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Part One
IDENTITY, PLACE, AND COMMUNITY
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1 | SOCIAL SPACE AND THE PLANNING OF RESIDENTIAL AREAS* |
| Anne Buttimer |
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. Instead the practitioners and teachers of this discipline … have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities — from anything but cities themselves — Jane Jacobs (1961 : 6).
The livability of residential environments has become one of the most urgent challenges facing our industrial cities. Despite the volume of scientific research, experimentation, and evaluation, our understanding of the problem remains embarrassingly incomplete. Its very complexity baffles the investigator. One merely carves out slices of the problem and investigates them according to the concepts and procedures of specific disciplines.
Traditionally, residential areas have been studied within the framework of urban land-use structure (Alonso, 1964; Muth, 1969). Norms and guidelines have been developed for the ‘rational’ allocation of space and service functions throughout such areas (Harvey, 1970). Of late, serious efforts have been made to explore the problem from the viewpoint of the resident. Studies have attempted to explore the dynamics of spatial behavior in microenvironmental settings (Proshansky et al., 1970), and several design implications have emerged from such behavioral research (Sommer, 1969; Alpaugh, 1970).
These studies also yield potential implications for planning of residential environments, but they are not yet readily translatable at that scale. Little substantial evidence is available regarding criteria on which the appropriateness of residential area design for different kinds of residents could be defined. Some studies suggest that there are important relationships between physical design and social behavior (Young and Willmott, 1957; Rainwater, 1966; Schorr, 1963; Yancey, 1971); others hold that little or no relationship is found between architectural design and social life (Gutman, 1966; Wilner et al., 1962; Gans, 1961). Confusion abounds partly because there is still no comprehensive framework within which research on different facets of the question can be coordinated and comparative studies implemented. This multidisciplinary research effort cannot as yet claim any unifying conceptual structure, nor has it a common language for interdisciplinary effort.
Meanwhile, the planner, charged with the responsibility for designing residential environments, combs through this literature for insight into practical issues, often only to abandon it, finding common sense, traditional ‘standards,’ or political pressure better guides for action than ‘scientific’ research (Reade, 1969). Besides, the Ivory Tower ethos that has traditionally separated the planner from the academic world still constitutes a serious barrier to fruitful communication (Gans, 1968; Blair, 1969; Buttimer, 1971). Yet even when a rapprochement occurs, as has indeed happened on occasion in the context of residential area planning, both social scientists and planners find themselves constrained by a predominantly Cartesian view of knowledge and by the peculiarly managerial perspective on urban life which this view has fostered. Both tend to think of systems, of states of being, whether on the demand side (behavior patterns, interaction networks) or on the supply side (service networks, building design).
Livability, if this be our aim, cannot be defined adequately in terms of systems or states of being. For life in residential areas involves a dialogue of behavior and setting, of demand and supply; it is thus essentially a condition of becoming. Such a condition is seen to arise when resident communities engage in creative dialogue with their environments, molding, re-creating and eventually appropriating them as home. In this existential view, the planner can no longer be considered solely as the manipulator of supply; neither can the academician be seen merely as the investigator of resident aspiration and satisfaction. Least of all can the citizen be considered a passive pawn of external social or technological processes. This view demands that all engage themselves responsibly in the planning process itself.
For such a joint involvement in the becoming of residential areas, a radical new education is needed for both planner and social scientist. Each has to develop a more comprehensive understanding of urban life and the dynamics of urban systems. We need frameworks for investigation and reflection which do not segment and ossify parts of the city, as Cartesian practices have done. And we need an empathetic understanding of urban life as existential reality, as lived experience. An existential view of livability challenges the traditional rift between theoretical and applied disciplinary orientations. It calls for a unified, interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental experience. Its essential focus on the meanings of phenomena in lived experience radically questions the assumptions and premises on which ‘objective’ scientific analysis is traditionally based, and openly invites subjective involvement in the reality to be investigated.
This paper addresses itself to that manifold challenge. First, it attempts to define and clarify the notion of social space as a framework for a comprehensive understanding of environmental experience. Second, it applies this idea to residential area-planning as illustrated by a preliminary investigation within selected housing estates in Glasgow, Scotland. The essay is intended to be provocative and suggestive; it does not offer rigidly tested hypotheses or guidelines for general application. Its aim is to raise rather than to resolve issues, to elicit curiosity rather than to provide conclusive answers.
Toward a Definition of Social Space
The concept of social space, as defined by Chombart de Lauwe (1956, 1952; Buttimer, 1969), offers a useful initial guide for an investigation of lived experience. As explained in his original Paris study, social space (l’espace social) is a framework within which subjective evaluations and motivations can be related to overtly expressed behavior and the external characteristics of the environment. Recent developments in sociology, social psychology, and other disciplines have greatly facilitated the analysis of specific dimensions of social space as defined in these terms.
In Anglo-American writings, however, semantic confusion surrounds the notion of social space. Sorokin (1928: 6) used the term to identify a person’s ‘relations to other men or other social phenomena chosen as “points of reference.’” Social space was defined as a system of coordinates whose horizontal axis referred to group participations and whose vertical axis referred to statuses and roles within these groups. Such a ‘system of social coordinates’ could, in Sorokin’s view, enable us to define the social position of any man. This purely sociological definition of social space differed from the psychologically oriented definitions of the term employed by other scholars, who stressed the subjective dimensions of reference systems (Park, 1924; Bogardus, 1925).
More recent definitions of the term favor the psychological orientation. One recent statement (Theodorson and Theodorson, 1969: 394), for example, holds that ‘social space is determined by the individual’s perception of his social world, and not by the objective description of his social relationship by any observer.’ This definition implies a close connection with reference group theory, a body of literature that provides useful insights into the nature of environmental behavior (Shibutani, 1955; Hyman and Singer, 1968). These interpretations reiterate the original Durkheimian sense of the term, which defines a person’s position in ‘sociological space,’ and specifies nothing about his situation in physical space. This was the critical link provided in the work of Sorre (1957) and further elaborated by Chombart de Lauwe (1952; 1965) in his study of Paris.
Chombart de Lauwe (1952: 190–1) identified two distinct components of social space: (1) an objective component, ‘the spatial framework within which groups live; groups whose social structure and organization have been conditioned by ecological and cultural factors,’ and (2) a subjective component, ‘space as perceived by members of particular groups.’ Recent research by Anglo-American scholars has advanced our understanding of these two components, but little attempt has been made to integrate them into any comprehensive explanatory model.
Social area analysis provides one obvious approach to a definition of objective social space. Social spaces originally denoted groupings of census tracts which displayed a degree of homogeneity in terms of given sociodemographic characteristics (Shevky and Williams, 1949; Shevky and Bell, 1955). This interpretation was later adopted by geographers for factorial ecology studies (Berry and Horton, 1970; Brown and Moore, 1971). Whether or not the ‘spaces’ derived from a factor analysis of census variables were considered to be ‘areas’ by the resident population was not considered. Pioneers of social area analysis studied the isomorphism of social participation patterns and social spaces and matched activity patterns with the spatial morphology of social characteristics (Bell, 1959; Greer, 1956), but they made little attempt to examine the isomorphism of place identification with so-called ‘social spaces’ (see Greer, 1969: 99–104). The analysis of social activity patterns offers more dynamic variation on this theme. Action spaces, activity spaces, behavior fields, and other concepts related to spatial movements have been examined as indices of social space (Chapin and Hightower, 1966; Cox and Golledge, 1969; Adams, 1969; Brown and Moore, 1971). In these studies, the nature and dynamics of people’s movements in space are taken as critical clues to their relationships with their environments.
Complementary perspectives on spatial experience are afforded by the literature on territoriality (Altman, 1970; Lorenz, 1966; Ardrey, 1966; Suttles, 1968), personal space (Sommer, 1969), and proxemic behavior (Hall, 1966). Processes whereby individuals and groups lay claim to space and organize and defend it in culturally prescribed ways have recently become a major focus of interest in studies of environmental behavior. Whereas research on social areas and activity spaces generally relates to ‘objective social space,’ the territoriality literature adds insights of ‘subjective social space’ (Boal, 1969; Metton, 1969). The subjective component of social space has been explored primarily in social psychology, anthropology, and ethology, within the framework of such concepts as life space (Lewin, 1951), ethnic domain (Barth, 1956), cognitive maps, (Downs, 1971; Blaut and Stea, 1971), and urban images (Lynch, 1960; Strauss, 1961). These studies, though diverse in their approach, share a common focus on perceptual and cognitive evaluations as determinants of spatial meaning (Stea and Downs, 1970; Cox and Zannaras, 1970). Such research seldom attempts, however, to link cognitive structurings of space with the actual ecological characteristics of the environment. Exceptions include Lee’s (1968) empirical study of ‘socio-spatial schemata,’ Michelson’s (1966) analysis of life-styles and value orientations, and Fried and Gleicher’s (1961) work on ‘satisfaction’ among relocated families in Boston. Each of these studies attempts to link value orientations, mental schemata, or traditions to externally manifest behavior in particular environments.
Can any common threads of meaning be derived from these diverse bodies of literature? Is there any comprehensive framework within which they can be integrated? Are the conceptual and methodological approaches so distinct that research coordination is impossible? The literature reviewed appears to offer insight into at least five distinct levels of analysis:
(1) a social-psychological level investigating a person’s position within society — that is, ‘sociological space’;
(2) a behavioral level investigating activity and circulation patterns — that is, ‘interaction space’;
(3) a symbolic level investigating images, cognitions, and mental maps;
(4) an affective level investigating patterns of identification with territory;
(5) a purely morphological level, in which population characteristics are factor-analyzed to yield homogeneous ‘social areas.’
To appreciate fully the patterns yielded by any one level of analysis, they must be related to the other levels. But before any comprehensive framework can be formulated, it is important to identify some of the missing links in the chain of research endeavor.
Incorporating a Sociological Dimension
An examination of the literature on spatial behavior suggests that one critical missing link is the sociological dimension. Most of the explanatory models rest heavily on generalizations about relationships of organisms to their environments; for example, perceptual/cognitive processes (image formation, distance and space perception); dynamic-movement processes (activity spaces); instinctual/cognitive processes (territorial defense, proxemic behavior); affective processes (identification with place); and various combinations of these. The sociological dimension in these processes is rarely given explicit attention. Similarly, life-style, social stratification, status, and role are rarely treated explicitly in studies of environment behavior (see, however, Gerson, 1972).
If environmental behavior is taken as the external (spatial) expression of social reference systems (sociological spaces), it becomes possible to integrate findings from the various levels of analysis. While genetic endowment, personality attributes, territorial instincts, and so on must be recognized in any study of environmental relationships, such personal characteristics are usually influenced by the individual’s life-style, group participations, and other activities involving interaction with others. The reference groups from which an individual derives his values and behavioral norms dictate certain aspirations and attitudes toward his milieu (Flachsbart, 1969; Rothblatt, 1961).
Investigation of...
