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Space and spatiality: what the built environmentneeds from social theoryBill Hillier aa Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London (UCL), Gower Street,London, WC1E 6BT, UK E-mail:

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To cite this article: Bill Hillier (2008): Space and spatiality: what the built environment needs from social theory, BuildingResearch & Information, 36:3, 216-230

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Spaceand spatiality:what the builtenvironment needs fromsocial theory

Bill Hillier

Bartlett School ofGraduateStudies,UniversityCollegeLondon (UCL),GowerStreet,LondonWC1E6BT,UKE-mail: b.hillier@ucl.ac.uk

To foresee social outcomes from decisions about the physical and spatial form of the built environment, built

environment professionals need to make use of theory-like propositions linking the two domains. In the absence of

scientifically tested propositions, a shifting consensus of beliefs fills the need, and it can take decades of social costs to

show the inadequacy of these beliefs. The problem of social theory and the built environment is then defined for

the purposes of this paper in terms of the potential for testable propositions at the level at which one intervenes in

the built environment. This is called the need for ‘design-level’ theories, defining design in the broad sense of all the

choices and decisions made by built environment professionals in creating and modifying the built environment.

Examining social theory under two broad headings, ‘urban sociology’ and ‘society and space’, it is noted that both

approach the society–environment relation ‘society first’, in that the form of the environment is sought as the product

of the spatial dimensions of social processes. This is called the ‘spatiality’ paradigm, and note that such approaches

have never reached, and probably can never reach, the level of precision about the built environment which would be

needed to found testable propositions at the design level. The alternative is to turn the question the other way round

and through ‘environment first’ studies look for evidence of social processes in the spatial forms of the built

environment. Recent work of this kind is outlined within the ‘space syntax’ paradigm and it is shown how the greater

descriptive precision this brings to the built environment both permits linkages to mainline formulations in social

theory and leads to testable design-level propositions.

Keywords: built environment, conceptual frameworks, design, planning, social theory, space syntax, spatial

configuration, spatial theory, spatiality paradigm, theory-building

Pour prevoir les resultats sociaux de decisions relatives a la forme physique et spatiale du milieu bati, les professionnels de

ce milieu doivent utiliser des propositions de type ‘Theorie’ reliant les deux domaines. En l’absence de propositions

testees sur le plan scientifique, un consensus mouvant de croyances comble cette lacune et il peut falloir des decennies

de couts sociaux pour montrer l’inadequation de ces croyances. Le probleme de la theorie sociale et du milieu bati est

ensuite defini pour les objectifs aux fins de cet article en termes de potentiel des propositions pouvant etre testees au

niveau auquel on intervient dans le milieu bati. Cela s’appelle la necessite de theorie au ‘niveau de la conception’ qui

definit la conception dans le sens large de tous les choix et de toutes les decisions prises par les professionnels du

milieu bati en creant et en modifiant ce milieu. En examinant la theorie sociale sous deux grandes rubriques:

‘sociologie urbaine’ et ‘societe et espace’, on note qu’elles approchent toutes deux ‘la societe d’abord’ dans la relation

‘Environnement–Societe’ en ce sens que la forme de l’environnement est recherchee comme le produit des dimensions

spatiales des processus sociaux. C’est ce qu’on appelle le modele ‘Spatialite’ et on note que de telles approches n’ont

jamais atteint et ne pourront probablement jamais atteindre le niveau de precision concernant le milieu bati qui serait

necessaire pour que les propositions soient soumises a tests au niveau de la conception. L’alternative est de retourner

la question et par des etudes sur ‘l’environnement d’abord’ de rechercher la preuve de processus sociaux dans les

formes spatiales du milieu bati. De recents travaux de cette nature sont brievement decrits dans le modele

de «syntaxe spatiale » et il est demontre que cela apporte une plus grande precision a la description du milieu bati ce

qui a la fois permet des articulations avec les formulations principales de la theorie sociale et conduit a des

propositions pouvant etre testees au niveau de la conception.

BUILDING RESEARCH & INFORMATION (2008) 36(3), 216–230

Building Research & Information ISSN 0961-3218 print ⁄ISSN 1466-4321 online # 2008 Taylor & Francishttp: ⁄ ⁄www.tandf.co.uk ⁄journals

DOI: 10.1080/09613210801928073

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Mots-cles: milieu bati, cadres conceptuels, conception, planning, theorie sociale, syntaxe spatiale, configuration

spatiale, theorie spatiale, paradigme de spatialite, formulation de theories

In the literature it is common to mix up what isgoing on in the ‘real’ world – for instance,changes in the space of communication whichmeans that certain kinds of geographical distanceare compromised – spaces in theory – forexample the assumption of mobility in all itsforms – and actual space – say cities like Parisor Berlin or Naples, to name but three citiesthat now stand as idiolects.

(Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 1)

Built environment and social theory: theneed for design-level theoriesThe design and planning of the built environment isabout adapting the physical and spatial surroundingsfor human purposes: to make communities work, tofacilitate business, to make organizations efficient, tosupport family life, and so on. In practical terms, theusable outcomes are patterns of shaped and interlinkedspaces intended to facilitate social aims. The trans-lation of social purposes into space then presupposesthat something is known about how patterns of livingand working can be affected, for good or ill, by thephysical and spatial forms imposed on them. In fact,beyond common-sense and accumulated experience,little is known. The deceptively simple questionsposed by designers – ‘will this work for thesepeople?’ and ‘is this solution better than that in thiscontext?’ – often conceal far-reaching questionsabout the relations between spatial patterning andsocial outcomes to which answers have rarely beensought, let alone found.

But it is through these questions that the concernsof the built environment professional intersect withthose of the social theorist. It might have been expectedthat an increasingly self-conscious society, aware of thehigh-cost-risk of errors that led, for example, to theearly demolition of much social housing of the 1960sand 1970s, might have provided the stimulus for col-laborations to try and find answers to these questions.On the whole, this has not happened, and one of theaims of this paper is to suggest why. In fact, in real situ-ations where a possible impact of the built environmenton social outcomes is debated, social scientists, or thosewith a social science background, are far more likely todeny agency to the built environment in the genesis ofsocial problems than to seek to explain it. Those whobelieve that design may have had a negative socialeffect tend to be faced on the one hand with architects,

whose professional self interest militates againstacknowledging this possibility, and social scientistswho claim to know that in principle no such effectscan exist.

In the absence of any meeting of minds or sharing ofinterests by social theorists and built environment pro-fessionals, what is found in practice is that, at any time,there are a number of conventional, theory-like prop-ositions that link spatial forms to social outcomes.These powerfully influence design and planning for awhile, so much so that they seem to have the kind offorce associated with paradigmatic ideas in science.For example, in the second half of the 20th century itwas widely believed that breaking up large residentialdevelopments into small, inward-looking courtyardsor piazzas would promote stronger local communities,that lower population densities would lessen crime andsocial malaise, that open-plan schools would supportchild-centred learning, and even that public openspaces with ‘good enclosure’ would be successful andwell used. These ideas, often presented as solutions topast problems, seem with hindsight to have beenmore part of the problem than the solution (Hillier,1988).

Where these ideas come from would require a Foucaul-tian enquiry into the archaeology of concepts(Foucault, 1972). But in the absence of either anunconscious vernacular tradition, through whichspatial and social patterning tends to be linked by cul-turally endorsed building and living practices (Glassie,1976), or testable propositions linking spatial designand social outcomes, the need for theory-like ideas inthe strategic phases of design – defining design in thebroad sense of the choices and decisions made bybuilt environment professionals in creating and modi-fying the built environment – to bridge from designdecisions to outcomes seems to call into existencequasi-theoretical ideas improvised from the generalbackground of ideas and beliefs fashionable at thetime. The examples given are particularly interestingbecause although they seemed self-evident at the timeto their advocates, and informed design practice overan extended period, their evidence base was alwayspoor to non-existent, and enough experience hasaccrued over the years to suggest they are probablywrong. Residential developments shaped by the firstidea, such as the Marquess estate in Islington,London (Hillier et al., 1983; Li and Rainwater,2006), turned out to be overly fragmented and cut offfrom the public realm and shared the fate of others inbeing pulled down or radically redesigned. Ideas

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about density and crime are changing dramatically(Haughey, 2005; Harries, 2006; Hillier and Sahbaz,2007) in response to new concepts in urban design.Open-plan schools and the child-centred learningthey were associated with are under fierce attack.And open spaces, such as Trafalgar Square, havebeen radically improved by redesigning them to inte-grate into the urban area and its movement patterns,at the cost of a reduction in enclosure.

This theoretical rake’s progress in the way the builtenvironment is created has not been because writersin the field of social theory have not been interestedin questions related to the built environment. On thecontrary, the last quarter of the 20th century wasmarked by a series of seminal texts that are bothsocial theoretical and focus on such questions as thenature and future of cities, and the relation betweenhuman societies and their spatial form, for example,Lefebvre (1974/91), Sennett (1970, 1977), Harvey(1973, 1996), Soja (1989, 1996), and Castells (1996),to name only the most influential. For many, thesecity-centred books have formed the cutting edge ofreflection on a changing society, even though theauthors are not always formally trained social theor-ists. But in general these texts, many of which share abackground in the Marxist critique of capitalism, areaimed at the macro-level of the changing economicand social processes within which built environmentsare formed, and their implications for the experienceof the city, and rarely engage the levels of resolutionat which built environment professionals intervene inthe real world. Their relevance to design-level theoriestends then to be more contextual than substantive.

These reflections define the scope of this paper. It willfocus on those parts of social theory that might leadto theoretical propositions which link physical andspatial forms to social outcomes at the design-level,defining this as the level at which built environmentprofessionals typically intervene in the built environ-ment. It will not attempt to engage the many areas ofsocial theory that offer no prospect of useful prop-ositions of this kind. It is at this level of real space,that is, of the shaped and linked spaces which peopleinhabit in an everyday sense, that the substitution ofsocial beliefs for testable theory seems to have led topast problems, and the need for testable theories atthis level is justified by the all-too-frequent experiencethat in the past it has often taken decades, sometimeswith substantial social damage, for these socialbeliefs to lose their force. It should also be noted thatwith the experience of past failure, many who investresources in the built environment are now demandingevidence-based functional design, using tested, or atleast testable, theories as well as high-quality visualdesign. The question of relating the built environmentto social theory then comes down to a lead issue:how to replace the shifting beliefs that guide the way

one tries to link the built environment to social out-comes with more testable and theoretically groundedpropositions which, at the stage at which the environ-ment is created, are better able to reflect the realities ofsocial behaviour and outcomes. It is at this level of realspace that the relation between social theory and thebuilt environment becomes substantive rather thancontextual.

The argument in the paper takes the following form.Social theory is first examined under two of its mostrelevant headings: ‘urban sociology’ and ‘society andspace’. It is noted that both approach the society–environment relation ‘society first’, in that the formof the environment is sought as the product of thespatial aspects of social processes. This is identified asthe spatiality paradigm, and it is argued that suchapproaches have never reached, and probably cannever reach, the level of precision about the builtenvironment which would be needed to find testablepropositions at the design level. The alternative is toturn the question the other way round and through‘environment-first’ studies look for evidence of socialprocesses in the form of the built environment.Recent work of this kind within the ‘space syntax’paradigm is outlined to show how the greater descrip-tive precision this brings to the built environment bothpermits linkages to mainline formulations in socialtheory and leads to testable design-level propositions.

Urban sociologyThe roots of a specifically ‘urban’ sociology lie in thefact that the founding fathers of modern socialscience in the 19th century saw the emergence ofmodern cities and urban societies from a pre-industrialor tribal background as the decisive event in the for-mation of modern societies and so most in need ofdescription and explanation.1 Many of the most influ-ential concepts that shaped the subsequent develop-ment of social theory were grounded in this problem.For example, Ferdinand Tonnies (1887) believed thatpre-urban village societies were unified by a form ofsocial coherence he called Gemeinshaft (usually trans-lated as ‘community’, but probably best left in the orig-inal German and explained), by which he meant asystem of common traditions and cooperative beha-viours formed out of the warp and weft of kinshipand neighbourhood, and so providing an all-embracingframework for a collective life that took precedenceover the individual. In contrast, he saw urban societiesas being based on Gesellshaft (usually translated as‘association’, but again best untranslated andexplained), which he saw as a more contractual formof collective life based on competitive individuals,each of whom provided a service to the whole, whichwas then constructed out of artificial rather thannatural bonds.

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Emil Durkheim (1893/1964) proposed a similar, but inmany ways subtler and less value-loaded, distinctionbetween what he called the mechanical solidarity ofpre-urban societies and the organic solidarity foundat the urban stage. Durkheim noted that humanbeings become interrelated in two basically differentways: by similarities, such as shared beliefs and identi-ties, and by differences, such as different occupations,which bring about functional interdependence. Mech-anical solidarity was rooted in the former, organic soli-darity in the latter. The principal factor in the historicshift from one to the other was what he called moraldensity, meaning something like the density of socialinterconnections, one factor in which was populationdensity. Again, these concepts have often beenadapted in the development of modern social theory.Both Tonnies and Durkheim were trying to explainthe phenomenon that in cities social life appears to beat once more free and individualistic, and at the sametime more constrained by social differences andinequalities. Both also presuppose an interdependencebetween the evolution of settlement forms and socialmorphology.

This focus on the transformations of society broughtabout by urbanization was continued by writers likeGeorg Simmel (1908, 1950) and Louis Wirth (1938).Early in his career, Simmel was concerned with theimpact of real space on social interaction, and viceversa, and explored concepts of proximity, distanceand boundary, but over time this grew into a widerconcern with the city as a transformation of socialexperience and psychological attitude. He was tryingto account for what seemed to him the increasingimpersonalization of life in the city. He traced this tothe range and intensity of social and physical experi-ences which the environment of the city broughtabout, leading people to become more detached andrational, and at the same time more individualistic.A generation later, Wirth focused on three populationfactors which he saw as bringing about distinctivelyurban lifestyles: numbers, density and heterogeneity.The first two caused the third, and the third waslargely responsible for the transformation of socialrelations into their characteristic urban form. Hetero-geneity implied individual variation, and this led tothe weakening of primary contacts, such as thosebased on kinship, and an increase in more impersonalsecondary ones. This lessened the importance ofneighbourhood, and so undermined traditionalforms of social coherence. Looking back, Simmel’sand Wirth’s theories of the interrelation betweensettlement forms and lifestyle seem today over gener-alized, and perhaps also too pessimistic about thesocial, mental and emotional life that is found incities, but both, like the founding fathers, saw thespatial aspects of urban aggregation as instrumentalin bringing about the changes in society that comeabout with cities.

The first social theorists to try to account for the actualspatial structures cities were those broadly identified(though questionably) as the ‘Chicago’ or ‘Ecological’School of the 1920s. Influenced by analogies withnatural processes, a principal concern was to accountfor the distribution of land uses, populations and pathol-ogies such as crime in the city. The work of this school,particularly that of Earnest Burgess (1925), originatedmuch of the standard terminology with which land useand population patterns in cities are still described.Burgess’s original ‘concentric ring’ model generated aseries of attempted improvements first through HomerHoyt’s (1939) ‘sector’ theory, then, through Harris andUllman’s (1945) ‘multiple nuclei’ theory. However, thisline of work took a more exclusively economic view ofthe drivers of city form, and was less interested in amore broadly social theory, and this has remained thecase with modern heirs of this tradition in the ‘urbanmodelling’ movement (Wilson, 2000).

Although these texts are still taught as the foundationof urban theory – one has to teaching something inthe theory course! – urban sociology today hasmoved away from the early theoretical ambition ofthe founding fathers to understand the relationsbetween social morphology and settlement form, andthe aim of the Chicago School to characterize formallyprocesses that gave rise to the pattern of areal occu-pation and land use found in cities, to a more exclusivefocus on the study of the changing characteristics andspatial distributions of urban populations, and therange of experience and problems they engender,such as the interrelation of ethnic or socio-economicgroups. This shift to a more limited point of view isperhaps best explained by Saunders (1995), whichexplains that while Saunders’s initial interest was in‘urban sociology’, he found himself increasinglypreoccupied with the following question: is theresuch a thing as a distinctive urban sociology, in thesense of being about a distinctively urban form ofsociety, as opposed to a sociology about issues whichcome up in cities as well as elsewhere?

Saunders’ book is essentially a review of the ‘foundingfathers’ who had seemed to argue for the distinctivenessof urban societies. But Saunders casts doubt on this:

Despite their very different approaches and con-cerns, Weber, Durkheim and Marx and Engelsall came to very similar conclusions as regardsthe analysis of urban questions. All agreed thatthe city played a historically specific role in thedevelopment of western capitalism, but they allagreed that once capitalism has become estab-lished, the city ceased to be a theoretically signifi-cant category of analysis. This was because it wasno longer the expression and form of a newmodeof production (Marx), or because it ceased to bethe basis of human association and social identity

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(Weber), or because it no longer corresponded tothe geographical boundaries of the division oflabour (Durkheim). . . . The city, in otherwords, was not seen as a significant object ofstudy in its own right, and urban questionswere addressed only insofar as they could con-tribute to an understanding of certain processesassociated with the development of moderncapitalism.

(Saunders, 1995, p. 249)

He adds in his Preface that:

each of these different approaches to urban soci-ology has foundered on the attempts to fuse atheory of specific social processes with an analy-sis of spatial forms. The conclusion . . . is thatthese two questions are, with one minor excep-tion [which Saunders calls the ‘social significanceof space’, which he suggests is of very limitedinterest] distinct and mutually exclusive.

If Saunders is right, then the prospect of finding usefullinkages between social theory and the spatial andphysical form of the built environment seem bleak,since he is arguing that no such relation exists.But there is at least one question that Saunders doesnot address explicitly: ‘is this the end of history?’ Ifthe spatial processes that urbanization entailedplayed a role on the evolution of urbanized societies,could spatial processes which might broadly be calledde-urbanization contribute to their deconstruction?De-urbanization has been seen before, for example inthe period between the fall of the Roman Empire andthe feudal system in ‘Dark Age’ Europe (Pirenne,1927/69), and this was very much a spatial as well associal transformation. The real question about thefuture is perhaps not how many people live in or outof cities, or whether or not there is a distinctive soci-ology of cities, but what would a society be likewithout cities as they are currently known, if, assome argue, cities could eventually disappear as theconditions which made spatial aggregation necessarycease to exist? Would a society with the spatial formof, say, a patchwork of discrete gated islands of devel-opment with separate specialized centres for adminis-tration and business, or the continuous countryside ofWilliam Morris’s anti-urban socialist fantasy ‘Newsfrom Nowhere’, still be like the present urbanizedsocieties, or would they mutate into something else?These issues are not seen as belonging to urban soci-ology, but they are relevant to – indeed key questionsfor – the more general study of ‘society and space’ thathas become an intellectual fashion in recent years, andwhich poses the question: what is the interdependence,if any, between human societies and the ways in whichthey manifest themselves in spatial form?

Society and spaceThe problem with the ‘society and space’ question isnot only that it is the broadest form of the questionabout social theory and the built environment, butalso that it is subject to a mesmerizing diversity ofapproaches. Historically, the space–society relationhas long been formulated as a key question in socialgeography, and in 1980 Robert Sack could lucidlyreview the main strands of thought and theoreticalissues within a single book Conceptions of Space inSocial Thought (1980). Within two decades, spacehad become a critical theme in many of the humansciences, from sociology (Giddens, 1983, 1984) to thecognitive sciences (Bloom et al., 1996), but evenmore so in the movement of late 20th-centurythought broadly known as ‘post-modernism’.In 1997, Benko and Strohmeyer (1997) could entitletheir reader on ‘interpreting modernity and post-mod-ernity’ Space and Social Theory, and within its pagescover at least 56 areas where space was a significantcategory of thought. Space had become the mostcapacious of concepts. As Crang and Thrift (2000,p. 1) wrote in their overview reader:

Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It isthe flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is alall purpose nostrum to be applied wheneverthings look sticky.

Crang and Thrift’s book brings some order into the chaosby assembling and introducing essays on 16 of the mostcited authors on some aspect of space in the socialsciences. Although scarcely any two seem to sharecommon theoretical ground, Crang and Thrift pointout that there are shared meta-theoretical assumptions:

What is clear is that space is not considered by anyof these writers to be outside the realm of practice.

(p. 2)

The headings under which the editors make their intro-ductory reviewexemplify the commongroundaswell asthe diversity: spaces of language, of the self and other, ofmetonymy (an entity which stands for something morecomplex, as in this case Paris as a metonym for moder-nity and Los Angeles for post-modernity), of experi-ence, and of writing. In each case, space is heldto acquire recognizable form through the agency ofsome social practice or process, and space is ofinterest because it structures the experienced worldin terms of these practices or processes. As theeditors say (p. 2), these all exemplify, as with geographyin general:

[a] moving away from a sense of space as a prac-tico-inert container of action towards space as asocially produced set of manifolds.

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The critique of space as a ‘practico-inert container ofaction’ is symptomatic of two pervasive themes inthis difficult and, some might suspect, inchoate litera-ture. One is the almost casual demonization of scienti-fic approaches to space in terms of:

[a] quest for purity for purity and abstract reasonthat simulates some of the worst aspects ofEnlightenment thinking . . ., the space of theoryis a purified space, defined by the purgingof real spatiality and the creation of a space ofthought where processes appear to be able toable to operate without geographical locationor extent.

(Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 2)

This view of science, which some might regard as a car-icature, seems to have the power of a universal trumpcard which once played stops all argument in itstracks. But it is hard to reconcile this insistence thatthe space of a scientific theory must be overlyabstracted from social reality with even the most quan-titative approaches to geographical space, as in theChicago School or the wider urban modelling move-ment (Wilson, 2000), which have always been drivenby the task of examining the spatial patterns producedby social and economic activity and seeking to under-stand the space of the city as the product of thispattern forming. Give or take the over-wrought termi-nology, this would seem to be exactly a case of showingthe space of the city to be a ‘socially produced mani-fold’, a collective result produced by individuallocalized activity.

The second pervasive theme in this literature is theapparent exclusion from this ‘social production ofmanifolds’ of the central theme: the real space of thebuilt environment, that is the patterns of shaped andinterlinked spaces referred to at the beginning of thispaper. In fact, early in their introduction Crang andThrift (2000) propose the distinction used as the prefa-tory quote for the present paper:

In the literature it is common to mix up what isgoing on in the ‘real’ world – for instance,changes in the space of communication whichmeans that certain kinds of geographical distanceare compromised – spaces in theory – forexample the assumption of mobility in all itsforms – and actual space – say cities like Parisor Berlin or Naples, to name but three citiesthat now stand as idiolects.

(p. 1)

It might be expected that ‘actual space’, that is theorganized, ordinary space of cities as experienced ona day-to-day basis, would be a candidate for beingseen as a ‘socially produced manifold’. The motivationof many of the writers is, after all, to understand the

experience of and behaviour in these everyday spaces,so it is unexpected that so little attention is paid tothe nature and origins of the spaces themselves andtheir interrelations, and so much attention to highlyabstracted accounts of the experiential side. In fact,there seems to be a paradox: in spite of the critiqueof scientific approaches as overly abstracted, the realspace of everyday experience is characterized in thesediverse texts almost exclusively in terms of models ofresolute and unrelenting abstraction with little appar-ent grasp on the everyday physicality of the spaces inwhich human beings live.

The spatiality paradigmIt seems strange then that the ‘spatially embodied’reasoning said to be the characteristics of post-modern approaches to space should lead to the exclu-sion of ‘real space’ from the agenda (Michell, 2002).On reflection, it might be suggested that, in contrastto the ‘founding fathers’, most 20th-centuryapproaches to space have, in spite of their diversity,worked within certain shared assumptions. The ques-tion about society and its spatial form, in whatevermode or format it is posed, offers a fundamentalchoice. It can either be approached from society tospace, or from space to society, that is by workingfrom social theory towards the spatial environment,or from the spatial environment toward social theory.To most social scientists it has always seemed self-evident that one must take the former route, since itis surely society that determines space and not spacethat determines society. The approach to the city thatthis generates is one of trying to see the spatial environ-ment as the spatial output, and so as the by-product, ofsocial, economic and perhaps cognitive processes. The‘society-first’ assumption might reasonably be calledthe spatiality paradigm, since it does not question theidea the link from society to space should be soughtthrough an examination of the spatiality of socialprocesses.

This paradigmatic stance clearly applies to the ChicagoSchool modellers, who saw the changing populationand land use characteristics of urban areas asthe outcome of social and economic competition atthe level of individuals and firms. It applies equally tothe wider ‘urban modelling’ movement, which seeksto simulate the dynamics of cities as the products ofspatial economics, as recently reviewed lucidly inWilson (2000). It is equally clearly the underlyingassumption of the cutting edge texts from Lefebvre,Harvey, Soja, Castells and others referred to abovethat are in all cases attempts find the city and itsspace as the product of much wider processes of econ-omic and social change. In this sense the – broadlyspeaking – ‘post-modern’ approaches reviewed byCrang and Thrift can and perhaps should be seen as

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the continuation of this paradigm by other means.Note, however, that it was not part of the paradigmaticapparatus of all of the ‘founding fathers’, who assignedspatial factors a far more instrumental, though farfrom fully clear, role in shaping social morphology.

It is not unreasonable then to argue that the spatialityparadigm is the common ground for most 20th-century social scientific approaches to the societyspace question, unifying the most hard-edged urbanmodellers and the softest of post-modern writers.Nowhere, perhaps, is it more clearly articulated thanin the work of one of the best known and space-conscious of current social theorists, AnthonyGiddens. One of Giddens’s explicit early aims was tobring space and time back into the heart of social the-orizing – correctly implying their previous exclusion –partly because social theory had concentrated so muchon characterizing abstract social institutions that it wasunable to deal effectively with the fabric of social lifewhich is the main source of the experience of society.Giddens had also been influenced by the social geogra-phy of such writers as Hagerstrand (1978), who triedto develop methods to record the actual traces inspace that people make in conducting their social lives.

Giddens’s argument is put forward most fully in TheConstitution of Society (1984) – though it is in abbre-viated and in some senses more accessible form in hisearlier A Critique of Historical Materialism (1983).Put simply, Giddens proposal is that social structuresare virtual, or immaterial, entities, but they appear inspace–time as concrete ‘situated practices’, that is associal behaviours and interactions that occur, as theymust, in real space–time locations. Giddens’s keyspatial argument is that these virtual social structuresare produced and even more importantly reproducedby being realized in space time. In other words,society may be ‘virtual’, but it only really exists andprojects itself through time by being realized in dis-persed space–time practices. So the pattern of situatedpractices is not itself the structure of society, but it isthrough dispersed situated practices that the virtualstructure of society is made real for us and, moreimportantly, reproduced. Giddens makes – and isprobably arguing from – an analogy with language.Language, he argues, exists in the same way. It isonly by being used – that is projected into space–time by being spoken and written – that the virtualstructure of language is perpetuated through gener-ations. This is a simple, but very subtle argument,since it allows space to play a critical role in societywithout any whiff of the spatial mechanism ordeterminism that seems to terrorize sociologists.

However, although Giddens sees space as playing a keyrole in the production and reproduction of society, hesays nothing about the production and reproductionof the real space of ‘shaped and linked architectural

and urban spaces’. In fact, at the end of the book,Giddens is at pains to distance himself from realspace in this sense, since to engage with this wouldbe to presuppose that it might in itself be of social inter-est. In principle, Giddens argues, this cannot be so:

to suppose that space has its own intrinsic nature. . . is logically questionable and empiricallyunfruitful. Space is not an empty dimensionalong which social groupings become structured,but has to be considered in terms of its involve-ment in the constitution of systems of interaction. . . in human geography spatial forms are alwayssocial forms.

In other words, Giddens makes it clear that space isonly of interest insofar as it is constructed by the spati-ality of human processes. Real space, insofar as it is ofinterest, is as the contingent by product of the spatialityof social processes. So Giddens does not aim to reachthe level and kind of real space at which built environ-ment professional intervene, because he does notbelieve that it is of interest to social theory.

Soja is equally clear:

a key first step in recognizing a socio-spatial dia-lectic is to recognise that physical space has beena misleading epistemological foundation uponwhich to analyze the concrete and subjectivemeaning of human spatiality. . . . Space in itselfmay be primordially given, but the organization,and meaning of space is a product of social trans-lation, transformation, and experience.

(Soja, 1989, pp. 79–80)

So is Soja’s mentor, Lefebvre:

instead of uncovering the social relationships(including class relationships) that are latent inspaces, instead of concentrating our attentionon the production of space and the socialrelationships inherent in it . . . we fall into thetrap of treating space ‘in itself’, as space as such. . . and so fetishise space in a way reminiscentof the old fetishism of commodities where . . .the error was to consider ‘things’ in isolation,as ‘things in themselves’.

(Lefebvre, 1974/91, p. 90)

Or Harvey:

Urbanism is a social form, a way of life predi-cated on, among other things, a certain divisionof labour and a certain hierarchical ordering ofactivity which is broadly consistent with thedominant mode of production. The city andurbanism can therefore function to stabilize aparticular mode of production (they both help

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create the conditions for the self-perpetuation ofthat mode).

(Harvey, 1973, p. 203)

Themissing question: the ‘space of space’In all its manifestations, then, a component of the spa-tiality paradigm seems to be a denial that real space isin itself of theoretical interest. This does not mean, ofcourse, that it is not of empirical interest. On the con-trary, the late 20th century saw a flowering of studiesof space of all kinds: domestic (for example,Csikszsentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981;Kirby, 1996; Cieraad, 1999), urban (Sibley, 1995;King, 1996), and anthropological (Low andLawrence-Zuniga, 2003). But as the titles suggest,these again do not engage directly with the ‘patternsof shaped and interlinked spaces of everyday life’,either as an object of investigation of as an entity oftheoretical interest. Even in these studies, thecommon assumption seems to be that space acquiressignificance by being seen in terms of some otheragency or process which gives it is shape and itsmeaning. The outstanding exception to this is archae-ology, where the traditions of the subject have meantthat the interest in space has been driven by the pat-terns of real space as part of material remains thatarchaeological practice brings to light. Among thebest examples are (Pearson and Richards, 1994) andthe remarkable Rich and Wallace-Hadrill (1991).However, these studies with all their insights, do notin general propose a social theoretic perspective, butseek to make use of those that already exist.

Why then should there be such widespread talk aboutspace, and at the same time a theoretical shying awayfrom its principal manifestation in our everyday lives:the pervasive diurnal confrontation with the ‘patternof shaped and linked spaces’ that defines the frame-work of our collective lives. A cynic might suggestthat space is no more than fashionable talk, a renamingof familiar areas of enquiry as matters of space: thespace of gender, of neo-liberalism, of colonialism, ofimperialism, and so forth. But this would only generateanother question: why space? As Crang and Thriftsuggest, the real driving idea seems to be that spacehas become the covering term for a concern for themateriality of human existence: the embodiment ofthe mind in the body, the spatialization of the bodyin relation to others, the daily world of encounterand place, the formation, separation and overlappingof groups and the manifestation of the ‘relations of pro-duction’ and ‘relations of power’ in the material world.

The ‘spatial turn’ is perhaps really a turn to thematerial world in which one exists, and the idea ofspace expresses the idea that material existence mighthave form and pattern, from the study of which one

can learn about society itself. The ultimate source ofthis may lie is a near paradox in the study of societies,and perhaps in society itself: that while ‘society’, theobject of social theory, seems to be a highly abstractedconcept, and can nowhere be pointed to in the realworld, all our experience of society, and so our knowl-edge of it, comes in the highly materialized form of thesocial life of encounter and place. The material formsof our existence are then, to most theorists, not somuch of interest in themselves, but as signs of theirsocial causes, in all the senses in which they can beunderstood as materializations of otherwise abstractedsocial forms.

In this context, attention to spatial patterns withoutreference to the social processes creating those patternsis to turn away from the reasons for studying space. Byturning space itself into an object of thought in its ownright there is, according to the protagonists of the spa-tiality paradigm, a danger of falling into precisely thewestern centred, overly abstracted, unselfconscious,asymmetric view of the social universe of which theprincipal strands of the spatiality paradigm offer a fun-damental critique. Studying the forms of the materialworld other than in the light of their social causesseems to be to take a step back into the western dark-ness. For writers like Soja and Harvey (among others),this reason for the exclusion of real space from theagenda is quite explicit. Both started their academiccareers as part of the ‘quantitative revolution’ of the1960s, which saw the quantification of spatial patternsas part of a move towards a universal scientific geogra-phy set on a mathematical foundations. Both laterrejected this view of space as denuding space of itsessential interest: its social formation. For theseauthors, the idea that space in itself is a worthwhileobject of study then risks a repetition of what theseauthors had come to see as the intellectual error ofthe 1960s (Soja, 2001).

The problem with paradigms, however, is that theyprevent questions, even obvious ones, from beingraised. In the case of the spatiality paradigm there issuch obvious questions: are the spatial patternsthrough which social patterns are materialized thenarbitrary? Does social life generate a endless prolifer-ation of momentary patterns with no relation to eachother, only to their social causes? Is space completelyamorphous, and so nothing, until given shape bysocial agency. A moment’s reflection suggests thatthis cannot be the case. If one says that space reflectssociety, it is meant that one can detect in space somedescribable pattern which has in some sense been gen-erated by social forces. Within the realm of humanreason (which may of course be mistaken), onecannot both say this and expect these patterns to bearbitrary, since the very expectation of influenceimplies certain consistencies through which similarsocial forces would produce similar patterns, and

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different social forces different patterns. Indeed, thatthis is the case is clearly a key, if unstated, assumptionof most of the writers reviewed herein. If the patternsare arbitrary, it is not clear that it would be possibleto argue in a coherent way that space was beingshaped by society. To quote The Social Logic ofSpace (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) for there to be asocial logic of space, there must in the first instancebe a some kind of logic of space on which this can bebuilt.

To understand the space of social phenomena, then the‘space of space’ must also be investigated.Without this,the spatiality paradigm seems to have two conse-quences, one practical, the other theoretical. Practi-cally speaking, the outcome is the paradigmaticexclusion of real space from the theoretical agenda,even when it is part of the empirical agenda, and thiswould in itself deter engagement between socialtheory and those who create the built environment.The theoretical consequence is that the fundamentalpreoccupation of the founding fathers with the possibleagency of spatial transformation in social morphology,and so an independent role in creating the society–space nexus, is more or less excluded from thought.

Turning the question roundIt was these reflections that led, in the early 1980s, toan attempt to turn the question round and re-establishthe theoretical links between the spatial and socialworlds that had been so influential in setting the foun-dations of modern social theory (Hillier and Hanson,1984). The idea was to look at the society–spacerelation ‘space first’ by examining the patterns of realspace found in the built environment and asking inwhat sense these could be seen to be the outcome ofsocial and economic processes. This approach wascalled space syntax, to emphasizes its initial focus onreal space, and this has now grown into a researchcommunity of several hundred worldwide, supportinga biannual symposium attracting around 250 papers(http://www.spacesyntax.org), as well as spin-outcompanies applying the method to real projects.What follows will be a brief overview of the spacesyntax theory of real space and its social embedding,sufficient for the purposes of this paper. Readersseeking a more thorough recent introduction couldrefer to Hillier and Vaughan (2007), written for asocial science audience, to Hillier (2006), written foran architectural audience, or to Hillier (2007a),written for a cognitive science audience.

There was a major problem in the space syntaxresearch programme right from the start: how todescribe the difference between one spatial patternand another. This first came to light through trying tocharacterize the differences in the space patterns of

the social housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s,some of which were already beginning to show signsof precipitate decline – and so presented a challengeto socio-spatial thought – and ordinary urban spacepatterns based on networks of streets. In researchterms, it was clear that if spatial and social patternswere to be compared, then the spatial variable had tobe controlled. The problem of spatial description wasfundamental.

In fact, the lack of a means to describe the familiar andcommon patterns of space that structure the builtenvironment reflects a very much deeper difficulty,one to do with the nature of human minds and howone occupies the world and moves about in it: thereis no language to describe the difference between onepattern of space and another. Language has termsthat deal precisely with spatial relations involving atmost three entities, for example, the English preposi-tions such as between, inside, beyond, through are allterms which all describe with some precision therelations of three things. Words like among describemore, but at a cost of less precision. In general,languages lack terms to describe complex patterns ofspatial relations, and in fact complexes of relations ofany kind.

The reason for this is that spatial relations, andrelations in general, are so fundamental to how ‘embo-died minds’ exist in the world that they form part of themental apparatus we think with, rather than of. In thissense space is analogous to language. When one speaksor hears, one thinks of the words, butwith the syntacticand semantic rules that allows one to form words intomeaningful sentences. It is this unconscious under-standing of patterns that make speaking and hearingpossible. Space is the same. One deals with complexspatial patterns competently but intuitively, and,again as with language, one does not really understandhow this is done. This opens up an interesting possi-bility. One can, as with linguistics science, study thecomplex patterns of space that have been produced indifferent social, economic and cultural conditions,and the ways in which people use space, and throughthis try to expose the structure and cultural variabilityof what seems, prima facie, to be a human language ofspace.

Progress was made on the description problem by usingthe basic ideas of spatial relation built into language tocreate more general tools for describing and comparingforms of spatial complexity. This was called the config-urational approach. Configuration was defined asrelations which take into account other relations (asthe prepositions do), and methods developed tomeasure the relations between each space in acomplex and all the others, and in this way to assign‘configurational’ values to individual spaces describingthe links of each to all others. A key example was the

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‘integration’ value, which indexed how topologicallyclose each space in a complex was to all other spaces.An early discovery was that configurational analysiscould show that notions of function in buildingcould, for the first time, be given a clear spatialmeaning. The function of a space was not simply areflection of what went on in the space and the furnish-ings and equipment that supported the activity, butalso of configuration values describing the positioningof the space with respect to all other spaces in thelayout. By learning to measure the different ways inwhich spaces could be embedded in layout, and apply-ing the measures to, say, samples of vernacular houses,it could be shown that social and cultural patterningwas actually present in the plan of a house and its func-tioning, as well as in the minds of the inhabitants.Society could be found in the form of the artefact,and this could be expressed by a simple mathematicalway (Hillier et al., 1987; Hanson, 1999).

Working with samples of vernacular houses it was alsopossible to use these formal techniques to show moregeneral consistencies across cultures in the way inwhich space was used to express different socialideas. For example, the more segregated a space waswith respect to all others in a dwelling, then the morestrongly it tended to be defined as a special social cat-egory, and the stronger the rules governing its accessand use. For example a ‘front parlour’ in the UKtradition was the least spatially integrated groundfloor room in the house, and was rarely used, but itwas also the best furnished and decorated, andhoused the most important memorial items. Its pos-ition by the front door meant that it could be used tosupport formalized encounters, such as those involvingdifficult class relations, for example, when the vicar orthe insurance man called. This tendency to segregatecertain kind of spaces whose conceptual importancecoincided with the rarity of their use, in its extreme

form becomes the idea of the sacred, which is oftenexpressed by positioning the most sacred objects,such as a religious altar, in the ‘deepest space’ fromthe entrance. These transcultural commonalities werelater shown to be related to certain simple mathemat-ical principles governing the effect on the shaping andplacing of objects on ambient space (Hillier, 1996,2002, 2007a). Figure 1 shows some simple cases.

The analysis of street networks in settlements similarlyled to results where underlying spatial patterns seemedto compel a social interpretation. For example, bylooking at the complexity of routes in settlements, interms of the number of turns required to go fromeach streets to all others, a pattern of least complex(or most ‘integrated’) routes could usually be identifiedwhich took the form of a deformed wheel: a ‘hub’ ofstreets at or near the centre, strong ‘spokes’ reachingout towards the edges in all directions, and often partof the ‘rim’ on the edge of the settlement. Figure 2shows the case of Nicosia in Cyprus within the walls.

The deformed wheel itself, although brought to lightthrough a purely topological analysis of the network,were the high activity spaces with most of the shops,while the areas in the interstices of the wheel werethe quieter residential areas. So it was clear that thepattern brought to light by spatial analysis was also asocial pattern in that its raison d’etre was to accessstrangers from the edge to the centre of the city whileat the same time ensuring some degree of relative seg-regation for residential areas, and also ensuring thatmovement from and between the residential areaswould use the spaces of the deformed wheel that stran-gers were using. The deformed wheel thus functionedas a probabilistic device to generate and modulate theinterface between the inhabitants of the settlementand the visitors and strangers with whom they shareda micro-economic interdependence.

Figure 1 The ¢gure on the left shows that as one moves an object from a corner to a central location, total inter-visibility in the ambientspace, shown on a scale from red to blue, decreases.On the right, the total metric distance from each point to all others, shown in red forlow through to blue for high, increases as the object is moved from corner to centre. In both cases, the ‘interference effect’ of the object isincreased by a central rather than a peripheral location. Similar effects follow from changing the shape of the object: the more the area-to-perimeter ratio is increased, the less visual and metric relations in the ambient space are obstructed. These simple mathematicalprinciples, which seem to be known to human intuition, are pervasively implicated in the evolution of complexity in human space, whetherat the building or urban level

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The ability to analyse streets networks in terms thatrelated to their social functioning then led to a discov-ery that, in its turn, led to a new social theory of thecity. The discovery was that the spatial configurationof a street network was in and of itself a majorfactor – probably the major factor – in shaping move-ment flows (Hillier et al., 1993; Hillier and Iida, 2005;Penn et al., 1998). This meant that spatial configur-ation was in good part responsible for the ways inwhich patterns of human co-presence emerge in thenetwork. Once this was clear, it also became clearthat through its influence on movement flows and co-presence, the structure of the street network alsoshaped land-use patterns (Hillier, 1996), in that move-ment-dependent land uses like retail would naturallymigrate to locations which the network had made co-presence rich, while others, often including residence,would prefer the contrary. Once a shop went to alocation, it would act as an attractor for more move-ment, and this would set in train multiplier effectsthrough which the settlement would evolve into the

dual form of a foreground network of linked centres,each scaled according to its position in the network,set into a background network of residential space(Hillier, 2000). The more integrated foreground, orglobal, network tended to take a universal formbecause it was generated by micro-economic activity,and other things that people do together, while thebackground, more localized and more segregated,network was much more strongly shaped by culturalfactors, which would be different from one culturalregion to another, and even within the same city(Hillier and Vaughan, 2007).

The generality of this process suggests that the dualtheory of urban spatial and social form is in effect atheory of the self-organization of the city. Throughits agency, urban space, like the space within dwellings,comes to reflect the differentiation of the phases ofsocial life, such as going to the shops, or going homeor going to a religious ceremony, on a continuumfrom integration to segregation. The more integrated

Figure 2 Space syntax analysis of Nicosia in Cyprus within the walls, showing the ‘deformed wheel’ pattern that emerges from an‘integration’ analysis of the street network in the red and orange colours.The approximation of real movement rates from these analyseshas been argued to be intuitively expected (on re£ection), mathematically necessary, and empirically the case. Source: Hillier and Iida(2005)

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a space, the more its social effect was to generate higherrates of movement and co-presence, the more segre-gated the less. The semanticization of space, throughthe construction of different kinds of facades, decors,objects and other urban paraphernalia, throughwhich much of the sense of meaning in space is con-veyed, is then built on this foundation (Netto, 2007).The spatial structure of the city thus comes to reflectthe phasing and timing of our social lives in a seeminglynatural and quite complete way.

In effect human space in general, and in cities in par-ticular, can be seen to be used in two social modes: con-servatively to express, and so reproduce, an existingsocial pattern of social relations by using space segre-gatively to restrict and modulate encounter; andgeneratively to create new social potentials by maxi-mizing co-presence through movement. The under-lying principle is that spatial segregation tends toleave things as they are, while integration creates mor-phogenetic conditions in which new things can happenand new social patterns can be created. Thus socialadvantage often tends to seeks greater segregation tostabilize the status quo, as now through gated commu-nities, while social disadvantage has more to gain fromthe social potentials of integration (Hillier et al.,2000).

This dual process by which the structure of citiesevolves to link social to spatial patterns compelsanother key conclusion: that the relation of society tospace is generic, not specific. Cities appear as patternsof activity related to patterns of space, and this ishow the task of design is presented to the designer.But theoretically it is not like that. Space is creatednot directly by the interrelated demands of specificactivity patterns, but indirectly by the differentdemands that kinds of activity place on the movementand co-presence that is created by space. The basicdifferentiation between the micro-economic and cul-tural aspects of the dual city is of this kind. Urbanspace does not reflect the relation between this activityand that activity, but the generic relations betweenkinds of activity. This is why new patterns of activitythat constantly evolve as society changes so often fiteffortlessly into old patterns of space. There is alwayslikely to be a range of activities with differentdemands on movement and co-presence, and eachwill find it appropriate locus in the range of spacesavailable, provided that it is sufficiently rich.

Linking back to social theoryThese are propositions, then, that link spatial patternsto social life. They satisfy the demand for testable prop-ositions since they make clear predictions about therelations between space and its use. But they are alsotheoretical propositions that link directly to social

theory, both to the preoccupations of the spatialityparadigm and to the founding fathers’ preoccupationswith the relations between spatial factors and socialmorphology. In fact, a pervasive dimension of thefounding fathers’ morphological dichotomies seems,exactly, to be a distinction between the spatial andthe conceptual. The earliest form of this distinction isthe idea that human society moved from ‘kin-based’forms of organization, as in more dispersed ‘tribal-type’ societies, to a ‘territory-based’ form with spatialaggregation. Kin-based in this sense refers not tolocal family relations within the cohabiting group,but to conceptual systems of social categories, such asclans, built up on the basis of kinship and serving toform super-ordinate linkages between as well aswithin cohabiting groups. Little of this tends tosurvive in the urban world, so in at least one sensethe shift from a kin-based to a territory-based systemis also a shift from more to less social complexity.But whereas the elaboration of the conceptual systemwas about making links between dispersed groups,the elaboration of the territorial system was muchmore about regulating the problems that arise froman increased scale of cohabitation and proximity. Dur-kheim’s distinction between organic and mechanicalsolidarity, arguably the most theoretically powerfulof the founding fathers’ distinctions, clearly reflectsthis dichotomy. The organic solidarity of functionalinterdependence is a spatial notion, and requiresspatial integration in large and dense settlements tobecome fully realized. The mechanical solidarity ofsimilarities and beliefs is, in contrast, a conceptualidea, and as such works to relate segmental groupsindependently of space, and so under conditions ofrelative dispersal.

The space syntax theory extends this idea by proposingtwo synthetic ideas. First, that just as integration–seg-regation is a continuum, so is the spatial–conceptualdistinction. Second, that there is a dynamic inter-relation between the two continua. In the case of inte-gration–segregation, the key to bringing thecontinuum to light, and using it to clarify the dynamicsof city space, was quantification. So it is with thespatial–conceptual. Here the key to quantificationlies in the distinction between informal and formalhuman behaviour. The more formal the behaviour,the higher the ratio of rules to events; the more infor-mal, the lower the ratio. Ritual is the upper limitingconcept. Every act has to follow complex rules aboutexactly who does what and when. All human beha-viour varies on the dimension formal–informal,depending on who is involved and in what situation,but by and large informal codes govern recursive beha-viours in everyday space, while formal behaviour isassociated with the rarer special events, dispersed intime as well as in space, that create relations acrossgreater physical and social distanciation, and sobetween rather than within groups.

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The continuum integration–segregation then exists inan active and dynamic relation with the continuuminformal–formal. Formal, time–space-segregatedsystems are used to overcome distance and reproduceexisting patterns in society, and informal, integratedsystems are used to create the densities of high activitythat permit morphogenesis and so move society on.The two are most clearly reflected in the dual structureof the city between the busyness of the network oflinked centres and the quieter and more rule-governedresidential areas where culture is more fully expressedin spatial form. But the parallelism of the two continuais as pervasive in everyday life, where more formalbehaviours are routinely used when relations involvingsocial or physical distance are involved, and informalbehaviours are routinely used when they are not, as itis in social morphology. These ideas are developedmore fully by Hillier (2002, 2007b).

Forming testable propositions about realspaceThemethodologies of space syntax and their associatedsocial theory are now increasingly also used both toreformulate and to address research questions aboutcities and to create a more rigorous and evidence-based prediction of social outcomes from spatialforms at the design stage. Examples of research ques-tions that have been addressed recently through spacesyntax include the spatial and social pathology offailing housing estates (Hillier, 1996; Hillier andVaughan, 2007), the economic and social developmentof self-generated settlements (Hillier et al., 2002), thespatialization of migration groups (Vaughan andPenn, 2006; Vaughan, 2007), the spatial definitionof urban areas (Hillier et al., 2007), the spatialdynamics of work environments (Penn et al., 1999),and the micro-analysis of spatial patterns of urbancrime (Hillier, 2004; Hillier and Sahbaz, 2007,forthcoming).

The space syntax package of method and theory is alsoused on an expanding portfolio of real projects, notleast through the University College London (UCL)spin-out company Space Syntax Ltd (http://www.spa-cesyntax.com). The application procedure involves firstmaking a model of the urban area in which develop-ment is proposed, testing it by directly observing exist-ing movement and land-use patterns, and thencorrelating these with spatial patterns. To the degreethat the model is able to account for the existing func-tional patterns, a tested model exists with which to gen-erate and test conjectural solutions to the designproblem in hand. In this sense, evidence-based designcan include both site-specific evidence provided by thecontext of a development and the theoretical evidenceprovided by the accumulation of studies. Once thetested model exists, candidate designs produced by

built environment professionals can themselves betreated as testable propositions by inserting the pro-posed spatial pattern into the model and rerunningthe analysis to see how the proposed pattern works inthe context of, and affects, the pattern of the surround-ing area. Typically, a series of improving designs areexplored, gradually converging on the pattern thatmost fulfils the social objectives of the design. Theaim of this procedure is to set design increasinglymore into the context of understanding of the self-orga-nizing processeswhich are pervasive in all cities, so thatdesign can work with these processes rather than, as sooften in recent history, under the influence of socialideologies masquerading as theory against them.

The space of spaceThe analysis of real space is not then the slide-rulealternative to the social analysis of space, but themeans to it. To understand the space of differentfields of human activity, one must first investigate the‘space of space’. By clarifying how space is manipul-able, it can be seen how it is manipulated, and why itworks for a particular social purpose. This is to sayno more than that to understand what space is sayingone must learn its language. Space has an active andstructured engagement with social life, and withoutunderstanding this one cannot fully realize the theoreti-cal promise of the social study of space. With a theori-zation of the ‘space of space’ in place, one can both setup testable propositions for space creation and linkback to the founding fathers of social theory in theiracknowledgement that space was a factor in humanexistence.

But there are intellectual obstacles. For reasons dis-cussed above, the spatiality paradigm has been insis-tent that space does not have a meaningful existenceindependent of social agency, that there is then noquestion of space having laws of its own, and certainlyspace can have no agency in human affairs. The space–syntax approach suggests the opposite of all threemight turn out to be the case. The social behaviour ofspace can only be understood by first understandingits potential to behave at all, and this means studyingspace itself as a variable phenomenon. Space not onlybehaves lawfully when manipulated, but also theselaws are the means by which it has agency in humanaffairs (Hillier, 2007a) – not agency in the old senseof spatial determinism, but in the sense that spatialconfigurations provide the conditions for the emer-gence of different kinds of complexity in humanaffairs, given only the continuation of everydayactivity, and the fact that human beings consistentlyand knowledgeably manipulate space for social pur-poses. The space of cities and the functioning of citiesare emergent phenomena built on this knowledgeableactivity of creating and using space.

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There are also more philosophical obstacles. Not leastis the curious idea of science as being overly concernedwith the abstract and inattentive to the material worldthat has come to prevail in so many areas of humanisticenquiry. Real science is not like that at all. It is aboutbeing careful enough in the observation of the world,and clear enough in the way ideas about it are formu-lated, for those ideas to be proved wrong by theworld. Science in not the imposition of abstractschemes of thought on the physical world, but the con-stant demolition such schemes of thought and theirreplacement with tentative and temporary alternatives.Space syntax does not claim to be science – that issomething to be achieved – but it does aspire to thestandards of science by seeking to be sufficiently clearand consistent in its descriptions of what space islike, and sufficiently careful in its observations ofspace at work for tentative theoretical formulationsto be proved wrong. When ideas have been shown tobe wrong, then often it is protracted attention to theworld at work, and the confrontation of unexpectedand unexplained phenomena, that lead to the formu-lation of a new ideas which can then be clarified andtested (Hacking, 1983).

This more pragmatic view of how science works hasinteresting affinities with the philosophy of GillesDeleuze, perhaps the key philosopher of the orientationtowards the material world that underlies much late20th-century interest in space. A guiding notion inDeleuze’s work is transcendental empiricism (Deleuze,1963/83). Defined in contradistinction to ImmanuelKant’s transcendental idealism, through which the mindimposes its categories on the world, Deleuze’s conceptmeans that the worldwith all is complexities and contra-diction is the most fertile source for thought. It is theworld that leads one to move beyond the accepted con-ceptualizations that structure thought, and guides oneto new concepts and new modes of thought. Deleuze’sphilosophy is usually thought of as being somehow anti-thetical to science, but with one more step it surely isscience. In science, the source of new theoretical ideas israrely simply abstract thought.More often it is the bring-ing to light of new phenomena which are inconsistentwith the existing theoretical models, and so demandnovel theoretical thought inspired by the intractabilityof the world to the abstractions imposed on it.

The difference is the expectation of finding useful order,as opposed to the endless restatement of how complexthe world is and how resistant it is to understanding.But this is the challenge in areas of the intellectualworld where the failure to understand can lead, as the20th century showed, to such high costs in terms of theperpetuation of social disadvantage and the reductionof life space. In the field of space creation through thebuilt environment it is worth solving these problems.The hope of the space syntax paradigm is to contributeits own speciality – the space of space – to a more

synthetic and less philosophically constrained interdisci-plinary effort to find clear formulations for these pro-blems and so some prospect of better resolutions. Spacesyntax is not the inverse of the spatiality paradigm, butits ‘other half’. As such, it is the means by which thesocial study of space can engage fully both with its owntheoretical development and also with the real-worldissues which await its attention.

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Endnote1The same can be said of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab his-torian whose ‘introduction to the philosophy of history’, TheMuqaddimah, can plausible be argued to be the first text ofmodern social theory, centred as it was on the evolutionaryrelations between nomadic and urban societies.

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