Society seen through the prism of space: outline of a theory of society and space

Abstract

Two questions challenge the student of space and society above all others: will new technologies change the spatial basis of society? And if so, will this have an impact on society itself? For the urbanist, these two questions crystallise into one: what will the future of cities have to do with their past? Too often these questions are dealt with as though they were only matters of technology. However, they are much more than that. They are deep and difficult questions about the interdependence of technology, space and society that we do not yet have the theoretical apparatus to answer. We know that previous ‘revolutions’ in technology such as agriculture, urbanism and industrialisation associated radical changes in space with no less radical changes in social institutions. However, we do not know how far these linkages were contingent or necessary. We do not, in short, have a theory of society and space adequate to account for where we are now, and therefore we have no reasonable theoretical base for speculating about the future. In this paper, I suggest that a major reason for this theoretical deficit is that most previous attempts to build a theory of society and space have looked at society and tried to find space in its output. The result has been that the constructive role of space in creating and sustaining society has not been brought to the fore, or if it has, only in a way that is too general to permit the detailed specification of mechanisms. In this paper, I try to reverse the normal order of things by looking first at space and trying to discern society through space: by looking at society through the prism of space. Through this I try to define key mechanisms linking space to society and then use these to suggest how the questions about the future of cities and societies might be better defined.

Appendix: Case study in fast and slow change

This is a simple example demonstrating both how the fast rate of change in urban activity patterns is absorbed by a slow rate of change in spatial form, and how the existing spatial pattern of the city acts constructively as a generator in bringing about new patterns of spatial culture within a largely unchanged urban fabric. The case is the historical transformation of the City of London over 300 years from an urban community based on guilds and face-to-face exchange mediated by an intricate and dense system of streets and alleys, to the current financial centre where most business is conducted by computer and behind closed doors (Hanson and Hillier, 1993). How has the city responded to this transformation of its spatial culture, and what, if any, is the effect back on this life?

Figure 1 is a black on white representation of the space of the city of London as it was in 1676 shortly after the great fire, and Figure 2 is its analysed axial map. Figures 3 and 4 are the same for the city in 1989. Let us first look at the changes to the urban space, leaving aside at this stage the dramatic increase in building heights and densities in certain parts. The differences are quite systematic and diffused throughout the system. For example, the number of convexly distinct spaces has reduced to about half, as has the number of axial lines. The number of dead end lines has reduced to about a tenth of what it was, but the number of through lines has also reduced. Also the number of built form ‘islands’ has reduced by about a quarter. Geometrically, the spaces have become considerably wider, and lines are on average substantially longer. There are three major new streets – England's answers to Haussman in the mid-19th century – forming a triangle meeting at the syntactic centre. Overall, the system has become much more syntactically integrated, and more intelligible, and, in spite of the overall reduction in the number of blocks, more permeable.

Figure 1

Space in the city of London in 1676.

Figure 2

City of London 1676: integration analysis.

Figure 3

Space in the city of London in 1989.

Figure 4

City of London 1989: integration analysis.

We also find that the ‘two-step logic’ of the city is conserved and even improved. This means that the global level, if you enter the city by one of its gates and follow at each stage the longest line you can see, then you will see the centre somewhere from the second line. At the local level, it means that if you depart from a main line into a shorter line into a back area, then the second line you use will show you either the way out or an important internal destination. It means, quite simply, that it is hard to get lost, because both at the global level of the whole city and at the local level of its small-scale sub-areas, the city has the kind of centre-to-edge structure that we saw in the previous paper. The effect of this is that the city works to create strong probabilistic interfaces between those moving in and out of the buildings and those moving past, and between those moving in the larger-scale system and those moving in the smaller-scale local areas. The city construct in effect a series of probabilistic interfaces between scales of movement, so much so that we can be sure that it has evolved in order to create this kind of pattern of co-presence. The need to interface scales of movement is the situational constraint that has governed the process by which the urban pattern has emerged.

It is easy to imagine how this local and global space structure would have supported the face-to-face commercial community that occupied the city 300 years ago. But how does it work now? The fact is that it works in more or less the same way, but with quite a different social embedding. One has only to spend time in the City of London to realise that it has an extraordinary spatial culture. Those who work in the city go out into the streets, especially in the midday period, and use public space for eating, drinking and socialising. In the recent past, this has been substantially added to by the building of highly successful new public squares, whose use now often extends well into the evening. In some cases, new experimental designs of public space offer new kinds of urban experience by engineering new kinds of co-presence. For example, Broadgate's Exchange Square creates a number of focal spaces within the same large space so that the different groups which congregate in its various parts are all in visual contact with each other. The effect is exhilarating, and generates a substantial amount of interaction through this engineered co-presence.

How should we then understand this? The system of public space is still being used in generative mode, but not so much as a direct support for face-to-face business activity, but to create an emergent spatial culture which in every sense stands in contrast to and thus complements the business activity. For example, while business activity behind closed door is oriented towards gain, the sociality of the public spaces is oriented to gift exchange and conspicuous consumption. The situational constraints that hold this evolving system of public space in place are to do with the construction of a complementary sociality, to bring together in society what the business activity divides and brings into conflict. Space thus plays as powerful a social role as it ever did, but in a different modality. It constructs an expressive rather than instrumental sociality. More practically, the distinctive ‘spatial culture’ of the city is a prime component of the famous quality of life that draws both individuals and organisations to the city. The new sociality has economic consequences.

Why has this new lived sociality emerged? It seems unavoidable that part of the answer is simply that the spatial and co-presence preconditions which it requires and which can generate the co-presence conditions in which it can emerge were already in place. Spatial culture is endlessly created and recreated by the spatial and institutional conditions that we impose on ourselves. It is a perpetually emergent phenomenon, arising from the fact of co-presence and the fact of society. What we have to understand is how it is structured, and this can only be in terms of how spatial conditions provide the co-presence raw material within which different spatial cultures will emerge. The city itself creates its spatial culture.