Insight #1
According to common sense, choices regarding style and furnishing merely result from the taste and aesthetic affinities of people. But the tastes in terms of planning are rather a reflection of their personal history: social and professional background, love and family history... They will build perceptions, ambitions and thus be reflected into different lifestyles. Those lessons come from our report on the building of living environments.
Planning one’s living environment is at the crossroads of several social processes that constrain as much as they help individuals to formulate expectations. Choices and decisions of planning are inseparable from the dynamics of love and their norms, but also from the social trajectories of people. The living environment is thus at the heart of contradictory phenomenon and injunctions, to which individuals must conform and sometimes resist to simply live.
The field study was conducted through detailed observations and semi-directive interviews with a panel of fifteen people. This panel was constituted by contrasting profiles, with strong differences in terms of age and life cycle, level of income and wealth, marital status and area of residence.