Julienne Hanson

NATURAL MOVEMENT - OR, CONFIGURATION AND ATTRACTION IN URBAN PEDESTRIAN MOVEMENT

Existing theories relating patterns of pedestrian and vehicular movement to urban form characterise the problem in terms of flows to and from ‘attractor’ land uses. This paper contains evidence in support of a new ‘configurational’ paradigm in which a primary property of the form of the urban grid is to privilege certain spaces over others for through movement. In this way it is suggested that the configuration of the urban grid itself is the main generator of patterns of movement. Retail land uses are then located to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the passing trade and may well act as multipliers on the basic pattern of ‘natural movement’ generated by the grid configuration. The configurational correlates of movement patterns are found to be measures of global properties of the grid with the ‘space syntax’ measure of ‘integration’ consistently found to be the most important. This has clear implications for urban design suggesting that if we wish to design for well used urban space, then it is not the local properties of a space that are important in the main but its configurational relations to the larger urban system.

Ideas are in Things: An Application of the Space Syntax Method to Discovering House Genotypes

Simple ‘space syntax’ techniques are used to explore the problem of spatially typing a sample of vernacular farmhouses in Normandy. It is suggested that such techniques can demonstrate that cultural ideas are objectively present in artefacts as much as they are subjectively present in minds.

Spatial types in traditional Turkish houses

The concept of ‘difference factor’ has been widely used in syntactic analysis of space configurations as a technique to measure the strength of a spatial genotype. Where the rank order of the integration of significant household functions remains stable across a sample of dwellings, and where differences in the relative integration values are pronounced, then configuration can be said strongly to structure the form of the dwelling. Conversely, where spaces are not found in a consistent rank order then the sample does not embed a functional genotype, and where this exists but integration values are very similar to one another, the configuration of the dwelling may be said to homogenise functions and render them spatially interchangeable with one another. This paper develops these ideas with reference to a sample of traditional Turkish houses from the 17th to the 19th century. Difference factor is used to pinpoint those household functions which are clearly differentiated by their relative integration or segregation and which are therefore strongly structured and articulated with respect to one another, and which activities remain relatively undifferentiated and held apart by the way space is configured. Two characteristic patterns of integration arc found, one centred on the sofa, and the other on the external paved courtyard of the dwelling. The social interpretation of this phenomenon will be the subject of a subsequent paper.

The social logic of space: The logic of space

SUMMARY This chapter does three things. First, it introduces a new concept of order in space, as restrictions on an otherwise random process. It does this by showing experimentally that certain kinds of spatial order in settlements can be captured by manual or computer simulation. Second, it extends the argument to show that more complex restrictions on the random process can give rise to more complex and quite different forms of order, permitting an analytic approach to space through the concept of a fundamental set of elementary generators. Third, some conclusions are drawn from this approach to order from the point of view of scientific strategy. However, the chapter ends by showing the severe limitations of this approach, other than in establishing the fundamental dimensions of analysis. The reader is warned that this chapter is the most tortuous and perhaps the least rewarding in the book. Those who do not manage to work their way through it can, however, easily proceed to the next chapter, provided they have grasped the basic syntactic notions of symmetry–asymmetry and distributed–nondistributed. Introduction Even allowing for its purely descriptive and non-mathematical intentions, a syntax model must nevertheless aim to do certain things: – to find the irreducible objects and relations, or ‘elementary structures’ of the system of interest – in this case, human spatial organisation in all its variability; – to represent these elementary structures in some kind of notation or ideography, in order to escape from the difficulty of always having to use cumbersome verbal constructs for sets of ideas which are used repeatedly; – to show how elementary structures are related to each other to make a coherent system; and […]

Socialising Spatial Types in Traditional Turkish Houses

In this paper we continue the argument which was presented in a previous paper in Environment and Planning B. There, two spatial genotypes were established within a sample of sixteen Turkish vernacular houses. The first was configurationally integrated around the principal living room or sofa, and the second was configured by means of the external paved courtyard which gave access to the dwelling from the street. Houses of the first type were shown to structure significant configurational differences within the suite of principal, first-floor living rooms. The sofa seems to have acted as an integrating hinge which linked these spaces together, and controlled access to and egress from the relatively segregated street outside. The second type of room arrangement was characterised by an integration core whch ran from the exterior through to the interior of the dwelling, and was centred on an external paved courtyard. In this paper we explore further the spatial properties of the two house types, and characterise these as ‘deep core’ and ‘shallow core’, respectively. It is proposed that the first may be considered a more introverted or centripetal plan, and the second a more extroverted or centrifugal layout. These differences are shown to embody alternative forms of household organisation, in that they support different conceptions of family life, gender relations, and ways of receiving guests into the home. The social origin of the genotypes is attributed to the existence of conservative and liberal tendencies within Turkish society during the period at which the houses were constructed.

The Social Logic of Space: Societies as spatial systems

SUMMARY These concepts are then applied to certain societies whose spatial form is well documented, following which a general theory of the different spatial pathways required by different types of social morphology is sketched. The aim of this theory is to try to relate the existing, well-known evidence into a coherent framework as a basis for further research, rather than to establish a definitive theory. Some societies With these concepts in mind, we may now look briefly at a number of societies that differ strongly both in terms of the way they order space, and in terms of their spatial logic as social systems. Obviously, within the scope of this book, this cannot be an exhaustive exercise. All we can do at this stage is to take a number of well-known cases where authors have described spatial properties of societies in such a way that they can be transcribed into the concepts we have used. In doing so we are, of course, adding nothing to the findings of these authors. We are merely using their work to show that the arrangemental model can provide a means for moving from social commentaries to analysis of spatial form. We may begin with the two well-known ethnographies: Fortes on the Tallensi of Northern Ghana, who live in dispersed compounds; and Turner on the Ndembu of Northern Zambia, who live in small circular villages. Tallensi compounds differ considerably in size and complexity, but always are based on a strong underlying model, which can be seen in the gamma map of the simpler of the two compounds shown in Fig. 131.