Amenity: quality in the social relationships, qualities of a place

Abstract

In a context where the word 'amenities' is used in the political realm on one hand, where its attested uses in the scientific realm comes from economics only on the other hand, the paper simply expresses the idea that an acception refering to other human and social sciences is possible for this terminology. After a brief insight into some present authors' words that employ 'amenities', we show that, in the light of some concepts mainly coming from sociology and geography, this acception could refer to the articulation of a sociological dimension and of a spatial dimension, to the articulation of the quality of being together and of the quality of places. We'll discuss a possible line of research for the 'amenities' question as far as it is applied to rural areas, still from the point of view of human and social sciences.