SIGNS OF DISTINCTION

The housing unit is thus important for the representation of the self and for showing the family's distinction. As “active users,” people have employed various strategies that have transformed the standardized spaces into personalized homes and diversified the homogenous housing project. These strategies localize change in durable forms so that it is easy for the eye to observe and measure the financial ability of the housing unit's occupants. At the relocation time, all the apartments were identical in the shape and division of space when the people moved to them. They did not manifest the socioeconomic differences between the people. For instance, several ex-tenants and ex–house owners moved to apartments similar in size, number of rooms, design, and location. This similarity made it crucial for financially capable families to signal their social distinction through other means. In addition to consumer goods such as

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VCRs and color TVs, families with sufficient resources introduced various physical changes to the modern apartment to signal their distinction. Most of these changes were marked by their high cost, afforded only by those with relatively high incomes, often families with male relatives working in the Gulf. The residents of each block examine changes that other families have introduced to their physical structure of the housing units and select what is suitable given their budgets, planned activities, and the messages that they would like these units to embody.

These physical changes introduced to the individual unit include adding balconies, removing and adding walls to expand the living room or to separate it more from the kitchen, adding windows and doors, rearranging and replacing the old washbasin with a ceramic one, renewing sewage connections and replacing the old toilet with a porcelain one or with a flush toilet, remodeling the kitchen and adding wood cabinets, installing water heaters, and repainting the apartment using oil paint.^[11] Here, it is meaningful to note that people use the word hadad or demolition to describe many of these changes. This word indicates that people saw certain aspects of the internal design of the apartment as so unfitting for their needs that they had to be destroyed. Before and after “we demolished” become two distinct stages in the history of the apartment and the life of the family in the unit. People also refer to the apartment that has been changed as muwaddaba (arranged), and its price increases substantially compared to other apartments of the same size but without the same changes. Due to the complexity and diversity of these changes, I will discuss as an example the changes introduced to the balcony, which are the most common and visible to the public and express the socioeconomic status of the family.