Seasonal homes, aging futures, and the memory of other ways of living.

Image: Old Japanese matchbox.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow take apart one of the stories we’ve come to accept almost without question: that private property, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and formal institutions, and even the way we imagine cities and houses, emerged naturally and inevitably with the rise of agriculture.

Drawing on archaeological and anthropological research, they show a much messier and more interesting picture. Forms of social complexity and urban life appear far earlier than we tend to assume, including among some hunter-gatherer societies. At the same time, many agricultural communities organized themselves without fixed hierarchies or private property as a central principle.

What struck me most was their observation that, in both contexts, people often used settlements seasonally rather than permanently. Homes and proto-cities were inhabited for a time, then left, with social organization itself shifting as seasons changed. Human societies, it turns out, have long experimented with how, and for how long, we live together in one place.

During the same week I was reading The Dawn of Everything, I unexpectedly came across a book on my shelf that I didn’t know we owned: Filosofia della casa by Emanuele Coccia. At the end of a chapter titled Armadi (Wardrobes), Coccia reflects:

"Dovremmo imparare ad abolire l'idea di abitare in un'unica casa, e dovremmo scambiarci le case come ci scambiamo i vestiti, entrare ognuno nelle case degli altri un po' come si entra negli abiti degli altri. In fondo la casa del futuro dovrebbe somigliare a una sorta di estensione e radicalizzazione della logica incarnata in Airbnb. Dovremmo cambiare casa a ogni stagione, proprio come abbiamo bisogno di farlo con i nostri vestiti.”

“We should learn to abolish the idea of living in a single home. We should exchange houses the way we exchange clothes, entering each other’s homes much as we enter each other’s garments. In the end, the home of the future should resemble a radical extension of the logic embodied by Airbnb. We should change homes with every season, just as we need to change our clothes.” *

Arriving at a similar idea through such different intellectual paths genuinely moved me.

Could we live in our homes temporarily?

Not as transients, but as inhabitants who know a place for now, who tend to it, mark it, make it home, knowing we'll leave when seasons shift. What would that kind of dwelling feel like? How would it change the way we care for places, form attachments, and accumulate belongings?

And what would need to change to make that possible? What kinds of economies, ecologies, and social hierarchies would this require?

It would require rethinking property not as fixed ownership, but as circulation. Care not as containment, but as networks that move with people. Cities not as stable containers, but understood as rhythmic systems.

What if we imagined at least some older adults of the future as early adopters of this model?

The seeds of this already exist. People swap apartments with close friends for a few weeks. They move in temporarily to care for plants and pets during extended trips. Well-established retirees in Europe already migrate seasonally, following warmth, family, or simply preference.

There are environments explicitly designed for circulation: modular research stations like Halley VI in Antarctica, where temporary inhabitation isn't a compromise but a design principle. Scientists rotate through, dwelling intentionally for a season before others arrive. The architecture assumes movement.

What if we built on these practices rather than treating them as exceptions?

Imagine cities organized around circulation rather than permanence. Intergenerational neighborhoods where student housing, family apartments, and residences for older adults are not fixed silos, but elements of a shared urban infrastructure that shifts with the seasons.

Care services, mobility systems, and public spaces would adapt accordingly, expanding or contracting as populations move, allowing cities to regenerate socially, ecologically, and economically without relying on constant new construction. Older adults would not retreat from urban life, but actively participate in sustaining it, contributing time, knowledge, and presence.

In this context, housing would no longer function solely as a private asset, but as part of a regenerative system, one that supports care, identity, territory, and belonging across different life stages.

The question I hear at conferences. ”What housing models should we design for older adults?” assumes a singular answer for a diverse population. For healthy, mobile older adults, especially, it assumes permanence when we might need to be designing for circulation. It seeks a single solution when we might need many, shifting with seasons and circumstances.

Perhaps the answer is not found in more statistics, nor in asking AI chatbots for projections. Perhaps we need to move closer to what might be called "useless knowledge."

Anthropology, archaeology, and philosophy help us recover ways of living we have already tested and forgotten. They do not offer ready-made solutions, but something more valuable: a way to reorient imagination, away from abstract projections and toward futures grounded in lived, remembered experience.

*Note: this is my own translation of the original text in Italian.