Dear all,
I think I have been making the mistake of thinking that Space Syntax is monolithic.
If I have understood the last few mailings, it seems that questions such as whether one measures visual aspects of space, or movement aspects is a matter of choice. So the case of a glass wall which divides a room for movement but not for vision is dealt with appropriately for whatever we want to measure on this occasion. If we are measuring a movement economy, it clearly divides convex spaces; if measuring sight lines it does not interrupt axial analysis.
I suppose the question is, how does Axman deal with it? Is it pre-set to particular ends? I really must get myself on a one-day course and find out.
A complication comes in the ideas of Social Logic: as Stephen mentioned, there is an underlying assumption in Hillier & Hanson’s books that the aspects of space that are measured by Space Syntax methods are ‘structures’ of features which individuals ‘retrieve’ (presumably over time) as a subliminal understanding of the pattern of the place (which is unconsciously re-embodied as the town develops in traditional, piecemeal development).
This pattern is, I understand, thought to be a causal determinant of the ‘movement economy’ of the area (because depth necessarily changes the number of destinations from each space, and therefore the likely number of journeys made through it).
But I thought (and perhaps wrongly) that there was a further implication: that the pattern of spatial features was assumed to provide an unconscious understanding of social rules - of who is allowed to go where. I am no expert on ‘proxemics’, but I think this is the basis of the rules (?),
If this is an understanding of the whole pattern of the space, acquired over time, then I don’t see the relevance of axial maps. Surely these are purely visual? As you wrote earlier, they do not reflect metric distances (and convex analysis shows ‘how many spaces’ between here and there). But if they just reflect sightlines, surely this in unnecessary once the ‘structure’ of the area has been absorbed? You don’t need to see “there it is” once you know where it is - as anyone discovers if they become aquainted with the tortuous pathways of Venice or Lindos.
Perhaps it is that syntactic distance, either through axial depth or convex spaces, is experienced as isolation (?). Depending on circumstances, this degree of isolation might be interpreted as privacy, or being ‘cut-off’, or an invitation to ‘virtual community’. Could this be right? But if it is, then even without the ‘interpretation’ of isolation / integration, we are still measuring features relevant to some form of experience or understanding, aren’t we?
Without some such social logic, the answer to “What is Space Syntax” must be “a graph-theory of space” mustn’t it?
Regards, Tom.
ps. what the phat is ‘phatic’?
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