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Tom wrote: > Hi Alan / Alain > I don't seem to have been very successful in steering away from philosophy towards the empiricism of measurement. > As you guessed, I am not qualified to expound the philosophy of space, in relativistic, quantum or any other models. As Alain said, I was being rhetorical, bringing in the aether as an absurdity to bounce us back into "How SS can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used." > However, I think you agreed that what you ACTUALLY measure are relationships between objects or the physical limits of activity (although I am still a little puzzled by the form of words). In fact the Ordinance Survey often measure the 'Spaces between' physical surfaces for us, in making the maps we work from. Tom - go back and re-read my description of representation maps. The relations we ACTUALLY measure are between elements of space, not really objects (although one can also do that and it has been done). The ordnance survey don't measure anything in the same way that we do. That is they survey space and built form and represent it as maps, but they do not then analyse that map in any specific way to quantify particular properties of the morphology. > I am suggesting that drawing the diagram of convex spaces / axial lines is a process of mapping "spaces for . . ." onto this map of "spaces between . . .." It is a microcosm of the social-space mapping Alan mentioned before, because the axial lines / convex spaces mark the physical limits of co-presence (where co-presence means that people at any two locations can see each other and move to meet each other) ie. they are "spaces for . . ." Tom, at the risk of getting slightly pedantic, although one interpretation of the empirical success of convex and axial maps in explaining social phenomena is to do with visual co-presence, it is not obvious that this is the reason why the analysis is explanatory. So although I go along with your point and often use this 'explanation' in describing the methodology to people to try and help them understand, to be quite honest I think that it is only part of the story. > And this is important in finding "How SS can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used." To mark out systems of co-presence encourages us to look for causal relations between human interaction and higher level social phenomena. Because co-presence includes co-visibility it raises questions related to human vision, such as the cognitive complexity of routes. Because it includes co-accessibility, we should ask about the physical pre-requisites of human movement, such as route density. > The danger I see in describing SS in abstract terms of 'space as space' is that it becomes detached from this grounding in reality. It is no longer obvious that the measurements relate to the affordance of the sort of activities which we are designing for. Of course the data becomes more abstract as you process it with mathematical tools of topology and graph theory, but this should be processing information about particular, specified phenomena. I wonder whether you are actually hoping for a relatively 'mechanistic' causal explanation. I am suggesting that although that may well be the case, the evidence so far doesn't let us distinguish between a causal and a more abstract explanation. To give an example - about 70% of variance in observed aggregate movement rates in urban space can be 'explained' by software agents with 'vision' taking their next step at random from their visual field, and re-evaluating every three steps. These 'agents' have no psychology and are effectively randomly sampling the spatial environment. What they suggest is that a good proportion of the observed regularity in human behaviour may be no more than mathematical necessity - no need to invoke psychology or cognition at this level. > Doubtless the axial line gathers up a whole lot of different affordances, of varying importance in different situations. But we can't see them, so we can't relate it to our work. It looks like a mysterious object which has been FOUND in the world, instead of an abstract measurement OF the world. Perhaps it is time to 'unpack' the axial line and have a look at the social / spatial ideas inside it, which can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used. Perhaps. Alan