d in these buildings like the columns of sandwiches at an automat. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move inö (1987, p. 330).
Gaston Bachelard, who supposedly went searching in Paris for the types of qualities in buildings that would allow them to be labelled as endowed with ôrootsö and a sense of ôcosmicityö (or cosmi-city), found that in ôParis there are no houses, and the inhabitants à live in superimposed boxesö (1994, p. 26). As for Heidegger, he went a step further and expressed his concern for the type of homelessness or rootlessness during that period that he called ômetaphysicalö in his own definitional use of that word, bringing the meta- and the ûphysical into the realm of the world rather than in some abstract plane of processed thinking (1971). According to Jonsson (1996): ô[A]ll of these thinkers shared a view of the modern city as a realm of alienation. For many of them, urban modernity became the symbol of the process by which individual identities are eras
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