notion of attachment – as developed by pragmatic sociologists such as Hennion (2007, 2012, 2013) – denote an active, embodied, habitual, and collective appreciation of, and aesthetic taste for, certain objects of care and affection. When deployed in the urban setting, this notion proves valuable, I want to show, in elucidating how relations and materials of the built environment shape the sensory and ambient conditions of everyday life in the city (Larkin, 2013), and how such shaping implies a specific politics of urban design. Amidst collective efforts underway in Kyoto to design and build 30,000 new eco-machiya houses across the city, the particular question I want to pose is this: how, in the face of multiple contestations over urban development, does the architectural style of machiya come to stabilize as the appropriate form of sustainable dwelling in present-day Kyoto? More generally, I ask: in what sense do these design efforts raise questions of aesthetics and culture as much as of technology and politics, and how may pragmatic sociology help clarify these relations?

In posing these questions, I invoke Strathern's (2004, p. 10) notion of aesthetics as ‘the persuasiveness of form, the elicitation of a sense of appropriateness’. In this anthropological definition, aesthetics is not simply a matter of bodily mediated sensory experiences, but more centrally about those conventions of expressive form that are shared by a specific collectivity (Riles, 1999). Architecture, in a straightforward sense, deals with such conventions of form. However, unlike most professional architectural discourses on aesthetics, this Strathernian notion helpfully repositions the question of architectural form as a relational, collective and – by implication – civic-political issue. Architecture and buildings, we might say, pertain to the shaping of common material and symbolic worlds that are deemed more-or-less appropriate by their various constituencies (Yaneva, 2012). How then, amidst on-going controversies and in the course of multiple design trials, do architects, planners, house-makers, and citizen groups in Kyoto achieve and compose the new urban common worlds of eco-machiya housing designs?

The argument developed in this article draws upon the pragmatic sociologies of Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion, and Laurent Thévenot, in order to show how the persuasiveness of architectural form must itself be built and tested within the urban-political community, a process involving also legitimate forms of disagreement and dissent. More specifically, I seek to substantiate the idea that uncertainties and tensions in the relation of built forms to societal concerns – of urban aesthetics to public engagements, architecture to politics – may fruitfully be cast as a politics of shared attachments. More strongly than ‘taste’ or similar standard aesthetic categories (Hennion, 2010), the pragmatic sociology of attachment highlights those practices, devices, and situations of interacting with the objects that motivate appreciation in the first place. Moreover, the various pragmatic sociologists have in common a dynamic notion of politics as revolving centrally around conflictual processes of critical collective ‘testing’ in a political community in need of constant and mutual adjustments (Thévenot, 2014a, 2014b). This shared pragmatic-sociological focus and commitment, I aim to show, can be worked into a valuable theoretical framework for analyzing the collective task of composing and testing new urban housing designs.³

While broadly inspired by similar traditions, not least those of the American pragmatist philosophies of William James and John Dewey (see, e.g. Hennion, 2012; Latour, 2013; Thévenot, 2011), the pragmatic sociologies of Latour, Hennion, and Thévenot have however also each evolved in somewhat different ways. As such, each approach will allow specific but related aspects of a politics of shared attachments to come into view. In other words, in what follows, I aim to turn my ethnographic interest in eco-machiya design practices in Kyoto into a site of theoretical elaboration on these different senses of attachment to architectural form. This approach entails, on the one hand, treating ‘attachment’ as the shared conceptual territory that allows for a productive dialogue between the various strands of pragmatic sociology. On the other hand, it entails an attempt to specify the analytical affordances of each approach, in terms of grasping how the architectural style of machiya has come to be collectively endorsed as the appropriate form of eco-dwelling in Kyoto. In a wider sense, this case study may in turn be taken as a testing case of how pragmatic sociology deals with the relation between cultural-expressive forms and political collectivity.

In empirical terms, my analysis is based on two months of fieldwork undertaken in Kyoto in the spring of 2011, combined with follow-up visits and interviews during 2012 and 2013, all focused on the work of the official heisei no kyō-machiya partnership.⁴ Established around 2008, this partnership is anchored in the Housing Policy Office of the Kyoto municipal administration and forms part of wider local government efforts towards climate mitigation. It brings together various government offices, house-making companies, professional associations of architects, engineers and carpenters, as well as civic groups concerned with vernacular wooden architecture. The joint mandate of the partnership is to work towards the design, certification, and commercial spread of new eco-friendly houses based on the machiya blueprint. The analysis that follows is based on interviews with a total of nine actors in or close to the partnership,⁵ combined with site visits, documentary materials, and observations during key events such as the opening of a public housing exhibition site. Two informants, an architect and a carpenter, were interviewed several times. I supplement this material by reference to existing ethnographic and historical work on recent townscape developments and civic politics in Kyoto (Brumann, 2012b).

In the next section, I engage in more detail with the pragmatic sociologies of attachment to architectural form, juxtaposing the Latourian notion of ‘cosmopolitics’ to Hennion's discussion of amateurs and Thévenot's notion of ‘commonality in the plural’. I then turn to the Kyoto setting, outlining first how the emergence of the heisei no kyō-machiya eco-housing partnership may be read within a history of civic engagements in collective taste-making activities vis-à-vis vernacular wooden townhouses in Kyoto. This leads into a more detailed empirical exploration of the on-going politics of eco-housing design in Kyoto. In conclusion, I return to the question of how built form and societal concern interrelate, suggesting that pragmatic sociology may lead to a better appreciation of the aesthetic (cosmo-)politics of sustainable dwelling.

Socio-cultural studies of architectures and built environments tend to oscillate between two somewhat incongruous perspectives, even as they seek to overcome the division. On the one hand, architecture may be seen as what gives material form to more overarching social, cultural, and political structures – as when, for instance, Humphrey (2005) depicts the communal dormitories of the 1930s as prisms of post-revolution Soviet ideology. On the other hand, as Harvey (2010) argues for the case of the spread of concrete into public spaces in provincial Peru since the 1980s, material building infrastructures may also be taken as what makes local state power itself (the aforementioned ‘structures’) less fragile and more obdurate. This is true, Harvey shows, even as the aesthetic allure of concrete to operate as a strong, homogeneous, and predictable material invariably gets caught up, in the building process, in tense and frictional accommodations between mutually entwined social and material orders.

In their various guises, existing approaches of pragmatic sociology to the built environment may be said to mitigate against such tendencies to disentangle architectural form (‘content’) from societal concerns (‘context’). They do so by making shared uncertainty and collective exploration integral to how we understand specific design and building processes (Guy, 2009; Yaneva, 2012). This point, indeed, reaches beyond the built environment, touching instead on a theoretical cornerstone in what has become known as French pragmatic sociology. In their different idioms, Latour, Hennion, and Thévenot all insist on the point that practices of community-building involve uncertain situations of trials and testing, in which actors link ways of knowing to ways of valuing and appreciating their environments, built or otherwise. This is true of all objects and situations, whether scientific, cultural or political, thus providing a conceptual and substantive bridge between these realms of practice and research (Hennion, 1989; Thévenot, 2009).

My aim in the following is to elaborate the contribution of pragmatic sociology in general, and of its various strands in particular, to thinking about the relation of architectural form to societal concerns as a matter of shared attachments. I commence this discussion with the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and others, because the most elaborate engagement with architecture so far in pragmatic sociology has emerged from this approach. Hence, in a key article, Latour and Yaneva (2008) argue that buildings are not static objects but movable projects, points of convergence and contestation among multiple networks of human and non-human constituencies. In order to stabilize as a material force, an emerging building must enroll and arrange a series of conflicting agencies – building materials, clients, models, zoning laws, neighborhood associations, aesthetic fashions, future users, and so on – within the same socio-technical form. Buildings, in this sense, instantiate an entire cosmos: as ‘cosmograms’ (Tresch, 2007), buildings draw together a multiplicity of relations among humans, technologies and natures, provisionally ordering these within a shared common world. At times, of course, such common worlds or cosmoses fail to materialize under the weight of sustained controversy (Yaneva, 2012).

In this ANT approach, in short, design manifests a specific modality of ‘cosmopolitics’, that is, the contested politics of bringing a situated and material common cosmos, a shared world of human and non-human cohabitation, into existence. It is characteristic that, as is the case with ANT more generally, the notion of attachment plays only a limited role in this definition of architectural cosmopolitics. Rather, the approach serves to stress the locally contingent and conflictual nature of design processes, as these stretch from architectural studios into distributed networks of trials throughout the city and beyond (Blok, 2013; Houdart & Chihiro, 2009; Yaneva, 2012). In such work, however, it becomes conceptually difficult to see how, amidst multiple public contestations and mobilizations, architectural designs are capable of stabilizing in the first place. If, as ANT ontology stresses, neither material forms nor societal concerns remain stable for long, on what basis are urban built environments themselves held together? What, indeed, might be meant, amidst such heterogeneous associations, by the common world in Latourian cosmopolitics? (cf. Watson, 2011).

This is the point, arguably, at which the notion of attachment does become central to ANT. In a rare engagement with the concept, Latour (1999) suggests that his entire sociology of translations revolves around the question of telling good from bad attachments – a distinction which, Latour argues, from now on inheres in the things themselves, once ‘things’ are duly recast as distributed networks. Attachment, in this Latourian sense, is thus at once what ties humans and things together, and what is at stake when actors attempt to sort out their conflicting moral commitments to the world. As a conceptual touchstone, then, attachment here acquires a basic (cosmo-)political significance, in terms of telling which commitments to things ‘make us do’ what we do. As Marres (2007) shows, for instance, a sense of ‘endangered’ attachments often underlie public concern with techno-science. While suggestive, however, Latour tells us little as to how he imagines attachments to be at work across different practices, such as those of science, law, politics, economy or, indeed, architecture and urban design.⁶

In short, while Latour thus succeeds in outlining a promising model of architectural cosmopolitics as revolving around the question of collectively sorting out conflicting attachments to the built environment, he falls short of specifying how this might work in any detail. On this point, Antoine Hennion has arguably taken the discussion of attachments further – including in ways that, while not cast on this cultural territory, resonate strongly with my interest in architectural forms. In his work with music lovers, for instance, Hennion (2005, 2007) shows the practical work by way of which the amateur ‘makes herself love’ specific musical things, by way of listening, playing, recording, making others listen, and so on. In this ‘pragmatics of taste’ (Hennion, 2010), taste is made from testing, that is, from experiences that define a domain filled with objects and nuances, of know-how and repertoires, of criteria and techniques, of common histories and contested evolutions. As a testing modality of attaching to the world, taste is a corporeal, collective, reflexive, and instrumented activity (Hennion, 2007, p. 109).

All of this, as I will show, bears directly on the amateur lover of architectural forms, such as those civic groups in Kyoto dedicated to the collective task of preserving and restoring existing machiya structures in the city. The architectural amateur, too, is a ‘virtuoso’ when it comes to aesthetics (Hennion, 2005); an aesthetics not of ‘pure forms’, but of long-term processes of taste-making, mediations, bodies, objects, situations, and equipments. In this sense, the aesthetic practices of amateurs partake in an uncertain exploration of socio-technical worlds. But they also slow down such processes, making them attentive to new variations and passions. Indeed, Hennion (2012) himself suggests that if Latourian assemblages are about redistributing agencies and redoing politics, then attachment might be seen as the ‘passive’ inverse of assemblages.⁷ Attachment insists on the necessity of being arrested by things, of making the world register its resistances in lived experiences.

While thus making an important addition to the Latourian approach – by specifying some of those taste-making activities constitutive of shared senses of appropriate architectural forms – Hennion, much like Latour, also leaves open the key (cosmo-)political question. How, we might ask, are different taste-shaping practices and attachments to the built environment formed, enrolled, coordinated, and put on trial within specific building and design processes? Given that, as Latour stresses, such processes involve a heterogeneous ensemble of actors, both expert and amateur, Hennion's attachments must somehow be made to cohere into new shared equipment and criteria, capable of exerting persuasive effects in the wider urban-political community. How, ultimately, to think of such work of forging and contesting urban common worlds of co-habitation, in ways that neither run the risk of overestimating the heterogeneity of controversial and incompatible associations (as does Latour), nor of overplaying the role of specific long-term taste-making practices and shared attachments (as does Hennion)?

This is where, finally, I turn to Thévenot, and his recent notion of ‘commonality in the plural’ (Thévenot, 2014a, 2014b, 2015) in particular, in order to highlight the way in which relations between architecture and societal concerns may take variable shapes, depending on the way architectural forms are ‘made common’. On the part of Thévenot, arriving at this analytical framework has involved a two-step extension of the moral-political sociology of critique and justification originally elaborated with Luc Boltanski (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006). First, Thévenot (2002, 2007, 2009) now distinguishes three so-called regimes of engagement with the world, of which justification by way of orders of worth, the regime elaborated with Boltanski, is only one. The other two are called, respectively, the regime of engaging in plans and the regime of familiar engagement. Within this three-fold distinction, the notion of attachment pertains mainly to the regime of familiar engagement, where people act within an immediate milieu that has come to be shaped into personal and familiar places for dwelling through their sustained use. Attachments to the milieu, in this sense, help sustain a sense of feeling at ease (Thévenot, 2007, p. 416).⁸

Alongside and corresponding to these regimes of engagement, secondly, Thévenot (2014b) has sought to bring a pragmatic impulse to the analysis of politics, by situating the research on orders of worth in a more general framework of commonality in the plural. This framework distinguishes three basic ways of ‘making things common’ and ‘composing’ differences, in terms of how actors connect and communicate with each other: the grammar of plural orders of justifiable worth; the grammar of individuals choosing in a liberal public; and the grammar of personal affinities to common-places. Here, the grammar of justifiable worth corresponds to what, in On Justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006), is referred to as ‘the polity model’, expressing the shared requirements met by a limited plurality of moral constructions of the common good, the orders of worth (market, industrial, civic, domestic, fame, inspiration).⁹ More importantly for the present purpose, however, the third grammar – of personal affinities to common-places – is the one most amenable to those personal conveniences and capacities of intimate attachment associated with familiar engagements. Meanwhile, the key point for Thévenot is that each grammar of commonality imposes its own moral-political constraints on how things can be made shareable and mutual. This, indeed, is what makes his framework suitable for further qualifying the role and importance of shared attachments in architectural cosmopolitics.

Put briefly, shared attachments – taken in the sense of Hennion – play an important role in Thévenot's framework in at least two ways. First, as noted, attachments are what shape the variable engagements with and associations of mutually invested ‘common-places’, a term understood here in the classical sense of a locus communis for sharing deep personal concerns and feelings. Common-places, to Thévenot, may be anything from a literary trope, songs, films or poems, to materially anchored places such as specific landscapes or buildings (Thévenot, 2015). In Kyoto, the wooden materials and forms of kyō-machiya buildings have arguably come to serve as such common-places for various actors (cf. Sandrisser, 2007). Second, when transposed into more formal settings of public justification and critique, attachments may be qualified according to what Boltanski and Thévenot (1991/2006) call the domestic order of worth, a grammar of the common good associated with the value of locality, heritage, and tradition. Exactly because attachments differ between these two grammars of commonality, work is needed to align them in specific settings. This difference is, in turn, elided or collapsed in Hennion's discussion, thus accounting for the difficulty pointed to at the level of his (cosmo-)political model.¹⁰

Compared to both Latour and Hennion, in short, Thévenot's grammars of commonality provide a more sensitive vocabulary for analyzing how composite and conflicting communities afford and legitimize specific ways of making things common, of voicing concern and of differing. Such processes, Thévenot (2014b, p. 17) suggests, revolve around what he dubs ‘intermediary objects’, which offer material support for, and focus attention towards, shared forms of political concern. Eco-houses in Kyoto, I will argue, are just such intermediary objects. According to the grammar of commonality in question, these houses take on different moral-political shapes: as entities qualifying for various common goods (orders of worth); as options publicly accessible for individual choices (liberal public); and as personally invested common-places. These various moral-political grammars must be ‘composed’, and hence given a composite formal-aesthetic shape, in the work of stabilizing and spreading new eco-house designs.

To summarize, the argument so far is that the pragmatic sociologies of Latour, Hennion, and Thévenot each help elucidate specific but related aspects of how attachments mediate the relation of architecture to political concern – and, that elements of each approach is needed to analyze how specific architectural forms come to seem collectively appropriate within urban settings. From Latour, in brief, I maintain the claim that the making of architecture should be analyzed as a conflictual cosmopolitics of sorting out good from bad attachments to things, among heterogeneous networks of humans and non-humans. Hennion, in turn, provides valuable insights into the very constitution of such attachments by way of embodied, instrumented, and collective taste-making practices within communities of amateurs. Thévenot, finally, helps situate such capacities of intimate attachment within a more pluralistic view to how buildings are composed as intermediary objects of shared but differentiated concerns. Taken together, these three propositions constitute what, in this article, I call the politics of shared attachments. The work of forging and composing shared attachments, on this view, is tantamount to stabilizing a specific architectural form as appropriate to the community. This is the sense in which, invoking Strathern's (2004) definition, this article speaks of an ‘aesthetic’ cosmopolitics. I turn now to the Kyoto setting, to analyze the case of composite attachments to new eco-machiya buildings.

On a sunny November day in 2012, a new housing exhibition space, just east of the main train station, opened up to the Kyoto public. While similar in format to spaces found all over urban Japan – as one standard market device for showcasing pre-fabricated family houses to potential customers – this particular exhibition still stood out. Established by the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, this was, at first sight, a space for home-makers to exhibit their new eco-friendly products, modelled on the vernacular machiya form. With roughly 28,000 old and renovated machiya houses scattered around city centre, this form would be familiar to Kyoto residents; still, the opportunity to buy a modern-day eco-machiya was a market novelty. On closer inspection, however, the space also embodied certain visions of the local government, in terms of addressing global climate change via the promotion of locally appropriate sustainable buildings. The fact that the opening was presided over by the mayor of Kyoto testified to this political investment.¹¹ Like the eco-machiya houses themselves, then, this was a composite space.

According to several members of the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership to whom I spoke, this particular spatial distribution – replete with symbolic connotations of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’, ‘local’ versus ‘global’, ‘past’ versus ‘future’ – had been the topic of rather heated controversy among different stakeholders. Some members of the partnership, particularly architects, carpenters, and academics with prior experience from civic machiya reconstruction associations, tended to favour more ‘traditional’ and fixed design parameters and methods. Others, and commercial home-makers in particular, were quite ready to view machiya architecture as an evolving cultural form; particularly since sticking to traditional labour-intensive craft methods of construction would raise prices beyond mass-market feasibility. Mediating between these different concerns and interests were public officials, for whom questions of housing form would also have to be politically evaluated against aggregate carbon saving accounts.

In short, whereas Kyoto city administrative discourses on these eco-machiya would position them as ‘hybrid’ houses fusing ‘traditional wisdom’ with ‘advanced technology’, such symbiotic imaginaries tended to disintegrate in material design practice amidst internal tensions. In particular, the very dichotomies which these houses were imagined to overcome, such as between tradition and technology, replicated instead as points of contention at several levels including, for instance, in questions of partnership form and the material shape of houses. In response, government plans attempted to stabilize such tensions into two different architectural types – one ‘standard’ (ippan-gata), the other ‘traditional’ (dentō-gata) – each with their own certification schemes and market shares (according to projections, 90% of sales would be of the standard type). In the language of Thévenot, the local government thus proved itself keen to organize design work according to standardized market choices in a liberal public.

At the same time, however, the tensions and compromises worked out in the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership should also be read as one micro-cosmic instantiation of a wider politics of shared attachments to specific Kyoto townscapes, played out across various scales of recent urban change (cf. Jimenez, 2005). Indeed, in the shape of embodied experience, such continuities were part of how the partnership was assembled as a hybrid ‘learning forum’ (McFarlane, 2011) in the first place. Two legacies, in particular, give shape to this forum: so-called ‘townscape disputes’ (keikan ronsō) played out over the spread of high-rise buildings (manshon) in inner-city Kyoto since the 1980s; and the formation, especially since the 1990s, of a sizeable civic movement aiming to revive and rebuild existing kyō-machiya townhouses (Brumann, 2012b). These trajectories of architectural controversy, we might say with Latour, have spurred many Kyoto inhabitants to attempt to sort out good from bad attachments to their built environments. Via such collective trials, I argue, a shared sense of desirable townscape has gradually emerged – ‘desirable’, that is, in the composite sense of Thévenot, as what is at the same time justifiable, individually preferable, and amenable to embodied attachments within the urban-political community.¹²

Takamura Mitsuyoshi,¹³ chairman of the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, bring together much of this recent history of urban change in Kyoto. Besides working as a professor of architecture, he has been active for many years within civic groups working to rebuild existing old machiya houses. An urban social movement driven mostly by middle-class professionals (Brumann, 2009), these activities unite residents, architects, carpenters, and craftsmen, engaging in material practices of building renovation and maintenance. As Hennion would suggest, through such collective and corporeal activities, attachments have been shaped and strengthened as participants have come to appreciate nuances of building design and develop criteria of taste in various machiya forms (Brumann, 2012b). Concomitantly, in recent years, renovated machiya dwellings, cafes, restaurants, and art studios have mushroomed in central Kyoto – as well as acquiring a new symbolic significance, not least in touristic renditions of the city.

Alongside participating in these activities, and in his expert capacity, Takamura has taken a public stance in favour of tightening building regulations, particularly in terms of lowering permissible heights for new high-rise construction in central Kyoto. He thus formed part of the build-up of civic pressure which lay in the background when, in 2007, the city of Kyoto became the first in Japan to establish a legal building code based strongly on notions of the townscape as a legitimate matter of public (as opposed to private) aesthetic concern (Brumann, 2012a). Within this code, much of the historic core of Kyoto is now classified as an ‘aesthetic area’ (bikan chiku) – and many of the tightened rules, including lowered heights, specified roof styles and wall colour specifications, are modelled on traditional machiya features. In an urban building context hitherto dominated by private investors, the code amounts to a significant change.

What has happened in Kyoto in recent years, we might say with Thévenot, is that a certain townscape aesthetics, linked to the architectural form of the machiya, has come to be qualified more strongly for public justification according to domestic worth. In this qualification, the machiya form is increasingly associated with the tradition, heritage, and identity of Kyoto city. This process, notably, has been one of trials and controversy, as witnessed in a string of ‘townscape disputes’ played out over specific high-rise building projects threatening to eliminate existing machiya structures. Moreover, it has involved an active process of taste-making within embodied and instrumented efforts linking professional and amateur actors in house-renovating practices. Finally, it has been a process of compromising (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006), not least between market and domestic forms of worth, as public authorities have sought to accommodate the divergent interests of home-makers, civic groups, and urban residents.

In this view, the heisei no kyō-machiya eco-housing partnership emerge as the latest instalment of such recent urban compromises – clearly marked and given material shape, in this case, by the split between ‘standard’ (market) and ‘traditional’ (domestic) housing types. Alongside these two orders of worth, however, the new machiya is also qualified, in the public justifications of the partnership, according to a grammar of green worth: the wooden materials, circulating winds, and advanced energy technologies turn these houses into spaces of eco-friendly dwelling. In my interview with Takamura, the partnership chairman, he recounts the story in such terms: what has happened, he narrates, is that environmental concerns have come to be nested on top of the shared pursuit of desirable townscapes embedded in the city's new building code. Tellingly, inside the Kyoto administration, the partnership is run jointly by the housing and climate policy offices, thus giving organizational shape to this new compromise.

Concerns with global climate change have been active in Kyoto at least since 1997, when new non-governmental (NGO) alliances were forged in the run-up to the city hosting the UN climate conference (Reimann, 2002). As a matter of local government policy, however, activity mostly picked up when, in 2004, the city set itself an ambitious target of 40% carbon reduction by 2030. Since then, various measures have been implemented, targeting infrastructures of energy, traffic, and the built environment. This is how, around 2008, the two hitherto distinct trajectories of urban concern – of desirable townscapes and low-carbon infrastructures – were brought together in the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership. In local policy documents, the new eco-machiya architectural form is depicted as a symbol of climatic ambitions in the city, thereby acting as a scale-making device that bring the global climate ‘home’ in Kyoto-style towards local, national, and international audiences (Slocum, 2004).

However, when engaging local citizens and members of the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, not least the architects and carpenters, it becomes clear that the ‘natural’ qualities of these eco-buildings are not simply vested in abstract measures of carbon. They are also embedded, arguably to more effect, in a sensory politics of bodily affinities to specific lived-in habitats and the visceral experiences these are said to afford (cf. Fennell, 2011). Hence, a crucial part of what makes these up-to-date machiya an appropriate form of eco-housing, I was told repeatedly by architects and administrators alike, is the way these buildings are adapted to the local, as opposed to the global, climate. Indeed, allowing cool breezes to circulate through the house during hot and humid summers constitutes the core design feature of these houses – contrasting with what is, otherwise, an urban landscape of air-conditioned indoor spaces.

To summarize, my historical analysis so far suggests that new eco-machiya architectural forms have come to seem appropriate in Kyoto through a series of collective trials and controversies across scales of recent urban change. Through these trials, a shared sense of desirable townscape has gradually emerged and gained legal and civic-political stability. This politics of shared attachments, I argue, has given rise to specific compromises of market, domestic, and green worth embedded in the public justifications of the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership as an urban learning forum. Inside this forum and its material practices, however, tensions still tend to replicate, necessitating new forms of adjustment. As I aim to show in the next section, in moving closer to the politics of eco-machiya design, this is true not least for the way this intermediary object afford bodily senses of what it means to dwell ‘ecologically’ in the city.

In 2009, a local Kyoto newspaper carried a page-wide commercial, showing the interior garden of a renovated machiya house with the following text on top: ‘Traditional living in Kyoto was eco-living.’ Within a single image, this commercial encapsulated the sense in which traditional wooden houses, and their ‘everyday aesthetics’ of dwelling in the city (Saito, 2007), have increasingly been infused with new ecological sensibilities over recent years. According to surveys carried out among members of civic machiya associations in the early 2000s (Brumann, 2009), Kyoto citizens tend to appreciate these houses in part for their ‘natural’ qualities: the wooden materials, the flow of fresh air, and the bodily sense of changing seasons afforded by small interior gardens are seen to create rare points of intimate and embodied attachment to nature within the city. Even if tainted by legacies of fire and earthquake disasters, as well as a somewhat nostalgic image, wooden machiya buildings thus still exert attractive powers as common-places in Kyoto, associated by many with personal stories of urban change over the years (Nakamura, 2008).

As Thévenot (2015) argues, the notion of commonality in the plural becomes especially pertinent in situations, such as those of environmental conflict, where personal affinities to common-places play an important, but often publicly unacknowledged role. This, in many ways, describes the overall situation of eco-machiya design work in Kyoto. As in other cases, ‘ecology’ has here come to be configured mainly through a process of governance by standards (Thévenot, 2009), reliant on technical forms of expert knowledge and implicitly assuming the grammar of individual choice among publicly standardized and certified ‘options’ (or stakes). This, as noted, is how the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership officially works: having established technical and formal criteria of administrative evaluation, home-makers and future residents may now aspire to certification as eco-machiya, with attendant (modest) local government subsidies. As such, houses enter into individual family planning, allowing for forms of calculation that render the desire for ecologically sound dwelling compatible with budget concerns.

The extent to which these standardization efforts will prove successful remains so far uncertain; less than 25 certified eco-machiya had been sold by 2013, a figure slightly below official expectations. However, following Thévenot, what seems certain is that ongoing eco-machiya ‘vernacular-making’ (Moore & Karvonen, 2008) in Kyoto built environments will rely for its effects on a more diverse set of personal attachments to material ecologies than what official standards take into account. This is true not least, my analysis will suggest, in terms of how far these new spaces prove accommodating to, and gradually reshape, existing sensibilities and embodied capacities for personal affinities to those ‘natural’ elements of wooden machiya houses that help constitute them as Kyoto common-places. In what follows, I thus explore how tensions and accommodations arise around this proximate and embodied politics of urban-ecological design, in terms of how personal attachments to the machiya form and its various ‘natural’ qualities come to be configured and composed vis-à-vis other layers of commonality in the plural.

When talking to housing policy officials in Kyoto about the heisei no kyō-machiya project, they explained to me that ‘the most important thing in the project is the territory in-between the inside (uchi) and the outside (soto) of the house’. As scholars of Japanese culture have long shown (e.g. Isozaki, 2006), these terms work as widely recognized symbolic markers of ‘Japan-ness’ in architecture. Invoking them in this Kyoto context, it seemed, served a double scaling purpose for the local administration. On the one hand, when reproduced in various visual and textual material, it allowed Kyoto officials to evoke a sense of global contrast, whereby their efforts would stand out from current ‘Western’ obsessions with highly insulated forms of energy-efficient architecture. On the other hand, conversely, it would anchor ongoing collective design efforts in a set of sensibilities, according to which kyō-machiya houses – famous colloquially for their unimpeded air circulation (i.e. draft), making them seem ‘breathing’ or ‘living’ entities (ikimono) (Brumann, 2009) – would, for that very reason, be a locally adapted form of eco-housing.

Contrary to historical machiya, however, these new eco-machiya will allow its residents greater influence over such circulating winds, whether during hot and humid summers or during cold and snowy winters. Via a so-called ‘environmental adjustment space’ (kankyō chōsei kūkan), basically a set of sliding doors in each end of the house, residents will be able to adjust indoor climates and temperatures according to their bodily sense of comfort. Moreover, as hybrids of ‘tradition’ and ‘technology’, the new eco-machiya – in their standard, marketable, pre-fabricated versions – also come equipped with new state-of-the-art energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, including semi-automated air-conditioning. This mixture of winds, part natural and part technical, will shape the houses as ambient spaces for their residents. At the same time, it makes claims and calculations around the ‘low-energy’ status of these houses quite difficult to stabilize, as much will depend on how they are actually inhabited and used.

Indeed, such ambiguities around bodily comforts, cooling winds, and their mutual accommodations create tensions at the level of the politics of housing design. According to Takahara Okamoto, an architect involved in historical kyō-machiya renovations and now serving as eco-machiya design consultant, carpenters in Kyoto used to not care much for insulating their houses. Reflecting this history, he adds, ‘the best thing will be not to use any energy. It is not a low-energy house, but a no-energy house. The notion of eco-house does not mean much in Kyoto’. On cold days, Takahara and others would stress, people should simply put on more clothes, not turn on the air-condition for heating. To others in the project, and certainly to commercial home-makers, such a sensory politics would condemn the machiya form as a relic of the past. These tensions, in short, show not only how the politics of design shape visceral sensations in ways that prove more or less accommodating to a personal sense of feeling at ease in habituated milieus (Thévenot, 2007). At stake, more importantly, is a politics of shared attachments to the machiya form itself as a historical entity, in terms of how winds are made to mediate ecological relations of body, house, city, and world in ways apprehended as appropriate to shared local experiences.

Apart from winds, sunlight constitutes another micro-climatic element with which the new eco-machiya will have to be coordinated; and in this respect as well, ecological sensibilities are mediated via more-or-less common-place architectural forms. According to the design and planning provisions developed in the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, the eaves (hisashi) extending from the lower parts of the roof and the partly open verandas facing the inner garden (engawa) – both characteristic of traditional machiya architecture – will now take on new ecological functionalities as techniques of passive solar heating and shading. Hence, while protecting against strong sunlight during summers, the eaves and verandas will still allow for the sun to warm up interior spaces during cold winters. Moreover, as the architects and carpenter would stress, these comfortable in-between spaces serve to open up the house to the wider world: onto nature's changing views, at one end, and onto the wider urban community at the other.

Meanwhile, however, sunlight is not simply a concern for its sensory qualities. Via technologies of solar water heating and solar panels for electricity, the new eco-machiya also harvest sunlight energies and puts them to use within wider, decentralized urban infrastructures. As such, these hybrid houses come to serve as nodes in new calculative efforts and techniques, meant to instantiate and verify forms of low-carbon economies between citizens, businesses, and local government. With the city of Kyoto hosting the headquarters of Kyocera, one of the world's leading multinational solar panel producers, the local government has for some time subsidized the instalment of rooftop solar panels across public facilities and residential housing. The effects of this policy is visible on rooftops all over the city. In this respect, then, to paraphrase Thévenot (2014b), the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership thus provides yet another avenue within which to promote this liberal policy option, and to make it available for individual choice.

This strategy, however, meets with some concern within the partnership, as well as in wider Kyoto publics, calling for a requalification of solar panels as matters of the common good. While environmentally friendly (green worth), the colours and textures of solar panel technologies, some civic opponents argue, now clash with stricter townscape regulations pertaining to the ‘aesthetic areas’ of inner-city Kyoto, ruining what is taken to be the city's traditional rooftop scenery (domestic worth). Indeed, the local government has had to accommodate such public criticism by modifying the regulations, in order to keep promoting solar panel uptake (Brumann, 2012a). Within the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, similar tensions also manifest in a politics of shared attachments to traditional rooftop architectures, with carpenters in particular critical of solar panels. According to one architect involved, what needs to happen is for some producer to invent and market a machiya-adopted form of solar panels. This compromise, he suggests, would allow technology, economy, and aesthetics to merge in a shared townscape cosmogram.

Wood, perhaps more than anything, is what gives material support to the sense in which particular forms of traditional Japanese architecture, such as kyō-machiya, has come to enjoy the status of cultural common-places (Sandrisser, 2007). Throughout the twentieth century, moreover, this building material has been subject to recurring attempts to (re-)define the very essence of ‘Japan-ness’ in architecture (Isozaki, 2006). While legally excluded from Japanese urban centers following the traumas of war-time fires, over the past decade, wood is now being re-appropriated within building projects throughout Japan, aligned to a new imaginary of environmental sustainability. In Kyoto as well, nuances and skills of how to stitch together wooden materials is at the core of those embodied and collective processes, whereby machiya fans make themselves appreciate this architectural form. Nevertheless, wooden materials also prove especially testing to the politics of shared attachments enacted around new eco-machiya designs.

At the level of symbolic politics, wood arguably serves as the great connector of the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, bridging across its various tensions between the civic groups, professionals, businesses, and local administrators. Wood, all at once, is tradition and technology; city and nature; past and future. For this narrative to gain material traction, however, it requires heavy techno-scientific investments in new earthquake-proofing standards, as well as attempts to redirect regionally dispersed timber markets. With cheap timber flowing into urban Japan from throughout Southeast Asia in large quantities, tropical rain forest destruction has been part of local environmental concern since the 1990s. As part of its climate policy strategies, the city of Kyoto now seeks to redirect market flows towards those (under-utilized) industrial forests making up much of the city's surroundings – and the new eco-machiya serves as vehicle to promote such a wider reconnection of localized wood ecologies and economies.

In quite tangible ways, then, the wood utilized in new eco-machiya houses thus embody the various tensions of, and attempts to compose, the layered commonalities of the urban setting. Like other features of the house, the wooden material is subject to new certification schemes of the city administration, pre-formatting local timber as a consumer option. When qualified as an object of the common good, however, such timber relies on fragile work of compromising among market and green forms of worth. According to the architects, for instance, Kyoto citizens will not prove willing to pay the extra cost of local timber. Meanwhile, to many participants, the attractions of wood continue to lie elsewhere, much closer to personal affinities: to the carpenters I met, it inheres in the tactile qualities of wood; to future residents, presumably, it will reside as much in the smells, touch, and look of different wood sources. In the aesthetic cosmopolitics of eco-building in Kyoto, in short, wood is at once what stabilizes attachments – and what has to absorb the various tensions arising from its own testing art of composition.

This article has explored the relation of built form to urban concerns, by way of a case study into collective efforts underway in the Japanese city of Kyoto to reposition a vernacular style of wooden townhouses within the emerging moral-political geographies of climate change and urban sustainability, mediating in-between global issues and proximate concerns in the urban community. Invoking recent work in French pragmatic sociology, I interpret this relation as a politics of shared attachments, played out through collective trials and testing across technological, political, and aesthetic investments. I argue that shared attachments to certain desirable townscapes, built up over years of collective, embodied and reflexive taste-making processes, account for the way a particular style of machiya eco-house has come to achieve relative stability as a locally appropriate architectural form. At the same time, similar attachments account for the way tensions tend to reproduce within design work, played out as an embodied politics of ecological sensibilities, in terms of how ‘natural’ qualities of the machiya form – mediated through winds, sunlight and wooden materials – afford specific senses of sustainable dwelling.

Broadly speaking, I believe these observations resonate with, while also contributing to, recent debates on architectures, built environments, and other material infrastructures, occurring across sociology, urban studies, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Most immediately, they follow in the footsteps of recent work on the politics of infrastructures (Fennell, 2011; Harvey, 2010; Larkin, 2013) that call attention to how processes of infrastructural transformation, including present-day ecological interventions, bring out questions of aesthetic form, at the intersections of contested material and symbolic assemblages. In Kyoto, as elsewhere, the built environment shape much of the ambient conditions of everyday life and urban dwelling. Here, following anthropologist Strathern (2004), I suggest that aesthetics – understood as a relational, collective, and civic-political category for conventions of expressive form – is crucial for analyzing how particular architectures and material townscapes become capable of eliciting shared senses of appropriateness within a composite urban community.

In this context, I argue, the pragmatic sociologies of Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion, and Laurent Thévenot allow – when read together, but not conflated – for a solid analysis of those open-ended collective trials whereby shared attachments to material urban forms may gradually emerge and stabilize. Here, following Hennion in particular, the notion of attachment points to a specific modality of relating to material forms, one centered on shared and embodied taste-making, care, and appreciation – or what, in the language of Thévenot, we may think of as commonality based on personal affinities to common-places. As such, combining these pragmatic sociologies allow the analyst to take seriously how such attachments to common-places are often at stake in urban controversies; without, on the other hand, relying on too strong assumptions about ‘tradition’ and its ‘reinvention’ (Brumann, 2009). This seems important, not least, in the field of sustainable architecture, which tend to rely on too static notions of what constitutes certain building forms as ‘vernacular’ and rooted in ‘context’ (Moore & Karvonen, 2008). Pragmatic sociology insists instead that vernacular architectures, too, are evolving cultural and aesthetic forms, subject to the ebb and flow of urban civic-political concerns.

Urban ecologies emerge in a nexus of situated and transnational assemblages; assemblages which have to be composed, as Latour rightly argues, into place-based architectural cosmograms of human, technological, and natural relations (Latour & Yaneva, 2008). At more fine-grained conceptual levels, however, the study of architectural forms and the making of desirable townscapes leads, I suggest, to a certain reassessment of the limited role afforded to familiar and bodily attachments in this Latourian cosmopolitics. In the sense of experience as ordinary and embodied sensitivity found in the pragmatism of John Dewey, aesthetics and politics are deeply entwined in how urban landscapes come to be qualified and valued as places of dwelling (Blanc, 2013; Saito, 2007). Indeed, one key argument throughout this article has been that the works of Hennion and Thévenot, in their complementary ways, afford a better appreciation of this aesthetic cosmopolitics. By casting ‘dwelling’ as a question of familiar engagements with and personal affinities to material common-places, and by elaborating how these attachments have to be composed vis-à-vis other public tensions, Thévenot in particular allows for a more nuanced appreciation of the embodied concerns at stake in urban-ecological politics.

In the end, then, pragmatic sociology has much to offer, I contend, when it comes to analyzing how ecological concerns nowadays impinge more strongly on the urban fabric, manifesting in new forms of collective engagement, concern, and care for specific urban environments, built and otherwise (cf. Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Thévenot, 2014a). Architectural projects, such as the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership in Kyoto, provide here one prism onto the wider scales of urban transformation at stake in this urban-ecological (cosmo-)politics worldwide. These processes, by definition, entail both a questioning of existing socio-material relations, and a collective search for new, more appropriate, more desirable, and more sustainable arrangements. Pragmatic sociology, I have suggested, is well placed to grasp this plurality of civic-political engagements. Hence, rather than erasing the tensions inherent in relations of cultural form to political concern, pragmatic sociology allows us to remain suspended, equally attuned to new critical trials and to new equipment for stabilizing attachments in common. This, it seems to me, is one way of staying true to architectural forms which, like the new eco-machiya in Kyoto, rely for their world-making ambitions on a capacity to exert their own effects of collective persuasion.

The author wants to thank staff at the Housing Policy Office of Kyoto Municipality, as well as other participants in the heisei no kyō-machiya partnership, for generously granting their time and engagements towards this research. Participants in the Environmental Infrastructures workshop in Tokyo, May 2014, provided valuable feedback on a draft version of the manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.