The place where we live—and where we are present
In Hungarian, there are two words often confused due to their similar sounds: “helyiség” (meaning a room or indoor space) and “helység” (meaning a locality or settlement). The difference is just a single letter, “i”. To put it simply, the former refers to an office, a classroom, or our own living room, while the latter refers to a community—perhaps the very village or town we call home. This immediately raises a question: how distinct or distant are these two concepts—the “rooms” and the “locality,” the inner and outer spaces where we lead our lives? Today, the broader space we inhabit often means little more than the road leading to our house. We open the gate with a remote from the car and only step out once we are safely inside. But is it right that these two spaces remain so detached? Is it right for our indoor spaces to remain so completely closed, never opening up to the community, leaving us absent from the world outside our walls?
Once, there was a bench in front of the house…
…serving as a point of connection between two worlds, the inner and the outer. In the evenings, people would sit outside and engage in what we would now call a “real-life reality show”: watching the familiar faces of the street, the coming and going of community members, like a live, unscripted series where the viewers also shared their opinions with the “participants.” They “chatted” and “networked,” to use modern terms. What happens in the real world matters to us. We feel that live speech, body language, and real-world interaction cannot be replaced by any virtual image. We feel a responsibility for the place where we live—for us, this is the essence and meaning of “The Place for Everyone.”
