Spatial-Existential Authenticity and Second Homes

It is possible to use Thirdspace to construct the theoretical framework to establish, what can be called, the spatial-existential authenticity. Following Soja, this comes in two interconnected trialectics: spatial-temporal trialectics and socio-spatial trialectics.

Spatial-temporal

‘Home’ is ordinary, ‘second’ is away, thus second homes deconstructs the regular assumption about ‘home’ being ordinary daily routine, and ‘away’ as extraordinary experience. Visiting a second home can sometimes be living an ordinary life in an extraordinary setting (e.g. staying in an exotic house with a usual lifestyle), or living an extraordinary life in an ordinary setting (e.g. living in a normal apartment can still live an extraordinary lifestyle), or living an extraordinary life in an extraordinary setting (e.g. staying in an isolated island house where one’s lifestyle is inevitably different). Coming back home, for regular tourists, according to Steiner and Reisinger (2006), means to return to the ordinary settings with a refreshed feeling gained through something extraordinary. However, for those who return from their second homes, the gap between ordinary and extraordinary is somewhat blurred, depending on how often they visit and how long they stay. Therefore, existential authenticity needs to take consideration from a time-space perspective.

Nostalgia is best to exhibit such linkage. The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning ‘return home’ and algia ‘longing’ (Boym, 2008). Nostalgia can be interpreted as the displaced person’s longing for a home that is no longer present or never existed.

Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. In relations to authenticity, the sentiment of nostalgia plays a significant part because the fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future (Boym, 2008).

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Following these thoughts, Boorstin’s objective authenticity can also be understood as past authenticity because it concerns originality and historicity of touring objects or events.

MacCannell’s constructive authenticity can be termed as present-past authenticity because it argues that tourism has become a stage to present the originality and historicity to the superficial, modern tourists. Existential authenticity can be termed as future-past authenticity.

Koselleck (1985) suggests that it is important to realise that each present once was a future that has passed, hence the term future-past. Since modernity dramatically increased the speed of changes in our society, expectations of the future have also increased (Müller and Hoogendoorn, 2013). This is because individuals now have realised that the future conditions have an increasing impact on their remaining lifespan.

In the realm of second-home research, nostalgia is a popular theme to analyse tourist motivation. For example, Dias, Correia & Lopez (2015) trace data from a UK-based second home rental website and discover that owners selectively apply their sense of place to the advertisements, along side descriptions of hospitality and house facilities. Perhaps a more interesting research is Walters’ (2014) discourse analysis on New Zealand second home owners. While the media and academia have increasingly labelled ownership of the traditional second home and the affiliated lifestyle as the antithesis of luxury, Walter (2004) find that the owners consider the ‘rustic’ lifestyle in the rural area as an article of luxury. The way of eating, playing and relaxing contains a strong sense of nostalgia because they are no longer accessible in an urban life.

Nostalgia , the disease of an afflicted imagination incapacitated the body (Boym, 2008, p.4).

The case of the Aqua is where imagination meets the body. On one hand, tourists seek the lost quality of life via the geographic quality and facilities at the Aqua. For example, when air pollution and traffic jams become issues concerning people’s health, visitors find the Aqua fresh and quite. Such opposition reminds them the lifestyle that they once had, before the rapid modernisation process took place in China. On the other hand, visitors turned into second-home buyers when they realise a hidden dream reflecting a potential lifestyle that they never had in the past or present. This dream is often culturally shaped with a strong influence from the media, family and friends. Indeed, the idea of living in a house with a private garden, eating organic and slow processed food, and participating in exotic sports such as golfing and horse-riding is a metaphor of the imagined lifestyle from Europe, Austrailia

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or North America. Owning a house at the Aqua means that owners could have the chance to realise a slice of the imagined lifestyle. Hence, it is almost reverse approach of Ed Said’s Orientalism, when the westerners formulate a set of culturally shaped nostalgia that was never there in real life.

Current thinking on existential authenticity misses the opportunity to analyse how the state of Being might be activated by spatiality in addition to tourist experience and activities (Rickly-Boyd, 2013). Spatial-existential authenticity also acknowledges the complex relationships between socially produced space and the authentic self.

On a temporal sense, the second homes are heterotopia sites when they are fully lived by the actors. This is when the actors stay at the second home (spatial practice) and realise that they are away from the home (conceive space). As such, the boundaries between the home and the second home rests in time (on holidays) and space (away from the everyday). Being heterotopia, the space of the second home is the reflection of one’s interpretation of the utopia which could be labelled as the destination for ‘lifestyle mobility’ (Cohen et al., 2015).

The sun, sand, beach, good weather, tasty food, and exotic culture in mass tourism equalises the rural beauty, fresh air and the suburban fortress that obstruct the everyday chaos in second homes. Indeed, the experience of second homes can activate one’s existential authenticity; but it is not possible without the second homes being heterotopia sites at the first place.

Second homes are limbotopia sites when they are not fully lived. This is when the physical dwelling and the ideal of it both remain but not combined. For example, when the actors are back to their everyday life and their second homes are left empty. The boundaries between the home and the second home become ‘restless’ in time (alienated everyday modern life) and space (geographically apart from the actors). Thus, existential authenticity can only be activated while owners are presence at their second homes.

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Socio-Spatiality of Second Homes and Existential Authenticity

In the socio-spatial dialectics, the key to understand spatial-existential authenticity is that space is socially produced and therefore can be socially changed.

It is not irregular to come across the strange spaces that Soja calls the ‘interstitial hyperreality’.

In between fact and fiction, people produce the ‘scamscapes’ – a constructed geography filled with trickery, misrepresentation, and often innovative forms of fraud, like the savings and loan fiasco of the early 1990s, perpetrated by people who genuinely believed that what they were doing was not only acceptable but virtuous (Soja, 2014). More global in its impact was Hollywood, USA’s fulsome dream machine, pouring out realistic fakes that entertained nearly everyone on earth (Soja, 2014). This observation echoes what Baudrillard (1988) calls the production of ‘hyperreality’ and the ‘precession of simulacra’ (1991) by which he meant that simulations of the real are rapidly replacing reality itself. At first, there was the material world which then abstracts into maps.

Place-making in the conventional way has now been turned around: the real material world seems to melt into its never completely accurate representations. In other words, now it is the map that precedes the territory (Soja, 2014). This is the case with Disneyland, where the tourist experience of the land is perceived and conceived by the maps rather than the geography.

Although Soja makes these observations based on Los Angeles and its urban changes in the past four decades, it can be argued that elsewhere in the world urbanisation happened in a similar fashion as in L.A. For example, the places like the Thames Town and The Aqua now flourished not only in China, but also across the world. It is increasingly difficult to judge the authenticity of spaces from the objective or constructive approaches because they have become juxtaposes of the real and the imagined. For example, having an entire Chinese town built in a British style, and naming the streets and shops in it ‘Piccadilly Road’ and ‘the Windsor’, is as confusing as talking to a performed Micky Mouse in Disneyland.

In the case of the Thames Town, the spatiality of the site can be classified as an apotopia since the lived experience of the project does not correspond to its purpose. The Thames Town was planned and built as the frontier of the state’s ambition for driving rural economics with the development of the new town (Shen and Wu, 2012b). The British image of the place survives

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among the limited number of tourists who come to take wedding photography but not among the community who were supposed to migrate there, or those who were forced out from local communities. To almost all its participants, the image of the Thames Town is alienated and in-authentic not because all the buildings are designed in a British fashion and given exotic names, but because the spatial practice of the site does not thaw its conceived image and hence the space is not fully lived.

By contrast, in a gated communities in China, the excessive usage of western-style architectural forms is interpreted as the catalyst for a sense of pride and a representation of personal wealth (Wu, 2010). Living in such an environment, whether permanently or seasonally, activates the participant’s authentic self. In other words, the key to unleash the catalyst power of space on existential authenticity is neither the architectural style nor the nature of the dwelling as first or second homes. Rather, it is the socially produced cognitive that allows the physical and experiential space to activate the existential self.

For The Aqua, the question to ask is not whether it is authentic or whether the actors see it as authentic or not. Because space is socially produced (Lefebvre, 1991), and space is as important a factor as history and social (Soja, 1996), the key to understand the existential authenticity associated with The Aqua is to understand how the space is socially produced.

Different actors construct existential authenticity differently, and as a result, they stood different positions in the process of place-making. The task of the thesis is to find out how diverse groups of actors have played their power to shape the Aqua and how the Aqua has shaped their self identity. Thus, the socio-spatial form offers a great tool for analysis.

Existential authenticity, without a sense of space, fails to grasp the flavours of a second home because the problematic assumption of being elsewhere is essential to activate one’s existential authenticity (Shepherd, 2015). Spatial-existential authenticity potentially overcomes these issues in two ways: by understanding how the space of second homes is socially produced, it is now possible to understand how the space activate one’s existential authenticity; reversely, by understanding one’s perception of authenticity, it is possible to understand why they choose to participate in place-making in a particular way and what impact their participation might address.

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