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

Space and spatiality: what the built

environment needs from social theory
Bill Hillier
Bartlett School of Graduate Studies,University College London (UCL),Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT,UK
E-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 labsence 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 linadequation de ces croyances. Le proble`me 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 sappelle 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 quelles approchent toutes deux la societe dabord dans la relation
Environnement Societe en ce sens que la forme de lenvironnement est recherchee comme le produit des dimensions
spatiales des processus sociaux. Cest ce quon appelle le mode`le Spatialite et on note que de telles approches nont
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. Lalternative est de retourner
la question et par des etudes sur lenvironnement dabord de rechercher la preuve de processus sociaux dans les
formes spatiales du milieu bati. De recents travaux de cette nature sont brie`vement decrits dans le mode`le
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 ISSN 0961-3218 print ISSN 1466-4321 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis
http: www.tandf.co.uk journals
DOI: 10.1080/09613210801928073

Space and spatiality

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 is

going on in the real world for instance,
changes in the space of communication which
means that certain kinds of geographical distance
are compromised spaces in theory for
example the assumption of mobility in all its
forms and actual space say cities like Paris
or Berlin or Naples, to name but three cities
that now stand as idiolects.
(Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 1)

Built environment and social theory: the

need for design-level theories
The design and planning of the built environment is
about adapting the physical and spatial surroundings
for human purposes: to make communities work, to
facilitate business, to make organizations efficient, to
support family life, and so on. In practical terms, the
usable outcomes are patterns of shaped and interlinked
spaces intended to facilitate social aims. The translation of social purposes into space then presupposes
that something is known about how patterns of living
and working can be affected, for good or ill, by the
physical and spatial forms imposed on them. In fact,
beyond common-sense and accumulated experience,
little is known. The deceptively simple questions
posed by designers will this work for these
people? and is this solution better than that in this
context? often conceal far-reaching questions
about the relations between spatial patterning and
social outcomes to which answers have rarely been
sought, let alone found.
But it is through these questions that the concerns
of the built environment professional intersect with
those of the social theorist. It might have been expected
that an increasingly self-conscious society, aware of the
high-cost-risk of errors that led, for example, to the
early demolition of much social housing of the 1960s
and 1970s, might have provided the stimulus for collaborations to try and find answers to these questions.
On the whole, this has not happened, and one of the
aims of this paper is to suggest why. In fact, in real situations where a possible impact of the built environment
on social outcomes is debated, social scientists, or those
with a social science background, are far more likely to
deny agency to the built environment in the genesis of
social problems than to seek to explain it. Those who
believe that design may have had a negative social
effect tend to be faced on the one hand with architects,

whose professional self interest militates against

acknowledging this possibility, and social scientists
who claim to know that in principle no such effects
can exist.
In the absence of any meeting of minds or sharing of
interests by social theorists and built environment professionals, what is found in practice is that, at any time,
there are a number of conventional, theory-like propositions that link spatial forms to social outcomes.
These powerfully influence design and planning for a
while, so much so that they seem to have the kind of
force associated with paradigmatic ideas in science.
For example, in the second half of the 20th century it
was widely believed that breaking up large residential
developments into small, inward-looking courtyards
or piazzas would promote stronger local communities,
that lower population densities would lessen crime and
social malaise, that open-plan schools would support
child-centred learning, and even that public open
spaces with good enclosure would be successful and
well used. These ideas, often presented as solutions to
past problems, seem with hindsight to have been
more part of the problem than the solution (Hillier,
1988).
Where these ideas come from would require a Foucaultian enquiry into the archaeology of concepts
(Foucault, 1972). But in the absence of either an
unconscious vernacular tradition, through which
spatial and social patterning tends to be linked by culturally endorsed building and living practices (Glassie,
1976), or testable propositions linking spatial design
and social outcomes, the need for theory-like ideas in
the strategic phases of design defining design in the
broad sense of the choices and decisions made by
built environment professionals in creating and modifying the built environment to bridge from design
decisions to outcomes seems to call into existence
quasi-theoretical ideas improvised from the general
background of ideas and beliefs fashionable at the
time. The examples given are particularly interesting
because although they seemed self-evident at the time
to their advocates, and informed design practice over
an extended period, their evidence base was always
poor to non-existent, and enough experience has
accrued over the years to suggest they are probably
wrong. Residential developments shaped by the first
idea, such as the Marquess estate in Islington,
London (Hillier et al., 1983; Li and Rainwater,
2006), turned out to be overly fragmented and cut off
from the public realm and shared the fate of others in
being pulled down or radically redesigned. Ideas
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Hillier

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 learning
they were associated with are under fierce attack.
And open spaces, such as Trafalgar Square, have
been radically improved by redesigning them to integrate into the urban area and its movement patterns,
at the cost of a reduction in enclosure.
This theoretical rakes progress in the way the built
environment is created has not been because writers
in the field of social theory have not been interested
in questions related to the built environment. On the
contrary, the last quarter of the 20th century was
marked by a series of seminal texts that are both
social theoretical and focus on such questions as the
nature and future of cities, and the relation between
human 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, these
city-centred books have formed the cutting edge of
reflection on a changing society, even though the
authors are not always formally trained social theorists. But in general these texts, many of which share a
background in the Marxist critique of capitalism, are
aimed at the macro-level of the changing economic
and social processes within which built environments
are formed, and their implications for the experience
of the city, and rarely engage the levels of resolution
at which built environment professionals intervene in
the real world. Their relevance to design-level theories
tends then to be more contextual than substantive.
These reflections define the scope of this paper. It will
focus on those parts of social theory that might lead
to theoretical propositions which link physical and
spatial forms to social outcomes at the design-level,
defining this as the level at which built environment
professionals typically intervene in the built environment. It will not attempt to engage the many areas of
social theory that offer no prospect of useful propositions of this kind. It is at this level of real space,
that is, of the shaped and linked spaces which people
inhabit in an everyday sense, that the substitution of
social beliefs for testable theory seems to have led to
past problems, and the need for testable theories at
this level is justified by the all-too-frequent experience
that in the past it has often taken decades, sometimes
with substantial social damage, for these social
beliefs to lose their force. It should also be noted that
with the experience of past failure, many who invest
resources in the built environment are now demanding
evidence-based functional design, using tested, or at
least testable, theories as well as high-quality visual
design. The question of relating the built environment
to social theory then comes down to a lead issue:
how to replace the shifting beliefs that guide the way
218

one tries to link the built environment to social outcomes with more testable and theoretically grounded
propositions which, at the stage at which the environment is created, are better able to reflect the realities of
social behaviour and outcomes. It is at this level of real
space that the relation between social theory and the
built environment becomes substantive rather than
contextual.
The argument in the paper takes the following form.
Social theory is first examined under two of its most
relevant 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 aspects of social processes. This is identified as
the spatiality paradigm, and it is argued that such
approaches have never reached, and probably can
never reach, the level of precision about the built
environment which would be needed to find 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 form of the built environment.
Recent work of this kind within the space syntax
paradigm is outlined to show 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.

Urban sociology
The roots of a specifically urban sociology lie in the
fact that the founding fathers of modern social
science in the 19th century saw the emergence of
modern cities and urban societies from a pre-industrial
or tribal background as the decisive event in the formation of modern societies and so most in need of
description and explanation.1 Many of the most influential concepts that shaped the subsequent development of social theory were grounded in this problem.
For example, Ferdinand Tonnies (1887) believed that
pre-urban village societies were unified by a form of
social coherence he called Gemeinshaft (usually translated as community, but probably best left in the original German and explained), by which he meant a
system of common traditions and cooperative behaviours formed out of the warp and weft of kinship
and neighbourhood, and so providing an all-embracing
framework for a collective life that took precedence
over the individual. In contrast, he saw urban societies
as being based on Gesellshaft (usually translated as
association, but again best untranslated and
explained), which he saw as a more contractual form
of collective life based on competitive individuals,
each of whom provided a service to the whole, which
was then constructed out of artificial rather than
natural bonds.

Space and spatiality

Emil Durkheim (1893/1964) proposed a similar, but in

many ways subtler and less value-loaded, distinction
between what he called the mechanical solidarity of
pre-urban societies and the organic solidarity found
at the urban stage. Durkheim noted that human
beings become interrelated in two basically different
ways: by similarities, such as shared beliefs and identities, and by differences, such as different occupations,
which bring about functional interdependence. Mechanical solidarity was rooted in the former, organic solidarity in the latter. The principal factor in the historic
shift from one to the other was what he called moral
density, meaning something like the density of social
interconnections, one factor in which was population
density. Again, these concepts have often been
adapted in the development of modern social theory.
Both Tonnies and Durkheim were trying to explain
the phenomenon that in cities social life appears to be
at once more free and individualistic, and at the same
time more constrained by social differences and
inequalities. Both also presuppose an interdependence
between the evolution of settlement forms and social
morphology.
This focus on the transformations of society brought
about by urbanization was continued by writers like
Georg Simmel (1908, 1950) and Louis Wirth (1938).
Early in his career, Simmel was concerned with the
impact of real space on social interaction, and vice
versa, and explored concepts of proximity, distance
and boundary, but over time this grew into a wider
concern with the city as a transformation of social
experience and psychological attitude. He was trying
to account for what seemed to him the increasing
impersonalization of life in the city. He traced this to
the range and intensity of social and physical experiences which the environment of the city brought
about, leading people to become more detached and
rational, and at the same time more individualistic.
A generation later, Wirth focused on three population
factors which he saw as bringing about distinctively
urban lifestyles: numbers, density and heterogeneity.
The first two caused the third, and the third was
largely responsible for the transformation of social
relations into their characteristic urban form. Heterogeneity implied individual variation, and this led to
the weakening of primary contacts, such as those
based on kinship, and an increase in more impersonal
secondary ones. This lessened the importance of
neighbourhood, and so undermined traditional
forms of social coherence. Looking back, Simmels
and Wirths theories of the interrelation between
settlement forms and lifestyle seem today over generalized, and perhaps also too pessimistic about the
social, mental and emotional life that is found in
cities, but both, like the founding fathers, saw the
spatial aspects of urban aggregation as instrumental
in bringing about the changes in society that come
about with cities.

The first social theorists to try to account for the actual

spatial structures cities were those broadly identified
(though questionably) as the Chicago or Ecological
School of the 1920s. Influenced by analogies with
natural processes, a principal concern was to account
for the distribution of land uses, populations and pathologies such as crime in the city. The work of this school,
particularly that of Earnest Burgess (1925), originated
much of the standard terminology with which land use
and population patterns in cities are still described.
Burgesss original concentric ring model generated a
series of attempted improvements first through Homer
Hoyts (1939) sector theory, then, through Harris and
Ullmans (1945) multiple nuclei theory. However, this
line of work took a more exclusively economic view of
the drivers of city form, and was less interested in a
more broadly social theory, and this has remained the
case with modern heirs of this tradition in the urban
modelling movement (Wilson, 2000).
Although these texts are still taught as the foundation
of urban theory one has to teaching something in
the theory course! urban sociology today has
moved away from the early theoretical ambition of
the founding fathers to understand the relations
between social morphology and settlement form, and
the aim of the Chicago School to characterize formally
processes that gave rise to the pattern of areal occupation and land use found in cities, to a more exclusive
focus on the study of the changing characteristics and
spatial distributions of urban populations, and the
range of experience and problems they engender,
such as the interrelation of ethnic or socio-economic
groups. This shift to a more limited point of view is
perhaps best explained by Saunders (1995), which
explains that while Saunderss initial interest was in
urban sociology, he found himself increasingly
preoccupied with the following question: is there
such a thing as a distinctive urban sociology, in the
sense of being about a distinctively urban form of
society, as opposed to a sociology about issues which
come up in cities as well as elsewhere?
Saunders book is essentially a review of the founding
fathers who had seemed to argue for the distinctiveness
of urban societies. But Saunders casts doubt on this:
Despite their very different approaches and concerns, Weber, Durkheim and Marx and Engels
all came to very similar conclusions as regards
the analysis of urban questions. All agreed that
the city played a historically specific role in the
development of western capitalism, but they all
agreed that once capitalism has become established, the city ceased to be a theoretically significant category of analysis. This was because it was
no longer the expression and form of a new mode
of production (Marx), or because it ceased to be
the basis of human association and social identity
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Hillier

(Weber), or because it no longer corresponded to

the geographical boundaries of the division of
labour (Durkheim). . . . The city, in other
words, was not seen as a significant object of
study in its own right, and urban questions
were addressed only insofar as they could contribute to an understanding of certain processes
associated with the development of modern
capitalism.
(Saunders, 1995, p. 249)
He adds in his Preface that:
each of these different approaches to urban sociology has foundered on the attempts to fuse a
theory of specific social processes with an analysis of spatial forms. The conclusion . . . is that
these two questions are, with one minor exception [which Saunders calls the social significance
of space, which he suggests is of very limited
interest] distinct and mutually exclusive.
If Saunders is right, then the prospect of finding useful
linkages between social theory and the spatial and
physical 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 does
not address explicitly: is this the end of history? If
the spatial processes that urbanization entailed
played a role on the evolution of urbanized societies,
could spatial processes which might broadly be called
de-urbanization contribute to their deconstruction?
De-urbanization has been seen before, for example in
the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and
the feudal system in Dark Age Europe (Pirenne,
1927/69), and this was very much a spatial as well as
social transformation. The real question about the
future is perhaps not how many people live in or out
of cities, or whether or not there is a distinctive sociology of cities, but what would a society be like
without cities as they are currently known, if, as
some argue, cities could eventually disappear as the
conditions which made spatial aggregation necessary
cease to exist? Would a society with the spatial form
of, say, a patchwork of discrete gated islands of development with separate specialized centres for administration and business, or the continuous countryside of
William Morriss anti-urban socialist fantasy News
from Nowhere, still be like the present urbanized
societies, or would they mutate into something else?
These issues are not seen as belonging to urban sociology, but they are relevant to indeed key questions
for the more general study of society and space that
has become an intellectual fashion in recent years, and
which poses the question: what is the interdependence,
if any, between human societies and the ways in which
they manifest themselves in spatial form?
220

Society and space

The problem with the society and space question is
not only that it is the broadest form of the question
about social theory and the built environment, but
also that it is subject to a mesmerizing diversity of
approaches. Historically, the space society relation
has long been formulated as a key question in social
geography, and in 1980 Robert Sack could lucidly
review the main strands of thought and theoretical
issues within a single book Conceptions of Space in
Social Thought (1980). Within two decades, space
had become a critical theme in many of the human
sciences, from sociology (Giddens, 1983, 1984) to the
cognitive sciences (Bloom et al., 1996), but even
more so in the movement of late 20th-century
thought broadly known as post-modernism.
In 1997, Benko and Strohmeyer (1997) could entitle
their reader on interpreting modernity and post-modernity Space and Social Theory, and within its pages
cover at least 56 areas where space was a significant
category of thought. Space had become the most
capacious of concepts. As Crang and Thrift (2000,
p. 1) wrote in their overview reader:
Space is the everywhere of modern thought. It is
the flesh that flatters the bones of theory. It is al
all purpose nostrum to be applied whenever
things look sticky.
Crang and Thrifts book brings some order into the chaos
by assembling and introducing essays on 16 of the most
cited authors on some aspect of space in the social
sciences. Although scarcely any two seem to share
common theoretical ground, Crang and Thrift point
out that there are shared meta-theoretical assumptions:
What is clear is that space is not considered by any
of these writers to be outside the realm of practice.
(p. 2)
The headings under which the editors make their introductory review exemplify the common ground as well as
the diversity: spaces of language, of the self and other, of
metonymy (an entity which stands for something more
complex, as in this case Paris as a metonym for modernity and Los Angeles for post-modernity), of experience, and of writing. In each case, space is held
to acquire recognizable form through the agency of
some social practice or process, and space is of
interest because it structures the experienced world
in terms of these practices or processes. As the
editors say (p. 2), these all exemplify, as with geography
in general:
[a] moving away from a sense of space as a practico-inert container of action towards space as a
socially produced set of manifolds.

Space and spatiality

The critique of space as a practico-inert container of

action is symptomatic of two pervasive themes in
this difficult and, some might suspect, inchoate literature. One is the almost casual demonization of scientific approaches to space in terms of:
[a] quest for purity for purity and abstract reason
that simulates some of the worst aspects of
Enlightenment thinking . . ., the space of theory
is a purified space, defined by the purging
of real spatiality and the creation of a space of
thought where processes appear to be able to
able to operate without geographical location
or extent.
(Crang and Thrift, 2000, p. 2)
This view of science, which some might regard as a caricature, seems to have the power of a universal trump
card which once played stops all argument in its
tracks. But it is hard to reconcile this insistence that
the space of a scientific theory must be overly
abstracted from social reality with even the most quantitative approaches to geographical space, as in the
Chicago School or the wider urban modelling movement (Wilson, 2000), which have always been driven
by the task of examining the spatial patterns produced
by social and economic activity and seeking to understand the space of the city as the product of this
pattern forming. Give or take the over-wrought terminology, this would seem to be exactly a case of showing
the space of the city to be a socially produced manifold, a collective result produced by individual
localized activity.
The second pervasive theme in this literature is the
apparent exclusion from this social production of
manifolds of the central theme: the real space of the
built environment, that is the patterns of shaped and
interlinked spaces referred to at the beginning of this
paper. In fact, early in their introduction Crang and
Thrift (2000) propose the distinction used as the prefatory quote for the present paper:
In the literature it is common to mix up what is
going on in the real world for instance,
changes in the space of communication which
means that certain kinds of geographical distance
are compromised spaces in theory for
example the assumption of mobility in all its
forms and actual space say cities like Paris
or Berlin or Naples, to name but three cities
that now stand as idiolects.
(p. 1)
It might be expected that actual space, that is the
organized, ordinary space of cities as experienced on
a day-to-day basis, would be a candidate for being
seen as a socially produced manifold. The motivation
of 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 to
the nature and origins of the spaces themselves and
their interrelations, and so much attention to highly
abstracted accounts of the experiential side. In fact,
there seems to be a paradox: in spite of the critique
of scientific approaches as overly abstracted, the real
space of everyday experience is characterized in these
diverse texts almost exclusively in terms of models of
resolute and unrelenting abstraction with little apparent grasp on the everyday physicality of the spaces in
which human beings live.

The spatiality paradigm

It seems strange then that the spatially embodied
reasoning said to be the characteristics of postmodern approaches to space should lead to the exclusion of real space from the agenda (Michell, 2002).
On reflection, it might be suggested that, in contrast
to the founding fathers, most 20th-century
approaches to space have, in spite of their diversity,
worked within certain shared assumptions. The question about society and its spatial form, in whatever
mode or format it is posed, offers a fundamental
choice. It can either be approached from society to
space, or from space to society, that is by working
from social theory towards the spatial environment,
or from the spatial environment toward social theory.
To most social scientists it has always seemed selfevident that one must take the former route, since it
is surely society that determines space and not space
that determines society. The approach to the city that
this generates is one of trying to see the spatial environment as the spatial output, and so as the by-product, of
social, economic and perhaps cognitive processes. The
society-first assumption might reasonably be called
the spatiality paradigm, since it does not question the
idea the link from society to space should be sought
through an examination of the spatiality of social
processes.
This paradigmatic stance clearly applies to the Chicago
School modellers, who saw the changing population
and land use characteristics of urban areas as
the outcome of social and economic competition at
the level of individuals and firms. It applies equally to
the wider urban modelling movement, which seeks
to simulate the dynamics of cities as the products of
spatial economics, as recently reviewed lucidly in
Wilson (2000). It is equally clearly the underlying
assumption of the cutting edge texts from Lefebvre,
Harvey, Soja, Castells and others referred to above
that are in all cases attempts find the city and its
space as the product of much wider processes of economic and social change. In this sense the broadly
speaking post-modern approaches reviewed by
Crang and Thrift can and perhaps should be seen as
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Hillier

the continuation of this paradigm by other means.

Note, however, that it was not part of the paradigmatic
apparatus of all of the founding fathers, who assigned
spatial factors a far more instrumental, though far
from fully clear, role in shaping social morphology.

and urban spaces. In fact, at the end of the book,

Giddens is at pains to distance himself from real
space in this sense, since to engage with this would
be to presuppose that it might in itself be of social interest. In principle, Giddens argues, this cannot be so:

It is not unreasonable then to argue that the spatiality

paradigm is the common ground for most 20thcentury social scientific approaches to the society
space question, unifying the most hard-edged urban
modellers and the softest of post-modern writers.
Nowhere, perhaps, is it more clearly articulated than
in the work of one of the best known and spaceconscious of current social theorists, Anthony
Giddens. One of Giddenss explicit early aims was to
bring space and time back into the heart of social theorizing correctly implying their previous exclusion
partly because social theory had concentrated so much
on characterizing abstract social institutions that it was
unable to deal effectively with the fabric of social life
which is the main source of the experience of society.
Giddens had also been influenced by the social geography of such writers as Hagerstrand (1978), who tried
to develop methods to record the actual traces in
space that people make in conducting their social lives.

to suppose that space has its own intrinsic nature

. . . is logically questionable and empirically
unfruitful. Space is not an empty dimension
along which social groupings become structured,
but has to be considered in terms of its involvement in the constitution of systems of interaction
. . . in human geography spatial forms are always
social forms.

Giddenss argument is put forward most fully in The

Constitution of Society (1984) though it is in abbreviated and in some senses more accessible form in his
earlier A Critique of Historical Materialism (1983).
Put simply, Giddens proposal is that social structures
are virtual, or immaterial, entities, but they appear in
space time as concrete situated practices, that is as
social behaviours and interactions that occur, as they
must, in real space time locations. Giddenss key
spatial argument is that these virtual social structures
are produced and even more importantly reproduced
by being realized in space time. In other words,
society may be virtual, but it only really exists and
projects itself through time by being realized in dispersed space time practices. So the pattern of situated
practices is not itself the structure of society, but it is
through dispersed situated practices that the virtual
structure of society is made real for us and, more
importantly, reproduced. Giddens makes and is
probably arguing from an analogy with language.
Language, he argues, exists in the same way. It is
only by being used that is projected into space
time by being spoken and written that the virtual
structure of language is perpetuated through generations. This is a simple, but very subtle argument,
since it allows space to play a critical role in society
without any whiff of the spatial mechanism or
determinism that seems to terrorize sociologists.
However, although Giddens sees space as playing a key
role in the production and reproduction of society, he
says nothing about the production and reproduction
of the real space of shaped and linked architectural
222

In other words, Giddens makes it clear that space is

only of interest insofar as it is constructed by the spatiality of human processes. Real space, insofar as it is of
interest, is as the contingent by product of the spatiality
of social processes. So Giddens does not aim to reach
the level and kind of real space at which built environment professional intervene, because he does not
believe that it is of interest to social theory.
Soja is equally clear:
a key first step in recognizing a socio-spatial dialectic is to recognise that physical space has been
a misleading epistemological foundation upon
which to analyze the concrete and subjective
meaning of human spatiality. . . . Space in itself
may be primordially given, but the organization,
and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation, and experience.
(Soja, 1989, pp. 79 80)
So is Sojas mentor, Lefebvre:
instead of uncovering the social relationships
(including class relationships) that are latent in
spaces, instead of concentrating our attention
on the production of space and the social
relationships inherent in it . . . we fall into the
trap of treating space in itself, as space as such
. . . and so fetishise space in a way reminiscent
of 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 predicated on, among other things, a certain division
of labour and a certain hierarchical ordering of
activity which is broadly consistent with the
dominant mode of production. The city and
urbanism can therefore function to stabilize a
particular mode of production (they both help

Space and spatiality

create the conditions for the self-perpetuation of

that mode).
(Harvey, 1973, p. 203)

The missing question: the space of space

In all its manifestations, then, a component of the spatiality paradigm seems to be a denial that real space is
in itself of theoretical interest. This does not mean, of
course, that it is not of empirical interest. On the contrary, the late 20th century saw a flowering of studies
of space of all kinds: domestic (for example,
Csikszsentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981;
Kirby, 1996; Cieraad, 1999), urban (Sibley, 1995;
King, 1996), and anthropological (Low and
Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003). But as the titles suggest,
these again do not engage directly with the patterns
of shaped and interlinked spaces of everyday life,
either as an object of investigation of as an entity of
theoretical interest. Even in these studies, the
common assumption seems to be that space acquires
significance by being seen in terms of some other
agency or process which gives it is shape and its
meaning. The outstanding exception to this is archaeology, where the traditions of the subject have meant
that the interest in space has been driven by the patterns of real space as part of material remains that
archaeological practice brings to light. Among the
best examples are (Pearson and Richards, 1994) and
the remarkable Rich and Wallace-Hadrill (1991).
However, these studies with all their insights, do not
in general propose a social theoretic perspective, but
seek to make use of those that already exist.
Why then should there be such widespread talk about
space, and at the same time a theoretical shying away
from its principal manifestation in our everyday lives:
the pervasive diurnal confrontation with the pattern
of shaped and linked spaces that defines the framework of our collective lives. A cynic might suggest
that space is no more than fashionable talk, a renaming
of familiar areas of enquiry as matters of space: the
space of gender, of neo-liberalism, of colonialism, of
imperialism, and so forth. But this would only generate
another question: why space? As Crang and Thrift
suggest, the real driving idea seems to be that space
has become the covering term for a concern for the
materiality of human existence: the embodiment of
the mind in the body, the spatialization of the body
in relation to others, the daily world of encounter
and place, the formation, separation and overlapping
of groups and the manifestation of the relations of production and relations of power in the material world.
The spatial turn is perhaps really a turn to the
material world in which one exists, and the idea of
space expresses the idea that material existence might
have form and pattern, from the study of which one

can learn about society itself. The ultimate source of

this may lie is a near paradox in the study of societies,
and perhaps in society itself: that while society, the
object of social theory, seems to be a highly abstracted
concept, and can nowhere be pointed to in the real
world, all our experience of society, and so our knowledge of it, comes in the highly materialized form of the
social life of encounter and place. The material forms
of our existence are then, to most theorists, not so
much of interest in themselves, but as signs of their
social causes, in all the senses in which they can be
understood as materializations of otherwise abstracted
social forms.
In this context, attention to spatial patterns without
reference to the social processes creating those patterns
is to turn away from the reasons for studying space. By
turning space itself into an object of thought in its own
right there is, according to the protagonists of the spatiality paradigm, a danger of falling into precisely the
western centred, overly abstracted, unselfconscious,
asymmetric view of the social universe of which the
principal strands of the spatiality paradigm offer a fundamental critique. Studying the forms of the material
world other than in the light of their social causes
seems to be to take a step back into the western darkness. For writers like Soja and Harvey (among others),
this reason for the exclusion of real space from the
agenda is quite explicit. Both started their academic
careers as part of the quantitative revolution of the
1960s, which saw the quantification of spatial patterns
as part of a move towards a universal scientific geography set on a mathematical foundations. Both later
rejected this view of space as denuding space of its
essential interest: its social formation. For these
authors, the idea that space in itself is a worthwhile
object of study then risks a repetition of what these
authors had come to see as the intellectual error of
the 1960s (Soja, 2001).
The problem with paradigms, however, is that they
prevent questions, even obvious ones, from being
raised. In the case of the spatiality paradigm there is
such obvious questions: are the spatial patterns
through which social patterns are materialized then
arbitrary? Does social life generate a endless proliferation of momentary patterns with no relation to each
other, only to their social causes? Is space completely
amorphous, and so nothing, until given shape by
social agency. A moments reflection suggests that
this cannot be the case. If one says that space reflects
society, it is meant that one can detect in space some
describable pattern which has in some sense been generated by social forces. Within the realm of human
reason (which may of course be mistaken), one
cannot both say this and expect these patterns to be
arbitrary, since the very expectation of influence
implies certain consistencies through which similar
social forces would produce similar patterns, and
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different social forces different patterns. Indeed, that

this is the case is clearly a key, if unstated, assumption
of most of the writers reviewed herein. If the patterns
are arbitrary, it is not clear that it would be possible
to argue in a coherent way that space was being
shaped by society. To quote The Social Logic of
Space (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) for there to be a
social logic of space, there must in the first instance
be a some kind of logic of space on which this can be
built.
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 consequences, one practical, the other theoretical. Practically speaking, the outcome is the paradigmatic
exclusion of real space from the theoretical agenda,
even when it is part of the empirical agenda, and this
would in itself deter engagement between social
theory and those who create the built environment.
The theoretical consequence is that the fundamental
preoccupation of the founding fathers with the possible
agency 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 round

It was these reflections that led, in the early 1980s, to
an attempt to turn the question round and re-establish
the theoretical links between the spatial and social
worlds that had been so influential in setting the foundations of modern social theory (Hillier and Hanson,
1984). The idea was to look at the society space
relation space first by examining the patterns of real
space found in the built environment and asking in
what sense these could be seen to be the outcome of
social and economic processes. This approach was
called space syntax, to emphasizes its initial focus on
real space, and this has now grown into a research
community of several hundred worldwide, supporting
a biannual symposium attracting around 250 papers
(http://www.spacesyntax.org), as well as spin-out
companies applying the method to real projects.
What follows will be a brief overview of the space
syntax theory of real space and its social embedding,
sufficient for the purposes of this paper. Readers
seeking a more thorough recent introduction could
refer to Hillier and Vaughan (2007), written for a
social science audience, to Hillier (2006), written for
an architectural audience, or to Hillier (2007a),
written for a cognitive science audience.
There was a major problem in the space syntax
research programme right from the start: how to
describe the difference between one spatial pattern
and another. This first came to light through trying to
characterize the differences in the space patterns of
224

the social housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s,

some of which were already beginning to show signs
of precipitate decline and so presented a challenge
to socio-spatial thought and ordinary urban space
patterns based on networks of streets. In research
terms, it was clear that if spatial and social patterns
were to be compared, then the spatial variable had to
be controlled. The problem of spatial description was
fundamental.
In fact, the lack of a means to describe the familiar and
common patterns of space that structure the built
environment reflects a very much deeper difficulty,
one to do with the nature of human minds and how
one occupies the world and moves about in it: there
is no language to describe the difference between one
pattern of space and another. Language has terms
that deal precisely with spatial relations involving at
most three entities, for example, the English prepositions such as between, inside, beyond, through are all
terms which all describe with some precision the
relations of three things. Words like among describe
more, but at a cost of less precision. In general,
languages lack terms to describe complex patterns of
spatial relations, and in fact complexes of relations of
any kind.
The reason for this is that spatial relations, and
relations in general, are so fundamental to how embodied minds exist in the world that they form part of the
mental apparatus we think with, rather than of. In this
sense space is analogous to language. When one speaks
or hears, one thinks of the words, but with the syntactic
and semantic rules that allows one to form words into
meaningful sentences. It is this unconscious understanding of patterns that make speaking and hearing
possible. Space is the same. One deals with complex
spatial patterns competently but intuitively, and,
again as with language, one does not really understand
how this is done. This opens up an interesting possibility. One can, as with linguistics science, study the
complex patterns of space that have been produced in
different social, economic and cultural conditions,
and the ways in which people use space, and through
this try to expose the structure and cultural variability
of what seems, prima facie, to be a human language of
space.
Progress was made on the description problem by using
the basic ideas of spatial relation built into language to
create more general tools for describing and comparing
forms of spatial complexity. This was called the configurational approach. Configuration was defined as
relations which take into account other relations (as
the prepositions do), and methods developed to
measure the relations between each space in a
complex and all the others, and in this way to assign
configurational values to individual spaces describing
the links of each to all others. A key example was the

Space and spatiality

integration value, which indexed how topologically

close each space in a complex was to all other spaces.
An early discovery was that configurational analysis
could show that notions of function in building
could, for the first time, be given a clear spatial
meaning. The function of a space was not simply a
reflection of what went on in the space and the furnishings and equipment that supported the activity, but
also of configuration values describing the positioning
of the space with respect to all other spaces in the
layout. By learning to measure the different ways in
which spaces could be embedded in layout, and applying the measures to, say, samples of vernacular houses,
it could be shown that social and cultural patterning
was actually present in the plan of a house and its functioning, 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 mathematical
way (Hillier et al., 1987; Hanson, 1999).
Working with samples of vernacular houses it was also
possible to use these formal techniques to show more
general consistencies across cultures in the way in
which space was used to express different social
ideas. For example, the more segregated a space was
with respect to all others in a dwelling, then the more
strongly it tended to be defined as a special social category, and the stronger the rules governing its access
and use. For example a front parlour in the UK
tradition was the least spatially integrated ground
floor room in the house, and was rarely used, but it
was also the best furnished and decorated, and
housed the most important memorial items. Its position by the front door meant that it could be used to
support formalized encounters, such as those involving
difficult class relations, for example, when the vicar or
the insurance man called. This tendency to segregate
certain kind of spaces whose conceptual importance
coincided with the rarity of their use, in its extreme

form becomes the idea of the sacred, which is often

expressed by positioning the most sacred objects,
such as a religious altar, in the deepest space from
the entrance. These transcultural commonalities were
later shown to be related to certain simple mathematical principles governing the effect on the shaping and
placing of objects on ambient space (Hillier, 1996,
2002, 2007a). Figure 1 shows some simple cases.
The analysis of street networks in settlements similarly
led to results where underlying spatial patterns seemed
to compel a social interpretation. For example, by
looking at the complexity of routes in settlements, in
terms of the number of turns required to go from
each streets to all others, a pattern of least complex
(or most integrated) routes could usually be identified
which took the form of a deformed wheel: a hub of
streets at or near the centre, strong spokes reaching
out towards the edges in all directions, and often part
of the rim on the edge of the settlement. Figure 2
shows the case of Nicosia in Cyprus within the walls.
The deformed wheel itself, although brought to light
through 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 were
the quieter residential areas. So it was clear that the
pattern brought to light by spatial analysis was also a
social pattern in that its raison detre was to access
strangers from the edge to the centre of the city while
at the same time ensuring some degree of relative segregation for residential areas, and also ensuring that
movement from and between the residential areas
would use the spaces of the deformed wheel that strangers were using. The deformed wheel thus functioned
as a probabilistic device to generate and modulate the
interface between the inhabitants of the settlement
and the visitors and strangers with whom they shared
a 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 ambient
space, 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 for
low through to blue for high, increases as the object is moved from corner to centre. In both cases, the interference effect of the object is
increased by a central rather than a peripheral location. Similar effects follow from changing the shape of the object: the more the areato-perimeter ratio is increased, the less visual and metric relations in the ambient space are obstructed. These simple mathematical
principles, which seem to be known to human intuition, are pervasively implicated in the evolution of complexity in human space, whether
at the building or urban level
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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 analyses
has been argued to be intuitively expected (on reection), mathematically necessary, and empirically the case. Source: Hillier and Iida
(2005)

The ability to analyse streets networks in terms that

related to their social functioning then led to a discovery that, in its turn, led to a new social theory of the
city. The discovery was that the spatial configuration
of a street network was in and of itself a major
factor probably the major factor in shaping movement flows (Hillier et al., 1993; Hillier and Iida, 2005;
Penn et al., 1998). This meant that spatial configuration was in good part responsible for the ways in
which patterns of human co-presence emerge in the
network. Once this was clear, it also became clear
that through its influence on movement flows and copresence, the structure of the street network also
shaped land-use patterns (Hillier, 1996), in that movement-dependent land uses like retail would naturally
migrate to locations which the network had made copresence rich, while others, often including residence,
would prefer the contrary. Once a shop went to a
location, it would act as an attractor for more movement, and this would set in train multiplier effects
through which the settlement would evolve into the
226

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, or
global, network tended to take a universal form
because it was generated by micro-economic activity,
and other things that people do together, while the
background, more localized and more segregated,
network was much more strongly shaped by cultural
factors, which would be different from one cultural
region to another, and even within the same city
(Hillier and Vaughan, 2007).
The generality of this process suggests that the dual
theory of urban spatial and social form is in effect a
theory of the self-organization of the city. Through
its agency, urban space, like the space within dwellings,
comes to reflect the differentiation of the phases of
social life, such as going to the shops, or going home
or going to a religious ceremony, on a continuum
from integration to segregation. The more integrated

Space and spatiality

a space, the more its social effect was to generate higher

rates of movement and co-presence, the more segregated the less. The semanticization of space, through
the construction of different kinds of facades, decors,
objects and other urban paraphernalia, through
which much of the sense of meaning in space is conveyed, is then built on this foundation (Netto, 2007).
The spatial structure of the city thus comes to reflect
the phasing and timing of our social lives in a seemingly
natural and quite complete way.
In effect human space in general, and in cities in particular, can be seen to be used in two social modes: conservatively to express, and so reproduce, an existing
social pattern of social relations by using space segregatively to restrict and modulate encounter; and
generatively to create new social potentials by maximizing co-presence through movement. The underlying principle is that spatial segregation tends to
leave things as they are, while integration creates morphogenetic conditions in which new things can happen
and new social patterns can be created. Thus social
advantage often tends to seeks greater segregation to
stabilize the status quo, as now through gated communities, while social disadvantage has more to gain from
the social potentials of integration (Hillier et al.,
2000).
This dual process by which the structure of cities
evolves to link social to spatial patterns compels
another key conclusion: that the relation of society to
space is generic, not specific. Cities appear as patterns
of activity related to patterns of space, and this is
how the task of design is presented to the designer.
But theoretically it is not like that. Space is created
not directly by the interrelated demands of specific
activity patterns, but indirectly by the different
demands that kinds of activity place on the movement
and co-presence that is created by space. The basic
differentiation between the micro-economic and cultural aspects of the dual city is of this kind. Urban
space does not reflect the relation between this activity
and that activity, but the generic relations between
kinds of activity. This is why new patterns of activity
that constantly evolve as society changes so often fit
effortlessly into old patterns of space. There is always
likely to be a range of activities with different
demands on movement and co-presence, and each
will find it appropriate locus in the range of spaces
available, provided that it is sufficiently rich.

Linking back to social theory

These are propositions, then, that link spatial patterns
to social life. They satisfy the demand for testable propositions since they make clear predictions about the
relations between space and its use. But they are also
theoretical propositions that link directly to social

theory, both to the preoccupations of the spatiality

paradigm and to the founding fathers preoccupations
with the relations between spatial factors and social
morphology. In fact, a pervasive dimension of the
founding fathers morphological dichotomies seems,
exactly, to be a distinction between the spatial and
the conceptual. The earliest form of this distinction is
the idea that human society moved from kin-based
forms of organization, as in more dispersed tribaltype societies, to a territory-based form with spatial
aggregation. Kin-based in this sense refers not to
local family relations within the cohabiting group,
but to conceptual systems of social categories, such as
clans, built up on the basis of kinship and serving to
form super-ordinate linkages between as well as
within cohabiting groups. Little of this tends to
survive in the urban world, so in at least one sense
the shift from a kin-based to a territory-based system
is also a shift from more to less social complexity.
But whereas the elaboration of the conceptual system
was about making links between dispersed groups,
the elaboration of the territorial system was much
more about regulating the problems that arise from
an increased scale of cohabitation and proximity. Durkheims distinction between organic and mechanical
solidarity, arguably the most theoretically powerful
of the founding fathers distinctions, clearly reflects
this dichotomy. The organic solidarity of functional
interdependence is a spatial notion, and requires
spatial integration in large and dense settlements to
become fully realized. The mechanical solidarity of
similarities and beliefs is, in contrast, a conceptual
idea, and as such works to relate segmental groups
independently of space, and so under conditions of
relative dispersal.
The space syntax theory extends this idea by proposing
two synthetic ideas. First, that just as integrationsegregation is a continuum, so is the spatialconceptual
distinction. Second, that there is a dynamic interrelation between the two continua. In the case of integration segregation, the key to bringing the
continuum to light, and using it to clarify the dynamics
of city space, was quantification. So it is with the
spatial conceptual. Here the key to quantification
lies in the distinction between informal and formal
human behaviour. The more formal the behaviour,
the higher the ratio of rules to events; the more informal, the lower the ratio. Ritual is the upper limiting
concept. Every act has to follow complex rules about
exactly who does what and when. All human behaviour varies on the dimension formal informal,
depending on who is involved and in what situation,
but by and large informal codes govern recursive behaviours in everyday space, while formal behaviour is
associated with the rarer special events, dispersed in
time as well as in space, that create relations across
greater physical and social distanciation, and so
between rather than within groups.
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The continuum integrationsegregation then exists in

an active and dynamic relation with the continuum
informalformal. Formal, time space-segregated
systems are used to overcome distance and reproduce
existing patterns in society, and informal, integrated
systems are used to create the densities of high activity
that permit morphogenesis and so move society on.
The two are most clearly reflected in the dual structure
of the city between the busyness of the network of
linked centres and the quieter and more rule-governed
residential areas where culture is more fully expressed
in spatial form. But the parallelism of the two continua
is as pervasive in everyday life, where more formal
behaviours are routinely used when relations involving
social or physical distance are involved, and informal
behaviours are routinely used when they are not, as it
is in social morphology. These ideas are developed
more fully by Hillier (2002, 2007b).

Forming testable propositions about real

space
The methodologies of space syntax and their associated
social theory are now increasingly also used both to
reformulate and to address research questions about
cities and to create a more rigorous and evidencebased prediction of social outcomes from spatial
forms at the design stage. Examples of research questions that have been addressed recently through space
syntax include the spatial and social pathology of
failing housing estates (Hillier, 1996; Hillier and
Vaughan, 2007), the economic and social development
of self-generated settlements (Hillier et al., 2002), the
spatialization of migration groups (Vaughan and
Penn, 2006; Vaughan, 2007), the spatial definition
of urban areas (Hillier et al., 2007), the spatial
dynamics of work environments (Penn et al., 1999),
and the micro-analysis of spatial patterns of urban
crime (Hillier, 2004; Hillier and Sahbaz, 2007,
forthcoming).
The space syntax package of method and theory is also
used on an expanding portfolio of real projects, not
least through the University College London (UCL)
spin-out company Space Syntax Ltd (http://www.spacesyntax.com). The application procedure involves first
making a model of the urban area in which development is proposed, testing it by directly observing existing movement and land-use patterns, and then
correlating these with spatial patterns. To the degree
that the model is able to account for the existing functional patterns, a tested model exists with which to generate and test conjectural solutions to the design
problem in hand. In this sense, evidence-based design
can include both site-specific evidence provided by the
context of a development and the theoretical evidence
provided by the accumulation of studies. Once the
tested model exists, candidate designs produced by
228

built environment professionals can themselves be

treated as testable propositions by inserting the proposed spatial pattern into the model and rerunning
the analysis to see how the proposed pattern works in
the context of, and affects, the pattern of the surrounding area. Typically, a series of improving designs are
explored, gradually converging on the pattern that
most fulfils the social objectives of the design. The
aim of this procedure is to set design increasingly
more into the context of understanding of the self-organizing processes which are pervasive in all cities, so that
design can work with these processes rather than, as so
often in recent history, under the influence of social
ideologies masquerading as theory against them.

The space of space

The analysis of real space is not then the slide-rule
alternative to the social analysis of space, but the
means to it. To understand the space of different
fields of human activity, one must first investigate the
space of space. By clarifying how space is manipulable, it can be seen how it is manipulated, and why it
works for a particular social purpose. This is to say
no more than that to understand what space is saying
one must learn its language. Space has an active and
structured engagement with social life, and without
understanding this one cannot fully realize the theoretical promise of the social study of space. With a theorization of the space of space in place, one can both set
up testable propositions for space creation and link
back to the founding fathers of social theory in their
acknowledgement that space was a factor in human
existence.
But there are intellectual obstacles. For reasons discussed above, the spatiality paradigm has been insistent that space does not have a meaningful existence
independent of social agency, that there is then no
question of space having laws of its own, and certainly
space can have no agency in human affairs. The space
syntax approach suggests the opposite of all three
might turn out to be the case. The social behaviour of
space can only be understood by first understanding
its potential to behave at all, and this means studying
space itself as a variable phenomenon. Space not only
behaves lawfully when manipulated, but also these
laws are the means by which it has agency in human
affairs (Hillier, 2007a) not agency in the old sense
of spatial determinism, but in the sense that spatial
configurations provide the conditions for the emergence of different kinds of complexity in human
affairs, given only the continuation of everyday
activity, and the fact that human beings consistently
and knowledgeably manipulate space for social purposes. The space of cities and the functioning of cities
are emergent phenomena built on this knowledgeable
activity of creating and using space.

Space and spatiality

There are also more philosophical obstacles. Not least

is the curious idea of science as being overly concerned
with the abstract and inattentive to the material world
that has come to prevail in so many areas of humanistic
enquiry. Real science is not like that at all. It is about
being careful enough in the observation of the world,
and clear enough in the way ideas about it are formulated, for those ideas to be proved wrong by the
world. Science in not the imposition of abstract
schemes of thought on the physical world, but the constant demolition such schemes of thought and their
replacement with tentative and temporary alternatives.
Space syntax does not claim to be science that is
something to be achieved but it does aspire to the
standards of science by seeking to be sufficiently clear
and consistent in its descriptions of what space is
like, and sufficiently careful in its observations of
space at work for tentative theoretical formulations
to be proved wrong. When ideas have been shown to
be wrong, then often it is protracted attention to the
world at work, and the confrontation of unexpected
and unexplained phenomena, that lead to the formulation of a new ideas which can then be clarified and
tested (Hacking, 1983).
This more pragmatic view of how science works has
interesting affinities with the philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze, perhaps the key philosopher of the orientation
towards the material world that underlies much late
20th-century interest in space. A guiding notion in
Deleuzes work is transcendental empiricism (Deleuze,
1963/83). Defined in contradistinction to Immanuel
Kants transcendental idealism, through which the mind
imposes its categories on the world, Deleuzes concept
means that the world with all is complexities and contradiction is the most fertile source for thought. It is the
world that leads one to move beyond the accepted conceptualizations that structure thought, and guides one
to new concepts and new modes of thought. Deleuzes
philosophy is usually thought of as being somehow antithetical to science, but with one more step it surely is
science. In science, the source of new theoretical ideas is
rarely simply abstract thought. More often it is the bringing to light of new phenomena which are inconsistent
with the existing theoretical models, and so demand
novel theoretical thought inspired by the intractability
of 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 complex
the world is and how resistant it is to understanding.
But this is the challenge in areas of the intellectual
world where the failure to understand can lead, as the
20th century showed, to such high costs in terms of the
perpetuation of social disadvantage and the reduction
of life space. In the field of space creation through the
built environment it is worth solving these problems.
The hope of the space syntax paradigm is to contribute
its own speciality the space of space to a more

synthetic and less philosophically constrained interdisciplinary effort to find clear formulations for these problems and so some prospect of better resolutions. Space
syntax is not the inverse of the spatiality paradigm, but
its other half. As such, it is the means by which the
social study of space can engage fully both with its own
theoretical development and also with the real-world
issues which await its attention.

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Endnote
1
The same can be said of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab historian whose introduction to the philosophy of history, The
Muqaddimah, can plausible be argued to be the first text of
modern social theory, centred as it was on the evolutionary
relations between nomadic and urban societies.