Alan
You're right its a bit chicken and egg - and arguments about how interior
or exterior these things are all get very silly though the philosophers
would no doubt go for it. But there's something else - Space syntax (or the
axmap at any rate) is actually _doing_ something as I see it - its
modelling something thats actually going on in urban space - and what that
is has a great bearing on the kind of questions Tom Dine is asking - and I
think its a bit disingenuous to act as though the axial map is just
revealing pure (spatial) structure in terms of 'depth' and 'integration'
and that sort of thing - and that this structure then has social
implications. The spatial doesn't 'know' anything of course, the spatial
structure that we are playing with is a mapping of an already apparent
process which is social-in-space or psychological-in-space. As I said this
is a speculation, but its not one I'm going to give up in principle though
I'm quite prepared to concede details. When we map social patterns to the
structure revealed by the axmap we are not mapping pure social onto pure
spatial, we're mapping social-spatial to another social- or
psychological-spatial. As I say I haven't thought too much about convexity,
but axiality is as far as I can guess about 'place' and the way it is
forged together with other places in a dilectical unity - through the
spatialisation of movement (and knowing??). At this scale and on the
street, all those other processes are probably slave to the process that
gets us around the city. I don't think we can answer all of Tom Dine's
questions without getting into psycho-spatial-analysis - and maybe
Bachelard and Lacan and the phenomenologists can help with some aspects of
the subjective response to space, but we need to know where we can help -
and I think that we can help with place and its outward aspects, because
the axmap has locked into its 'phatic' character, and the way it conjugates
with other places to structure larger wholes. I think it probably happens
at smaller scales as well. It gets back to one of my earliest points in
this series of exchanges - that people need to be able to understand what
space syntax is doing as a (latent) theory of the city rather than just as
a technique for prising regularities out of space. Otherwise they're going
to keep on asking - yes, but what _is_ it actually??
Stephen
>I suspect that we are probably saying the same thing, and that this could
>be seen as an academic 'chicken and egg' argument. Which comes first,
>spatial structures (millions of them) or the structures of "doing or
>'knowing'"? I think that space and its mathematical logic comes first.
>Lines of sight and minimising depth in axial maps no doubt have social
>implications, as do the notions of convexity, however the only processes I
>can concieve of that lead to those being 'knowable' run from the ability of
>the human mind to 'read' these sort of structures and turn them to use. A
>bit like seeing faces in clouds - humans are quite good at that kind of
>thing. In my view the 'logical' structures of space come first, ie: there
>has to be somthing there to 'know'. If we try and argue the reverse, we are
>left proposing that the logical structures of space are somehow responsive
>to ('aware of'?? clearly absurd) what humans can know. This may be argued
>(in a weak version) by those that say that space is 'social' purely in so
>far as it is a product of social and ecomomic forces, but in principle the
>argument seems to me to be illogical and fundamentally wrong. It is just a
>fallacy put about by those that seek to distinguish humans and the human
>mind from everything else in nature.
>
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