The Places That Unravel Us

Where we live shapes how we hope.

Hi, I’m Patricia Hurducaș, a Romanian writer and urban explorer currently living in The Hague. I write about our relationship with places, imagination, and life abroad, in my newsletter, The Flâneurs Project.

“When we first moved into the apartment, the view’s insistence caught me off guard. It was as if the place – the house – was not only delivering me a project – this book – but was also giving me advice. It seemed to suggest that the crisis in which I found myself, if harnessed in the right way, could become an opportunity for redefinition.”

Kirsty Bell, The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin

At a certain point in a layered personal crisis, we begin to see omens and symbols everywhere, whether we want to or not.

When I arrived in The Hague almost three years ago, in the midst of a chaotic year-long sabbatical and a series of solely gut-inspired decisions, I too saw omens, or at least life-giving coincidences, at every corner. I was seeking them faithfully, so they sought me back in return.

I sometimes, honestly and half-jokingly, explain that my journey to this city began when I realised that staying long-term in the hastily found apartment on Rheinsberger Straße in Berlin would slowly but surely drag me into a pit of deep unhappiness. I remember an existential moment in the bathtub, surveying the old, grimy surroundings, knowing that, as a renter, I couldn’t do much to change anything—except leave, as soon as possible. Again.

The apartment was in one of Berlin Mitte’s prime locations, just steps from my previous pre-pandemic home. But the neighborhood couldn’t compensate for the state of the place: for nearly €1,800 per month, we got furnished rooms filled with old, dirty, mostly broken down furniture, and a locked “Oscar” room where the landlords stored their belongings, in case they ever returned to live in Berlin from Spain. You might rightly ask why we accepted such a deal. But anyone who’s hunted for housing in Berlin knows the market’s truth: a sometimes year-long search, and fierce competition.

For immigrants, the ongoing quest for a good home protects both imagination and dignity, especially when we land in places we can’t easily leave behind. I’ve never stopped believing that where we live shapes our outlook on life and our sense of self, and that wanting a safe, inspiring space that supports both our well-being and imagination is a fundamental human need.

There’s always been a quiet, uncomfortable guilt when I speak about this, as if wanting a beautiful, clean, and inspiring home were a wild request. Yet out of necessity, and sometimes urgency, I’ve often paid more than I should have for places that lacked some, or most, of those things. I’ve also been lucky at times, especially in Switzerland, where I lived near the mountains in a house that improved with time rather than decayed. In that case, the landlord lived just above us; as a Swiss homeowner, he too was directly affected by the home’s functionality and beauty.

After conversations with others in similar situations, people who rent or bought homes and moved across countries, I can now more confidently assert this: the spaces we live in shape how we think and hope.

The paper Psychological Needs in the Built Environment is one of the few that explores how the built environment intersects with our psychological well-being, particularly through aspects such as privacy, biophilia, clutter, and colour temperature. These elements, when present, help satisfy fundamental needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

In the essay The Camping Cure Jill Neimark highlights how environmental illness can push individuals to redefine “home” and seek refuge beyond conventional walls. She describes how debilitating multiple chemical sensitivities in her rent-stabilized, mold-infested high-rise in New York drove her to abandon indoor life and seek relief by sleeping under the open sky:

“By the time the renovation was complete, my sanctuary was infested with mold and probably strange bacteria; back in the 1930s, they insulated between floors with rock wool, which holds an astounding amount of moisture and can grow mold and bacteria after flooding. I was bedridden, too ill to ride the elevator down one floor and walk across the lobby to get my mail.”

While camping as a cure for indoor sickness might not be a long-term solution for most, it can serve as a starting point for a deeper discussion: what should we demand of the places we live in, and why should we never settle, long-term, for something that drains our vitality, or compromises our imagination?

After the bathtub revelation and a binding commitment to leave that apartment behind, exhausted, yet full of the hope, I came across The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin. As with omens, or self-made metaphors, books also tend to find us when we are ready to find them. Throughout the book, Kirsty Bell practices what she calls “radical close readings” of the view from her window, the canal’s water, and Berlin’s architecture, to uncover “messages” in everyday details.

Her personal life, and the end of her marriage, were symbolically mapped onto the large leak destroying her apartment, leading her to the conclusion that the “house was mourning”:

“Sometimes when water is flowing it means the house is mourning. There is an excess of emotion that needs to be expelled. … The image that formed on the surface of the pool of water did not just reflect a broken home, it also reflected the house itself.”

I think it’s only human to try to map our emotions onto the built environment, to seek a physical symbol for an idea, a decision, a feeling, just within reach. When things come to an end, the house, the city, even the country can seem to expel us, to our quiet relief.

And yet, no matter how bad things get, if we still want to stay, we should keep demanding from the place what we know we need, because of the understanding that the long-term cost of not doing so is simply too high.

A few years later, I now find myself living in a newly built high-rise with water damage that has remained unresolved for over a year. Each month, technical inspectors arrive to investigate the source of the problem, muttering “bizar” in Dutch, as if part of an absurd theatre script, only to leave once again, baffled and without answers.

There’s no symbol I want or need to assign to the leakage. Every morning, I try to embrace the stunning views more than the peeling wooden floors. But I also know this: if I ever have another gut-wrenching realisation, I’ll know when it’s time to move on. Hope and vitality are here to stay.

Vojo Stanić: Piazza, 2003

Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome your stories.

Patricia