Dear Tom Dine and All

This is precisely the place to air questions, naive or not. A lot of us are
not surrounded by our space syntax colleagues and the everyday ponderings
and speculations that go on at Torrington Place are missed by me for one.
And the 'experts' don't know all the answers and may sometimes need the
corrective of the sharp question in plain language from people doing the
work on the ground to keep their minds on relevant things.

As I understand it space syntax makes no detailed claims about behaviour in
space and sees its remit as the revealing and investigation of 'structure'
in complex social-spatial arrangements. However the whole question of space
and place, if it is social space and place, must I think implicate
behaviour.

I've been working on the 100 and 1000m scales in cities so my thoughts are
derived from these scales and I'm not sure if what I have to say is of much
relevance at your scale. I kind of think there are two different problems
here - one of which I am sure that space syntax can help with - and the
other I'm not so sure. There's something inherently dynamic about what
space syntax does and something to do not with the small or the large
scale, but with the passage between the two. In so far as a Hepworth
sculpure has a relationship of scale and movement with its observer and its
surroundings, then I think space syntax can say something about this
relationship. Whether this is the 'subjectivity' you are talking about, I'm
not sure. Alan's right in reminding everyone that 'non-discursive' has
nothing to do with 'subjective'. As I see it it boils down to what it is
that space syntax actually does - because it seems to be modelling
something about the way we do things in concrete environments - and clearly
doing it so well that we get very useful results from it! But what is this
thing that it's modelling? - Is it visual? or access related? - or what.
Maybe its something so basic that it comes before 'visual' or 'access'
questions and has to do with how we know things, any things. The link
between space (and time) and the way we understand things may be so close
that they stand as metaphors for each other. Some people suggest that space
and time are just ways of keeping things separate from each other and in a
relationship to each other that we can understand and use. I'm sure that
they are more than just mental, but the the point is that what is useful to
us in them (space and time) seems to be neatly captured in this idea and in
the notion that space and society/activity are already latent in each
other.

Bill's spatial ideas (and the notion of the spatialisation (see Lefebvre,
Gottdiener) of everyday activities) challenges the space-activity or
space-society dualism which sees the space of the urban environment as a
neutral container in which social practice takes place; proposing instead
that social practices are by necessity spatial and grounded in the
physical/spatial context and that urban space and urban social practice are
latent within each other. It challenges also the 'common-sense' perception
of 'place' as simple location or 'space specified' and proposes instead
that 'place' aquires its full significance only when it is recognised that
it is 'produced' through processes that are operative at a variety of
spatial and temporal scales - and that it therefore has a broader
significance within the whole. Social and cultural practices and processes
have to ground themselves and be acted out in specific places and the
spatialisation of these processes and practices forge 'place' together with
other 'places' in a dialectical unity. The useful consequence of this for
us is that a simple social activity like moving in the city involves an
exchange between the subject moving and the urban spatial field in which
he/she moves, and insofar as there may be behavioural consistencies in the
way this exchange affects the movement of different people, urban space is
capable of constructively ordering the movement of people within it.

One of the most interesting things for me about space syntax is the absence
of a metric dimension - this forces you to look somewhere other than the
'distance as friction' ideas that derive from the Cartesian conception (see
also Deleuse about smooth and striated space). For me, a connection with
the everyday space- everyday language analogy of de Certeau (Practice of
everyday life) is suggested, where he emphasises the 'phatic' aspect of
movement and the way movement 'conjugates' places. "Walking, which
alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile organicity
in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi." (p 99) 'Friction' would
then be measured in places, topoi, experienced in a series relationship in
the course of a journey. De Certeau is suggesting I think that this is how
we know our surroundings and the link between knowing and doing is then a
fairly direct one. Add to this a fairly coarse behavioural preference for
certain kinds of 'platial' sequences (longish sightlines and corner-poor)
and we're just about back at what the axial map does.

This is all highly speculative of course (this is the place for
speculations isn't it?) but it might give an insight into the type of space
we are talking about and its relevance for human experience. The dynamic
multiscalar space we are talking about is not the Cartesian fishbowl in
which objects sit, but is the system of relations between places
experienced in movement (produced by movement), a system closely linked
with the way we know our cities (organise them in our minds?). All this
seems to me to start to blur the boundaries between objectivity and
subjectivity in a most confusing way. Maybe we're stuck here with another
rather limited dualism (objectivity and subjectivity) and the right
questions to ask are rather along the lines of: Are there relationships of
movement and scale in the system under discussion? As far as the experience
of place is concerned, I dare say that space syntax will say rather more
about the dynamic outward-directed aspects of place than about the more
static contemplative inward-looking aspect of place as a 'room' in itself.
But here I'm biased towards the axial map and the experience of place as it
begins to structure the space of cities. I haven't really thought that much
about 'convexity' and the way it is used in buildings though I have heard
it being talked about in London and remember being a little sceptical about
one or two aspects at the time.

Stephen Read

By the way I'd love to know what those articals about phenomenology were -
could we let each other know what we all are reading, we're all interested
and it could stimulate more discussion.




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