Another day spent enclosed in my house in the vicinity of my neighbourhood.　Confined by the walls of my one-bedroom apartment, I sense the city’s expansive radius slowly shrink, much like a shrivelling balloon.  

At that moment, I pick up architect Hideyuki Nakayama’s 1/1000000000. Nakayama reflects on a particular request made by a couple he was designing a small country cottage for. They asked for a fence that would keep the wildlife out and protect the produce in their garden. But instead of constructing a fence in the exteriors of the house, he built the garden in the interiors of the cottage.

“In the morning, the husband goes out into the garden to collect eggs. While some wild creature gazes on wistfully from beyond one of the windows, he passes the eggs to his wife through another window, then picks up some fallen fruit. Through the windows, surrounding the oval garden, both the lady of the house and the creature in the woods appear lined up in the same row. To someone in the garden, where is the interior, and where is the exterior? As you stand in the garden, for that brief, fleeting moment your own life and the world “beyond” are on equal footing” (Nakayama 2018, 36-39).

In this issue, we feature the theme: “City as a home.” We explore Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Ogawamachi in Saitama Prefecture to redefine the boundaries of our cities in relation to what we perceive as ‘home.’ What happens when we make room for a circle of ‘home’ within the radius of our houses? Perhaps we get a glimpse of the world ‘beyond’… Let's take a step into the world of small and simultaneously big homes.