In the last 50 years, our planned environment has probably been more radically altered than any time since human civilization began. Moreover, this period has seen social objectives being explicitly stressed and considered in the discourse of planning and architecture. Yet it is widely believed this new environment has been extremely unsuccessful in the long-term social and human effects. It is recognized with a great sense of alarm that the present urban/regional structure and configuration is sharpening the distance between the social and political extremes; the rich and the poor, and the Have and the Have-not. This phenomena of alienation has been largely attributed to either the physical structure (drab, monotonous, placeless), physical organization (suburban sprawl, automobile city) or (lack of) physical density and interrelationship.

To combat the prospect of a worsening future, many valiant protests and designs have been put forward, all hoping to recreate in modern form the various characteristics of the natural city which seem to give it life. However, so far these designs have only remade the old. The problem these designers have tried to face and the way the solutions have been derived suggest that they seem to be yearning for the physical and plastic characteristics of the past. The ordering principle, the inner nature that the old spaces had which our modern conceptions of the city/region has not yet found seems to have been relegated to the background. We seem to discuss about them in terms of simple, general physical attributes viz. building height. The inference that more fundamental spatial factors are involved is strongly supported by the examples of the new lifeless environments. It has become clear that a lack of understanding of the precise nature of relation between the spatial organization and social life is the chief obstacle to better design.

This is the premise from which Bill Hillier et al start their argument for a socio-spatial understanding of the human habitat in their book The Social Logic of Space. And the places they start to try to find their clue are the disciplines, which are concerned with the effect of social life on spatial organization. They examine the works of anthropologists (Levi-Strauss, Bordieu), sociologists (Durkheim, Giddens), archaeologists (Clarke, Hodder) and geographers (Christaller, Losch). They surmise that there is presently no consistent descriptive account of the morphological features of manmade space that could be lawfully determined by social processes and structures. Second there is no descriptive account of the morphological features of society which would require one kind of spatial embodiment or another. They reason that it is due to the paradigm in which we conceptualize space as being without social content and society without spatial content. Their critiques of the various existing approaches are illuminating.

In anthropology, space is understood to be an empirical problem. But similarities and differences in the human spatial patterns in different parts of the world are astounding and can not be just ascribed to extraneous factors viz. climate, topography, technology etc. Hence Levi-Strauss approaches to ‘study social processes through their crystallized external projections’. However some societies have elaborate spatial patterning and clear geometric structures while some are extremely organic and informal. Some attach a lot of social significance to spatial form while others have recognisable form but they attach no significance to it. Hence the fundamental drawback of this approach is that it makes space a by-product of other pattern forming dimensions of society viz. kinship systems, information structures etc. Spatial systems have to be given their descriptive autonomy and they must be wide enough to explain the above-mentioned variation from meaning to non-meaning, order to non-order.

Theory of Territoriality starts from the biological impulse of the individuals to claim and defend territories and it supposes that this principle can be extended to all levels of human grouping. But the biggest problem with this is the variety of human physical configuration; a variable can not be explained by a constant. Moreover the anthropological division between groups and individual sodalities poses another problem. It is seen that as spatial integration decreases i.e. more dispersed, social identification increases. So theory of territoriality appears more as a limiting case rather than a universal theory.

The MIT approach to describe environments and then relate them to use does go beyond the traditional approaches of geographers to urban morphology. They have analyzed how differences in the organization of space relate to and influence social life. But they fail to take care of the fact that society already pervades those patterns of space that need to be described or analyzed.

Semiologists aim to describe the physical environment solely in terms of its power to operate as a system of signs and symbols in much the same way as natural languages. Theirs is the systematics of appearances. But it is more fundamental to understand how buildings help to constitute society through the way they organize space. Semiologists reduce buildings to a general field of artifact semiotics. More than objects buildings are about the transformation of space through objects. Through any analytic practice through images and words, we can not go beyond the synchronous field of the observer into the asynchronous complex of relations, understood and experienced rather than seen so reason the authors.

And thus they start to outline their new method of the quantitative investigation of the society-space relation and attempt to present their theory about the unified phenomena of social relationships built into spatial form. The first step in this construction is:

Spatial Order as restrictions on a random process.

Assuming human beings will deploy themselves in space in some way and without any interconnection among one another meaning a pure random process, the question is how individuals have to relate their spatial actions to those of others to give rise to pattern and form in space. So some rule is formulated, the following of which is probabilistically ordained. Global forms rise from restrictions on random processes. Variations result by changing the probability value of the restrictions. Moreover by thus controlling the probability value, one can keep track of how much order has been put to get a particular type of global pattern. Global form results not only from aggregation of individual cells/units but by superimposition of units of higher order. In effect it creates a hierarchy of boundaries. If a single cell contained others, then the containing is accomplished through the ‘inside’ of the super-ordinate cell, while in aggregation, the cells define space with ‘outside’s. The authors call the former ‘distributed’ meaning the design of the cell is distributed among all primary cells and by the same token the later ‘non-distributed’ i.e. the pattern is accomplished by a single cell rather than a collection. Another important formal property was that in the first type, each cell (with its attached open cell) had been made a neighbor of another, which is a symmetrical relationship. If A is a neighbor of B, opposite is also true. But the second type is an ‘asymmetrical’ relationship.

All this leads to their formulation of a spatial language resembling a natural language. Distributed and non-distributed are pattern elements defined by plural or singular entities. While the existence of asymmetric relations is like a sentence in which subjects had objects. A rich variation is obtained by a combination of various restrictions, which if identified made comparative relation between societal spaces much easier. Secondly the degree of order of a society can be expressed as the degree of restrictions. Hence systems can be described as ‘short description’ and ‘long description’ to express the randomness and order. Now this again leads to the expression of the social ‘meaning’ in the pattern. The ordering processes are done with a certain probability of restrictions and randomness. But the question is whether all the cells or the parts/constituents of the pattern are interchangeable. By requiring and specifying certain parts to have certain relations non-spatial factors are built into the system. So the theoretically opposite case to a completely random process (which can generate no patterns) is when the relationship of each constituent to the other is specified.

After a range of complex analyses of structures, they suggest certain general principles for analysis of spatial patterns. First, space is described and understood as being determined by two kinds of relations, among occupants and between occupants and strangers. A very critical finding is the relationship between these two points of view, which can be investigated by analyzing spatial relations both from inside and outside the system. Second there were certain consistencies between the quantitative values of the model and their social orders. The realm of the public spaces of settlements is the most important difference/characteristic between settlements. They are a kind of interface between the dwelling and the outside world, the former of the inhabitants and the latter of the strangers. However the global nature of spaces can not be obtained by their analysis on their own terms; they have to be related to the global socio-spatial systems of which they are a part. This means looking beyond the level of a settlement to the level of society itself. Society is not an abstraction, which finds itself a physical location and then defines an arrangement, but an entity with its own internal spatial logic.

Social relations as restrictions on random encounter patterns.

From the social patterning of spaces they surmise that there is a strong relation between spatial form and the ways in which encounters are generated and controlled. But they fail to explain the differences in the patterns in different societies and refer to Durkheim’s conceptions of ‘organic’ solidarity based on interdependence through differences viz. division of labor; and ‘mechanical’ solidarity based on integration through similarities of belief and group structure. Organic solidarity requires an integrated and dense space, whereas mechanical solidarity needs a dispersed segregated space. To develop this into their socio-spatial theory, they start from the sociology of the elementary cells. It has two important attributes, the inside and the outside. Thus there are two ways of growth, subdivision of the cell and the accumulation of cells. When the first occurs, we call it a building, and when the latter, a settlement. One is an elaboration of the sociology of the inside of the cells, the other an elaboration of the sociology of the outside. Interior spaces has been generally more clearly defined and related to social categories and roles while exterior spaces have far fewer difference in categories. It also has lesser control, more people have access to it and it grows by accumulation into one continuous system. So exterior spaces are more probabilistic while interior spaces are more deterministic

In the most elementary way, buildings participate in a larger system in two ways: first, they are spatially related to one another; and also, by separating off some categories from the outside world to define and control it. So interiors tend to define an ideological space, as a system of categories and relations which are continuously re-affirmed by use, while exteriors define a transactional or political space as it constructs a fluid system of encounters which is constantly renegotiated by use. The former has a high degree of indeterminacy, the later more structure.

All societies use both possibilities but to varying degrees. In western societies a suburban lifestyle is characterized by values which maintain order ands structure in interior rather than external spatial relations. It requires strong control on boundaries and strong internal control. The traditional eastern societies have weak boundaries and generate rather than control events. The former consists of small and isolated segments, the latter out of large and integrated segments. These extremes are based on opposing principles. So there is a duality in which societies generate space and this is a function of social solidarity.

There is another ordering principle. The duality of inside and outside is the case only when the system is considered a local-to-global phenomena i.e. as it constructs a global pattern out of interrelationships of basic units. But when we consider the global to local phenomena, there is a different logic. A set of spaces are produced which define ideological landscape through exterior and another control global politics through interior. Shrines and meeting places are the first structures of the global formations of society. This follows into another duality, the more the system is run from global to local i.e. a stronger state, the more the exteriors are dominated by ideologically defined structures and interior by controlled transactions, an example can be the Islamic societies throughout the world.

Urban form expresses this duality. The traditional urban spaces had two separate spatial components, the open street system and the space of major public buildings and functions. The former is a dense system, public space defined by buildings and their entrances the latter a sparse system i.e. space controls buildings with few entrances, more global to local, the structure of the society, the more will be the spatial pattern of the later type. The administrative capitals and the business capitals show these dichotomies. The same dichotomies are also seen in the difference in ceremonial centers and centers of production. The formers are created by a strong global to local logic. The primary cells are inward looking and ceremonial buildings define the global system. The European medieval towns, where primary cells define global structure, exemplify the later. The ceremonial buildings, which are interspersed, do not define the global order.

So space is a function of the forms of social solidarity and those are in turn a product of the structure of the society. The final argument of the book is to explain the current space-society relations based on the socio-economic condition. There is a gradual change being seen in spaces changing from a continuous system to a discontinuous system divided into a number of closed local domains. The street as an open distributed local event in the larger open system has been replaced by ‘estates’, which are segregated from surrounding ‘estates’. The change is fundamental. Its is also universal, found in many different cultures and societies. There are variations, at some cases the physical boundary is used as a segregating medium, and in others it is the open space. The common thread, which explains all theses disparate but similar conditions, is today’s ‘industrial bureaucracy’ structure of the society. This system divides the society into those having the control over the forms of production and social reproduction and those who do not.

A major structural change in the productive sector effected by industrial; bureaucracy is the separation of the worker from his tools. The tools, which are the means of production are controlled and possessed by capital. In the earlier case when the worker owned the tools, there was a symmetrical relationship between workers. And their interdependence guaranteed that asymmetry and hierarchy had no basis. But under capitalism, workers do not make relationships with each other. Each makes a relation to the factory owner who employs him. Exigencies of production require the social separation of worker to worker as well as spatial aggregation of the same workers. Symmetrical and distributed system threaten the principles of the system. That is why in nineteenth century dreams of new social order, the benefits of capitalism are evoked in strongly spatial terms. In today’s context, if a society is to be democratically deployed in space, it will have to be on the basis of large communities, dense encounter spaces and an open distributed urban surface. In summary the authors’ models has to be praised for their originality of approach and the quantitative rigor of the analyses. Even though the problem definition resembles more towards finding a relationship between space and society and vice versa, during the progress of their research the authors seem to have consciously attempted a unified theory of space. But it has a whole lot of weaknesses being a statement of a new theoretical approach. Some of the major shortcomings are:

1. Because of the quantitative method of analysis, many subjects, which influence our perception of spaces, have not been taken into account, as they could not be reduced to measurable decisions. Psychology and cognitive science is one of the more important ones, the contribution to this field can be exemplified by Amos Rapoport’s postulation of Perception-Cognition-Evaluation cycle of Human –Environmental Relation.
2. The method in which the authors leave scope for ‘extraneous’ inputs by leaving out probabilistic values for randomness may be a sound quantitative technique. But it raises questions that when another factor e.g. Cultural or Ecological factor is brought into the quantitative pattern of space, whether it will influence them in the expected way. As they themselves have explained while critiquing the theory of territoriality, it will be folly to explain a variable by a constant.

So we see two extremes of approach, one a purely quantitative one by Hillier to explain society and space, pattern and system and the other by Evernden, a qualitative approach advocating individual subjectivity and perception, identity of place, and wonder at nature and experience. Both the approaches in one sense are complementary; one describes the surface/appearance/manifestation of our existence, the other the deep meaning and values. But the problem one encounters is that they are viewed as mutually exclusive, one or the other while neither seems to work, to comprehensively explain the ambit of human habitat and identity. Another approach may lie in the realm of both one and the other.

In such a similar but different vein, an innovative approach to the depiction of human/nature condition has been the attempts of the "nature writers." This popular but nebulous genre originated in 19^th century as natural history. In its ideal form, achieved in the works of Thoreau, Muir and Leopold, it artfully combined scientific observation and autobiography, history of landscape and land ethics. Since the last three decades starting with Carson, a large number of people have taken this approach influenced as they have been by the rising environmental consciousness. I would now refer to the anthology of contemporary nature writing that we studied this semester, Words from the Land edited by Stephen Trimble.