Dear David - Think you missed the point: the argument is how to reduce the sense of isolation of the field, not the quality of its theoretical achievements – although of course we can also discuss those as well. Here, I’m particularly fond of the Durkheimian insights – the relation of co-presence and social solidarities and spatial patterns, which brought me to my interactions with Hillier. And I regret that little has been done in the syntax field regarding expansions of those explanations. It feels like syntax turned out into sheer applications of a method rather, with explorations on the theoretical front being carried on mainly by a few (more recently, focused on cognition).

There are things to be explored, though. You point out the relation of co-presence, body and space correctly – that’s a very interesting thing to think about. However, how explored is it in the theory? Have anyone pursue this goal further, including (and apart from) the phenomenological approach? For instance, Bernard Tschumi has very interesting notions on archicture, body and movement since the 1980s, and there’s a growing literature on body and space stemming from the work of human geographers – although the spatiality of their approaches is poor, in my view. The syntactic concept of space could be of help, if we could explore the concept in that direction.

There are other directions for theoretical expansion regarding other areas regarding the problem of society and space relations, and dialogue with other approaches. It seems to me that those would require expansions of the concept of space itself: adding more to the concept or moving from an overtly physical conception of space to one engaged, say, with other “layers” of social information embedded in space. We could add those layers through a substantial number of different approaches – including phenomenology (say, Heidegger perhaps more than Merleau-Ponty).

One point here is how to render the topological insight on space (and how it allows the view of space with active effects, not quite what I see outside configurational studies) theoretically useful to other approaches – say, spatial economics. Has anybody noticed that the concept of space in spatial economics (certainly just as active, but based on absolute distances) has brought difficulties in how they consider the role of urban structures in economic interaction? And they seem stuck for decades on that – on the sole role of distance. If only we could bring the topological concept of space and tie it strongly with the interactivity amongst activities placed along spatial structures into those theories, that would mean a substantial increase in explanatory power. If we could go beyond the coloured lines and handle the concept of space, and work towards synthetic theoretical constructions linked to other approaches….

Vini