Spatial Organization and the Built Environment
Introduction
The article discusses the interdisciplinary topic of spatial organization and the built environment.
It is based on a synthesis of ideas developed in previous publications.
The article is divided into two parts: the first introduces the approach and relevant concepts, and the second deals with substantive aspects of spatial organization and the built environment.
Context
Conceptualization of the Built Environment
Built environments exhibit extraordinary variety across cultures and history.
Built environments are a product of human activity and culture and are never random.
Environments perceived as chaotic are those not understood or considered inappropriate.
The order underlying spatial and conceptual organization needs to be understood.
Western built environments often emphasize geometrical design.
Non-Western societies may structure their environments based on social, ritual, or symbolic principles.
These principles may be expressed through geometrical patterning, but not always.
Western observers may find non-Western environments incomprehensible due to their geometric expectations.
American observers may struggle to understand the Islamic city, while French observers may be dismayed by the American city.
Consideration of built environments must include people, their activities, wants, needs, values, lifestyles, and other cultural aspects, not just the 'hardware.'
Three broad questions underlie the study of any human environment:
How do characteristics of people (as members of a species, social groups, or individuals) affect the shaping of built environments?
What effects do aspects of the environment have on individuals and groups, under what conditions and circumstances, and why?
What mechanisms link people and environments, given their mutual interaction?
All three questions need consideration, study, and understanding, but the emphasis may shift depending on the enquiry.
The focus is on human environments, although animals also build environments and organize space.
Some human groups organize space conceptually while building very little.
Conceptual organization precedes building, so built environments are a subset of all human environments.
There are different ways of conceptualizing human environments.
Conceptualizations are often complementary rather than conflicting.
The notion of the 'setting' is crucial; it combines the ideas of a 'behavior setting' and a 'role setting.'
A setting comprises a milieu with an ongoing system of activities, linked by rules about appropriate and expected behavior.
These rules are specific to the setting and situation but also vary with culture.
Physical attributes of the setting act as cues, reminding people about the situation and appropriate behavior.
Settings are organized into systems connected in space and time, and in terms of centrality and rules.
The extent of a system and its settings cannot be assumed a priori but must be discovered.
This applies to the house-settlement system.
The dwelling itself is a system of settings within which systems of activities occur.
Cross-cultural comparisons of dwellings are misleading if this isn't considered.
What happens in one part of the system influences what happens elsewhere due to activities occurring in buildings, outdoor areas, settlements, and the entire cultural landscape.
Settings are not the same as neighborhoods, streets, buildings, or even rooms.
One of these may contain a number of settings.
Spatial organization is at least partially independent of the built environment defined by walls.
A single-plan unit can comprise different settings at one time or become different settings at different times.
People and objects establish setting boundaries and provide cues within spaces defined by fixed features.
Temporary organizations in space can be based on shared values or community of interests.
Cultural rules change appropriate activities for settings, even in the same space.
Changes in street rules can turn it from a setting for traffic to one for a street party.
Differences in street rules account for contrasts between the United States and India.
What happens in some settings influences what happens in others.
The definition of units of comparison depends on discovering the extent and nature of the relevant system of settings.
A dwelling is a system of settings where sets of activities take place.
Buildings cannot be compared as dwellings merely because they appear so; systems of settings are the proper units of comparison.
This discovery avoids problems arising from discrepancies between 'etic' and 'emic' models.
Cues communicating appropriate situation and behavior are not only architectural ('fixed feature elements').
Semi-fixed feature elements (furnishings, signs, plants, personalization, furniture) are important.
They are easily moved or changed and respond more easily and quickly to social and cultural changes.
Settings include 'non-fixed feature elements'—people and their behavior and activities.
The cultural landscape includes fixed, semi-fixed, and non-fixed feature elements.
It also comprises much of material culture: signs, furniture, furnishings, landscaping, plants, decorations, art objects.
Environments expressing spatial organization involve relationships among people (or animals), between people (or animals) and inanimate components, and among the inanimate components themselves ('hardware').
One can consider a group organized in space without physical enclosures, in relation to enclosures and cues, or envisage enclosures and cues without people.
The built environment involves the organization of four elements:
Space
Time
Meaning
Communication
The environments of non-human animals can also be conceptualized this way.
The four elements can be studied separately but their interactions and relationships must also be considered.
The same space can become different settings at different times, which is organization of time.
Spatial distribution of groups can be uneven and relatively permanent, allowing discussion of social geography or ecology of the city.
Group distribution can also change rapidly, with different groups occupying the same area at different times.
Examples include street corners taken over by different groups and parks occupied by ethnic groups according to unwritten rules.
Subjective perceptions of safety affect the use of areas of cities at certain times.
Urban images, cognitive schemata, or mental maps are specific to particular time periods (daytime vs. nighttime).
These images impose temporal as well as spatial constraints on movement.
Temporal organization needs to be studied as much as spatial organization.
Chronogeography links the organizations of space and time at the scale of regions and cities.
It is impossible to study the organization of space without considering the organization of time.
Constraints on movement are based on meaning and affect communication; they involve the organization of meaning and communication.
The environment of humans (and animals) involves the organization of space, time, meaning, and communication.
Spatial organization cannot be understood without considering the others.
Consider the question: 'Who does what, where, when, including/excluding whom, and why?'
The organizations of space and time can reinforce one another, achieving greater redundancy.
Spatial organization and cues indicate expected uses, and spaces may only be used at certain times.
Spatial and temporal organization can be separate, or one may substitute for the other.
Time organization may replace space organization as a privacy mechanism.
Spatial organization responds to, is partly for the purpose of, and influences the organization of, communication.
Communication patterns are affected by clustering in space, social networks, acquaintanceship, neighboring, travel, and visiting.
The organization of meaning influences space, time, and communication.
Urban cues interpreted as dangerous discourage communication and lead to spatial localization of groups.
These groups organize time differently, further isolating each other.
The organization of space and meaning influences behavior, movement, access, information flows, knowledge, and communication.
Through working together, redundancy is increased so that effects are magnified.
Redundancy is needed to provide clear cues for behavior and to facilitate it.
Privacy (control of unwanted interaction) can be achieved by organizing time (avoidance, scheduling) or space (moving to a remote setting).
Separation can be achieved by rigid behavior regulation or separation in space.
Markers indicate private space.
Making markers stronger increases clarity and the strength of cues, reinforcing the organization of meaning.
The process of erecting walls, doors, shutters, and providing signs, blinds, locks, chests, etc., is the strongest physical expression of expected privacy norms.
Multiple mechanisms (time, rules, distance) further increase redundancy.
The complex interaction system among the organizations of space, time, communication, and meaning constitutes a complete ecological system.
Origins of the Built Environment
The chapter concerns human use and organization of space as expressed in cultural landscapes and built environments.
All living things organize space, even plants.
Animals actively organize space, most obviously higher animals.
It is a fundamental evolutionary fact that all living organisms both are organized in space and organize it.
This is often seen ecologically in terms of resource availability for both non-human animals and human beings: there is a link between the nature, abundance and predictability of resources and the form of spatial organization (e.g. Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978).
These resources can also be symbolic and social, which becomes important among higher animals and dominant in humans.
There is a continuity between human built environments and those of other animals.
A three-step evolutionary sequence exists: animals, through hominids, to humans.
As one moves through the sequence, resources increasingly include latent (symbolic) aspects, as opposed to manifest (instrumental) ones.
As human societies become larger, more differentiated, and more complex, the role of latent aspects of resources continues to increase.
The spatial organization of non-human animals may respond primarily to the distribution of ecological resources and environmental factors (e.g. nutrients, climate, predators).
In hominids and especially humans, latent (or symbolic) factors exert an ever-increasing influence.
Latent aspects can lead to variations in manmade environments and cultural landscapes.
These variations attract people differentially, so that cultural habitat selection takes place, further reinforcing the spatial organization that can be perceived in the diverse cultural landscapes of regions of various kinds and scales.
Animals organize space, learn about their environments, use regular routes, and occupy territories, sleeping roosts, feeding sites, and leks.
Animal habitat involves the organization of space, time, meaning, and communication.
It involves relationships between organisms and inanimate components of the environment, which become invested with meaning, as well as relationships among the inanimate components themselves, together comprising the organization of space.
Animals possess cognitive schemata or ‘maps’ of their lifespace, with territories, barriers, and paths organized in relation to hierarchy, status, resources, and predators.
Animals live not only in a spatial environment but also in a social environment with its various settings.
Animals' schemata of their environment can be complex, relating to the perceived environment and action space.
Animals also build fairly complex settings.
Animals select habitats, mark boundaries and paths using sound, scent, and visual markers, and even decorate their settings.
Maintaining spatial organization, territories, and boundaries demands communication among groups and individuals.
There is a link between the organization of space, communication, and meaning.
The construction of stone circles nearly two million years ago at Olduvai Gorge may relate to the establishment of 'home-bases.'
The establishment of ‘home-bases’ implies a central site for the family group and food sharing.
The supposed buildings at Olduvai, inferred from semicircular stone arrays, may have been either windbreaks or bases for huts.
The non-shelter functions of such constructions were probably as important as their function as shelters.
By 300,000 years ago, sizable buildings arranged in camps suggest complex social organization.
Such socio-territorial arrangements were adaptive.
All human groups mark specific locales and organize space by using it differentially and establishing rights over portions of it.
Humans form a mosaic of groups in space by congregating in particular spots.
Permanent congregations become cities or other components in the spatial hierarchy of settlement.
Ownership or control may not always be involved in space appropriation, or always of resources.
Spatial organization may persist even after ecological conditions have changed and can be studied in terms of status, power, group membership, social networks, and cultural meaning.
These factors have been suggested as principal reasons for the origins of cities.
The sacred served initially to legitimate forms of spatial organization based on ecological and resource criteria.
There is a link between the organization of space and meaning.
Resource use, as in hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and swidden cultivation, also involves the organization of time, which, in turn, reflects and influences patterns of communication.
Since individuals and groups exist and interact in space, human space is anisotropic.
The systematic use of space generates spatial organization, based on rules, life-styles, meanings, and culture.
Space is culturally classified and socially regulated, resulting in shifting boundaries.
Permanent boundaries eventually constitute the built environment.
The built environment is the physical expression of spatial organization made visible.
Reasons for, and Purposes of, Built Environments
Different assumptions and approaches (materialist, ecological, symbolic, cognitive) emphasize different reasons for organizing spaces and building environments.
The reasons are also open to empirical investigation.
There is doubtful any single reason for the built environment.
In human evolution, latent (symbolic) aspects gain importance vis-à-vis manifest, instrumental functions.
Different aspects may come to the fore depending on the study point and questions posed.
Latent functions emphasize meaning, making them important.
Variability is a crucial attribute of built environments needing explanation.
Consideration of latent aspects offers a potential explanation.
There are approaches from three different disciplines that make much the same point.
As one moves from instrumental function, concrete object, or technomic function to latent function, symbolic object, or ideo-technic function, variability increases.
The relatively few types of activities typical of most built environments would imply little variability.
The transition from the instrumental to the symbolic has potential explanatory value.
All human groups cook, but how they cook varies significantly, as do the activities systematically associated with cooking.
The meanings of cooking, its latent aspects, are most variable.
This leads to a need for different and culture-specific settings.
Binford divides artifacts into those whose primary function lies in coping directly with the physical environment ('technomic' artefacts), those used principally in the conduct of social relations ('socio-technic' artefacts), and those serving to symbolize key cultural ideas ('ideo-technic' artefacts).
Socio-technic functions vary more than technomic ones, and ideo-technic functions vary most of all, leading to a corresponding variability among artifacts.
Gibson's point is that most humans perceive trees (the concrete objects) in the same way.
How one uses trees will greatly change the cultural landscape: firewood, shade, or ornament.
How trees are valued depends on the meaning trees have as symbolic objects.
Advertisements for housing land in Australia showed that negative meanings attached to native trees were replaced by highly positive meanings, emphasizing preservation of native vegetation.
The two resulting cultural landscapes were obviously very different.
By responding to latent aspects of activities, functions, and objects, built environments become more variable and culture-specific.
Cultural differences are conveyed by language, costume, food habits, and ways of carrying out activities in the systems of settings in which they are carried out.
This makes it easier for groups, cultures, and languages to retain their cultural distinctiveness by upholding critical cultural settings and institutions.
Clustering by perceived homogeneity has tended to occur, especially in groups with lowered competence and under greater stress, such as ethnic or linguistic minorities and recent migrants.
Variability can exist and increase as cultural variables play a greater role because of the low criticality of built environments.
Physical constraints, although not insignificant, tend to be relatively permissive.
Many possible ways of satisfying needs usually exist.
Latent aspects of activities can find prominent expression in the built environment.
Specific constraints can have different meanings for different subgroups.
'Traditional' and 'modern' societies differ because of 'resource constraints,' which can be absolute, relative, or culturally imposed.
Spatial organization and territoriality are linked to privacy, conceptualized as the control of unwanted interaction and information flows.
What is 'unwanted,' what counts as 'interaction,' between whom, and using what mechanisms, are all culturally variable.
This leads to differences in domains of privacy, patterns of access, and degrees of penetration.
All involve boundary regulation exercised by individuals or groups to regulate information flows or interaction.
Frequently involve systems or sequences of boundaries that become fairly complex and structure the cultural landscape.
Boundaries may be known, marked, or defined physically, reflecting and influencing behavior and social interaction.
Boundaries, like spatial organization and built environments, are thought before they are built or given physical expression.
Analyzing boundaries involves concepts discussed and to come and runs as a dominant theme through much of the literature.
Boundaries separate different areas of space and enclose social, cognitive, symbolic, or other domains.
One can analyze boundaries in terms of their formation, dissolution, function, regulation, defense, permeability, marking, and rules.
Built Environment, Meaning, and Writing
Emphasizing latent aspects in human organization of space and built environments highlights the role of meaning.
The notion of meaning is broad, but meanings communicated by built environments can be distinguished on three levels:
'High-level' meanings related to cosmologies, cultural schemata, world views, philosophical systems, the sacred.
'Middle-level' meanings: identity, status, wealth, power—the latent rather than instrumental aspects of activities and settings.
'Lower-level' instrumental meanings: material cues for identifying uses, expected behavior, privacy, accessibility, seating arrangements, movement, and way-finding, enabling co-action.
Meanings on these levels vary across cultures and time and have suggestive links between them and the hierarchies shown in Table 1.
The invention of writing and the elaboration of other symbolic systems change things.
With this, high-level meanings in the built environment become less important, and many meanings emphasized in the anthropological literature on non-literate societies tend to disappear.
It is unlikely that a literate culture could be destroyed by destroying its built environment.
As the scale, heterogeneity, and internal specialization of activities and settings increase, changes occur in the other levels of meaning.
Middle-level meanings become relatively more important, and lower-level meanings need stronger expression, resulting in greater redundancy.
This comparison covers groups, spatial organization, space use, boundary marking in developed/developing countries, traditional groups, subcultures, rural/urban settlements, large/small urban settlements, neighborhoods, special-use areas, and so on.
This provides ways of analyzing, classifying, and comparing groups as one moves from nomadic to semi-nomadic groups and from unspecialized to specialized groups.
Nomads use movement for conflict resolution, subtly shifting door directions or dwelling locations, erecting 'spite fences' as reflections of shifting social relationships.
In semi-nomadic groups, changes and shifts still occur; residential patterns and house locations are impermanent, representing kinship and other social links and meanings that articulate land and people.
House locations are sensitive to changes in social relations above the household level.
Spatial mobility and residential flux are different and need to be distinguished.
In settled societies, people tend to cluster with others like themselves.
Some may have extensive social networks, interacting with selected others on bases other than propinquity.
Interaction and involvement may also be avoided altogether.
When people move, they usually do so to similar communities.
The result is a permanent distribution of different groups in space, yielding a social geography of neighborhoods, settlements, regions, and countries.
In societies with a simple division of labor and few specialized activities, single spaces are used for many different activities and contain many settings.
Spatial organization is simple, but activities are organized and co-ordinated in time in complex ways according to elaborate rules.
In societies with a complex division of labor and many specialized activities, there are many specialized spaces, each often comprising a single setting for a particular activity.
This calls for redundant meaning cues, strong boundary control, and expressions in the form of physical barriers, signs, and semi-fixed objects.
Space is organized in complex ways and marked more clearly and strongly.
Relationships between the Built Environment and Culture
The concept of culture is central to our topic.
The definition of culture is contentious and complex.
Traditional culture definitions fall into three broad classes:
Culture as a way of life typical of a group.
Culture as a system of symbols, meanings, and schemata transmitted through enculturation.
Culture as a set of adaptive strategies for survival in relation to resources and ecology.
One can ask what culture does or is for, rather than what it is.
Three types of answers can be found:
The role of culture is to distinguish among groups and to maintain their identities.
Culture carries information, i.e., it is a set of instructions for assembling components (a ‘design for living’).
Culture provides a structure or framework which gives meaning to particulars.
These definitions of what culture is and does are not conflicting but complementary.
Each class of definitions is relevant to understanding the built environment as a material expression of spatial organization.
As it stands, the concept of culture is too general and abstract.
It is virtually impossible even to begin to discuss or analyze the relationship between 'culture' and 'built environment' at that level of generality and abstraction.
The concept of culture needs to be made less general and less abstract by 'dismantling' it.
Dismantling the Concept of ‘Culture’
There are different ways of dismantling the concept of culture to make it more useful in considering spatial organization and the built environment.
The dismantling can be visualized along two axes—one addressing the view that ‘culture’ is too abstract, the other that it is too global or general.
The vertical axis takes the position that culture is an ideational concept, and that it is manifested in more concrete social expressions, the actual social structures—groups, family structures, institutions, social networks, roles, status relations (e.g. by age or gender).
These social structures often have settings associated with them or are reflected in (and influenced by) spatial organization and built form; they can thus be much more easily identified, studied and analysed.
The horizontal axis takes the position that culture is a general concept, which can be broken down into more specific expressions, such as world views, values, life-style and activities.
World views are still difficult to relate to built environments, but values, life-style and activities can relatively easily and directly be related to components of built environments.
Spatial organization and built environments can be related to activity systems, lifestyles and values and to status, roles, institutions, social groups, and networks, but cannot be related to 'culture' as such.
Specifics of Important Components of Culture
The specifics of components of culture cannot be discussed in detail or the linkages between them and the more general definitions of culture can be established. The discussion will continue in the following sections.