Space and boundaries

‘Comfort Distance’ (personal space), 2020, Photo by Alessandro Chiola

In modern society, especially in crowded urban communities, maintain personal space can be difficult, and in specific circumstances, like public transport or elevators, strangers may even trespass the intimate space.

San Donato Estate, Pescara, Italy

Space and boundaries

Every morning we get dressed, we cross the city, we take public transport, we go to work or visit places but are we aware of our body, the space we occupy, the space we build around ourselves in a crowded city?

A few years ago, I was a member of a women community called KIbS – Knowledge Increased by Sharing - meeting monthly at the Barbican centre and sharing knowledge about art, literature and architecture.

Surprisingly enough, just before the pandemic, a series of interesting exhibitions and performances drove my attention to the topic Body and Space under different lights and point of views. The Anthony Gormley[1] exhibition was a discovery of the body as a ‘place’: a place of experience, memory, emotion, imagination; Tate Late hosted Project XO[2], a wearable robotics technology performance, an immersive experience and interaction between artificial body and space; the Doug Aitken exhibition ‘Return to the Real’[3], questioned the relationship of our body with the world in an era of connectivity.

This blog is the summary of my contribution and reflection on the topic Space and Boundaries, an exploration about how the space is perceived, experienced and occupied through the lenses of artist, photographers, sociologists and architects. The text is organised in small chapters, each one accompanied by a few exemplificative pictures of the major topics I touched during my presentation with KIbS back in January 2020.

J. Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Classic, New York, 2008

The dialectic of outside and inside

The first image we have in mind when we speak about boundaries is the image of gates and barriers, something that limits our accessibility to some other places rather than joining it.

Boundary, by definition, is “a real or imagined line that marks the limits or edges of something and separates it from other things or places; a dividing line.”[4]

Physical or abstract, in principle, a boundary defines the outside and the inside space.

“From the point of view of geometrical expression, the dialectic of outside and inside is supported by a reinforced geometries in which limits are barriers.” [5]

Infact, in his book Species of Spaces[6], the sociologist George Perec begins his narrative about space with a drawing, essentially a square that breaks the emptiness of the blank page and defines the inside and the outside world.

Proxemics

Bodies are surrounded by invisible boundaries that limit our space and determine our interaction with other people within the space. We all have learned in the past few years how in modern society, especially in crowded urban communities, maintain personal space can be difficult. This awareness opened a lot of reflection and consideration on how proxemics could shape our cities.

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effect that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction.

In his book “The Hidden dimension”[7], Edward Hall argues that perception of spaces is patterned by culture: different cultural frameworks for defining and organising spaces are internalised at unconscious level and can lead to different ways of communication.

After years of studies and observation of human behaviour, E. Hall defines 4 zones of interpersonal distance: intimate, personal, social and public distance.

Intimate distance is the closest bubble of space surrounding a person, it includes hugging and touching, therefore entering this bubble is acceptable only for intimates. Personal distance designates the psychological area of the body, a small protective sphere between itself and others. Social distance is the distance maintained in conversation with colleagues or in a group of discussion. Public distance requires no physical involvement and a more formal language, and it is used by public figures or on public occasions, like speeches, lectures, theatre.

In modern society, especially in crowded urban communities, maintaining personal space can be difficult, and in specific circumstances, like public transport or elevators, strangers may even trespass the intimate space. Members of the modern society have developed a defensive mechanism to recreate their own personal space: avoid eye contact or keep muscle tense to avoid any body contact.

The idea of the invisible boundary of personal space within a crowded scenario is expressed amazingly in the work of the photographer Stefan Rousseau, who took pictures of people in the tube on his commute. What he noticed was that despite crowds and lack of space, every person managed to remain in their own little world avoiding interaction with strangers and using their time to read, do the make-up or sleep.

Street photography is probably the most intrusive form of art that can explain the spatial relation between subjects and the abstract concept of boundary within public spaces.

The work of the American street photographer, Viviana Maier[8], is another great example. Vivian Maier was a professional nanny, with the passion for photography who, from 1950 to 1990, secretly shoot in the streets of Chigaco and New York. Her outstanding work, accidentally discovered by the historian John Maloof, is a collection of portraits and urban scenes of America. Her camera, operating at chest level, allowed her to maintain eye contact with the subject, therefore, many of her strongest and memorable shots are people staring at her.

Similarly, the American street photographer Bruce Gilden is best known for his close-up photographs of people in the street of New York: with the use of a flashgun he pushed the limits of the frame with his proximity to the subject.

Provocative is also the conceptual art of the Argentinian artist, Alberto Greco, who experimented the concept of boundary in his work\manifesto Vivo Dito (Living Finger), an artwork series where, by pointing with his finger and signing he draw attention to objects and people as living art pieces within everyday life. Some of these performances included circling passers-by and metaphorically turning them into living sculpture. By drawing the circle around passers-by, he defines a boundary and a piece of living art. This act was at the same time an intrusion and a definition of what E. Hall calls ‘personal space’.

Do Ho Suh, Passages, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2017

Door as threshold

Door is a movable barrier, the symbol of the passage from an inside to outside, from an intimate world to the public world. Doors clearly depict the limit between the private and the public sphere.

The exhibition Passages of the Korean artist Do Ho Suh hold at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2019, offered a different prospective focusing the attention to the spaces in between. 

“I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination. We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in between spaces. But with these mundane spaces that nobody really pay attention to, these grey areas, one cannot get from point A to point B.” [9]

The exhibition expresses the idea of the home as a both physical structure and a lived experience, the boundaries of identity and connection between individual and other people. The installation, panels of coloured translucent polyester fabric, depicts transitory connecting spaces between rooms, corridors, passages from one space to another metaphorically blurring the limit between private and public. Moving through them means experience of being in flux, crossing boundaries and moving between psychological states.

“But is he who open a door and he who close it the same being?”[10]

Fleet Road, view of communal garden.

Highgate Town, view of public walkaway

Blurring Boundaries

The transition from the indoor and the outdoor spaces and how different urban forms could develop different domains of urbanity and relationship between private and public sphere has always been at the centre of architects and urban designer attention.

Important to the debate has been the work that the architects like Neave Brown and Peter Tabori had undertaken while working at the Borough of Camden under the direction of Sidney Cook[11], developing the research on the low-rise high-density housing.

This urban model emerged as type in UK with Neave Brown, first with the Winscombe Street (1962) and then developed further in Fleet Road (1967) and Alexandra Road (1969).

In his design for Fleet Road, Neave Brown, influenced by the research of ‘Community and Privacy’[12], defines 4 domains of urbanity: public, semi-public, private and semi-private:

• Public streets define the space where anyone can get, the new road to the south and the walkway on the north;

• Semi-public are the pedestrian alleyways dedicated to resident use only where anyone else would feel like an intruder;

• Semi-private is the communal gardens located at higher level than the public zone and accessed by stairs;

• Private spheres belong to dwelling, with the protected interior space and fenced balcony and gardens.

The concept of low-rise high-density housing was developed in different Ways by Peter Tabori who succeed Neave Brown at the Camden.

For the Highgate New Town project, he opposed the idea of the estate as self-contained residential enclave and bases his design to the traditional British approach to build houses as an integral part of the urban fabric. Consequently, for Tabori, the space was to be either public or private without any intermediate space, avoiding semi-private and semi-public areas like indirect access.

In contrast to the hierarchy of spaces in Fleet Road, at Highgate Town all dwellings have direct access from the street and every space beyond the front door is public. Inspired by Jane Jacob’s theory[13] of eyes on the street, Tabori believed that space where public and private sphere were strictly separated was socially successful, ‘self-policing’ just like the traditional streets of the city.

Temporal boundaries

As confirmed by recent research around the 15 min neighbourhood, another way of defining spatial boundaries is by time. I have already explored the meaning of neighbourhood in relation to time and proximity in my previous blog “What is your neighbourhood” but I wanted to reiterate the concept of temporal boundaries to define the limit of a place we live.

What has always interested me since my PhD research about Council Estate and urban regeneration was the notion of housing enclaves and how mental and physical boundaries could be broken in favour of a more connected urban place.

Different researches have demonstrated that 5-minn walking distance, which corresponds to about 400 m, is the pedestrian shed people are willing to walk before driving. The pedestrian shed is usually used to calculate public transport catchment areas or to define access to destination within neighbourhood and it is essentially based on the concept of ‘neighbourhood unit’ of Clarence Perry, which place the community uses within walking distance at the heart of the neighbourhood.

This notion informed the analysis and interpretation of my case studies. Looking at each Council Estate in relation to the services withing walking distance, rather than in isolation, opened new opportunities to define regeneration strategies.

Perceived proximity and hodological space

Council estate like any other single use in cities, like campuses, industrial sites or infrastructure, create boundaries that feels impenetrable. Jane Jacobs reflects on the topic of border vacuums[14] and how edges in cities could create empty spaces with little or no connection with the surrounding neighbourhood. What she describes, when speaking about spaces abutting railways or Council Estate, is like a centrifugal effect that progressively drives the economical and vital social life away from the border itself. In terms of urban design, she defines two type of lands, ‘general land’, places like streets and small parks where people walk on foot and ‘special land’, places that, despite could be physically accessible, people are walking alongside them but not through them.

Spaces deprived by activities are considered the dead end of uses and affect the way people move and perceive proximity: street pattern, sidewalk design, security and active frontages affect how long people are willing to walk before reaching a destination. For instance, the perception of a street with no active frontages, retail, shops, amenities, is distorted and the distance between two places stretched as consequence.

There is a gap between real proximity and perceived proximity and that gap could be understood trough the definition of the hodological space. From the Greek word ‘hodos’: way, hodological space refers to the space of possible movements. Unlike the straight lines, this space involved the preferred paths as a compromise of different domains: shortest distance, security, maximum experience. The topological geometry of the path is defined psychologically. The distance between A and B is not the shortest path but the path of least effort.

Mental Map and Mental boundaries

I have always found the idea that there isn’t just a possible route but multiple connections between places fascinating and in particular the fact that positive or negative experience of a place could have an impact in the recording of mental maps.

“If something hurts me, I erase it from my mental map. Places where I stumbled, fell, where I was struck down, cut to the quick, where things were painful – such places are simply not there any longer.” [15]says Olga Tokarczuk in her book Flight.

Zygmunt Bauhman, in the chapter Time/Space of the book Liquid Modernity clearly describes how the perception of the space and the exclusion of some ‘non places or empty spaces’ from our mental map could affect the way we experience the urban life.

He describes his experience in a southern European city during one of his lecturing trip. He was drove from the airport to the hotel from a young lecturer, a wealthy woman who apologised for the long journey ahead since there was no way to avoid the centre’s traffic. The trip took indeed two hours. On his way back, the drive to the airport with a taxi took just 10 minutes. He realised that there was a shorter route through slums which the taxi driver wasn’t afraid to drive through. What really happened is that the mental map of his guide did not record the rough and dangerous streets: in her mental map the slum was an empty space.

“Empty are places one does not enter and where one would feel lost and vulnerable, surprised, taken aback and a little frightened by the sight of humans”.[16]

[1] Anthony Gormley at Royal Academy of Arts, 2019

[2] Project XO at Tate Late, 2019

[3] Return to the real at Victoria Miro Gallery, 2019

[4] Oxford Dictionary

[5] G. Bachelard, The poetic of space, Penguin Classic, New York, 2014

[6] G. Perec, Species of Spaces, Penguin Classic, London, 1974 

[7] Edward Hall, The Hidden Dimension, Penguin Classic, 1974

[8] Vivian Maier Street Photographer, powerHouse Books, New York, 2011

[9] Do Ho Suh: Passages, at Victoria Miro Gallery, 2017

[10] G. Bachelard, The poetic of space, Penguin Classic, New York, 2014

[11] Mark Swenartorn, Cook’s Camden, The making of Modern Housing, Lund Humphries ,London, 2017

[12] Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Community and Privacy, Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, , Penguin Books, 1966

[13] Jane Jacob, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Modern Library, 1961

[14] Ibid

[15] Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, 2018

[16] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 1999

Home is a feeling/Home is a process

Neave Brown, 22-32 Winscombe Street, London

House becomes alive with people and in Pallasmaa’s words ‘our domicile is the refuge of our body, memory and identity’. Therefore, public houses should be designed to gather wider range of occupants and current domestic spaces should provide some degree of flexibility in order to reflect identity and address the change of time.

Consideration on domesticity and sense of home

Home is a feeling and simultaneously is an image, an idea which embodies certain principles of living. Very often the image of domestic space designed by architects is the illusion of stillness and tidiness, a place to look at rather than live in.

As G. Perec says in his ‘Species of Spaces’, living a place means take possession of it. But when does a place really belong to us? Creating home is a process which usually starts with populating it with our belongings and it concludes with building memories.

‘Home should allow us to express our unique selves […] In turn, our identities should be reinforced by where we live. Good homes can help us to express our true selves. Bad homes are so austere or overdesigned that leave little room for homemaking, for adding biographical texture’ says Dr Paul Keedwell in his book ‘Headspace. The Psychology of City Living’.

The images of internal spaces from Lacaton and Vassal project The Cité Manifest, Mulhouse are provocative in this sense. What interested them the most is the evidence of daily life rather than the perfectibility. Their interiors show the way people live and occupy the space which has been deliberately left empty. The idea of the French architects is the house as a shell, an envelope where domestic uses unfold one after another in a continuous open space.

Home is a process, it follows the passage of time, it grows with its inhabitants until it cannot grow further to contain any other changes. Despite that, the current housing model, generally based on functionalism, with a different function assigned to each room, sleeping, cooking, washing and relaxing, is not flexible enough to allow this changes to take place.

Lifestyles have been generally standardised into a few family models, single, couple and couples with children and they have been translated into a few standard layouts: studio, 1 bed, 2 bed, 3/4 bed apartment.

G. Perec describes very well this model of today apartments, where every daily activity is related to a specific moment of the day and where every hour is related to a specific room. This model implies that daily activities of sleeping and cooking are spent in the house and others such us work and free time are spent outside the domestic world.

In his book ‘Liquid modernity’, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman introduced the notion of liquid modernity to describe the condition of constant mobility and changes in relationship, economy and social life of contemporary society.

Today many people work from home or live temporarily in a city and work in another, others temporary share accommodations or push the boundaries of the traditional family system living within communities. Therefore a ‘liquid’ form of social life better reflects the contemporary lifestyle.

Despite that, domestic space is still based on a more traditional and static way of living. Apartments rarely include extra spaces for any other activities such as working from home, collecting books and art, producing music or developing specific hobbies the inhabitants might have. Internal space is compressed to the minimum standard required and doesn’t leave much room to flexibility, creativity, personalisation and identity. Dwelling buildings don’t provide guest rooms and co-housing is not yet considered a tenure.

Many questions arise from these considerations:

Is contemporary architecture considering new form of living?

Is the composition of a family the only driver to define a lifestyle and consequently a typical layout?

Are the new ‘fluid’ needs being addressed in the domestic space?

Standardisation has always been a key factor in developing housing schemes mainly to speed up and facilitate construction process, but the resulting risk is that apartments within a building appear identical, an infinite repetition without identity.

Recent housing projects across London have been focused on addressing the lack of identity and variety of the urban fabric designing ‘family of buildings’ but there is not enough research about ‘family of homes’.

As J. Pallasmaa says in his ‘The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses’, ‘Homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being and wipes away the sense of place’.

House becomes alive with people and in Pallasmaa’s words ‘our domicile is the refuge of our body, memory and identity’. Therefore, public houses should be designed to gather wider range of occupants and current domestic spaces should provide some degree of flexibility in order to reflect identity and address the change of time.

Domestic space and flexibility

Research in flexibility find its roots in Japanese architecture. Indeed, many Japanese architects looked at different way of living and conceive the domestic space.

Shigeru Ban, amongst them, breaks barriers in housing design with its Nine square grid, Wall-less house and Naked house. While the first two projects share the same principle of ‘making rooms’ in an open space through sliding partitions, the latter is a house naked of partitions. Roof and floor define the domestic envelope in which flexible rooms on wheels are capable of reconfiguring the space all the time. In all these examples fixed elements of the house, bathroom, kitchen and wardrobes are packed on the edges to free the central communal space or occupy strategic positions within the open plan.

Also amongst modern British architectures there are examples of dwellings exploring some degree of flexibility.

The layout of 22-32 Winscombe Street terrace houses by Neave Brown provides an independent children room divisible into two separate rooms by a sliding wall enhancing the family to grow within the same house.

Likewise, Type 20 layout of Barbican Estate by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon provides a generous one bed flat with an additional space in continuity with the living room which could be separate by a sliding doors, creating a room with flexible uses.

This layout anticipated in a way the primary need for space dedicated to nourishing the mind of inhabitants rather than mere functionality. The house is not just a ‘machine to live in’ but it’s a place where inhabitants can express and develop their own identities.

SoHo - small office home office - Shininome Canal Court Block 1, Japan in Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, 2010, Actar

Interesting in this sense is Shininome Canal Court Block 1, Yamamoto’s project in Japan, the only example which introduces the so-called SoHo - small office home office. SoHo depicts an additional room to the flat which interface with the circulation space through a transparent envelope. SoHo is an in-between space capable of mixing the domestic space with communal space by visually opening part of the flat to create a communication with neighbours and animate the corridor.

SoHo not only creates an additional room which the tenant could benefit of but redefine the residential use and the relationship between public and private.

If working from home or any other evolving needs could be incorporated into the design of our homes, unexpected solutions could be found. Perhaps, current regulations and briefs could be challenged, deconstructing the mere functionalism to prioritise comfort, sensory pleasure and domesticity as experience of inhabiting, shaping new way of living capable to express and reinforce different personalities and a personal sense of home.

G. Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974, Penguin Classic

Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 1999, Polity Press

J. Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses, 1996, John Wiley & Sons

Dr Paul Keedwell, Headspace. The Psychology of City Living, 2017, Aurum Press, London

M. Swenarton, Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, 2017, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd

S. Orazi, C. Rudquist, The Barbican Estate, 2018, Batsford Ltd

Total Housing, Alternatives to Urban Sprawl, 2010, Actar

What is your neighbourhood?

Wilton Way, Dalston

How can we then (re)define the boundary of our neighbourhood? Is the 15 minutes walking distance still a factor? Is a neighbourhood something we can really measure in time or miles? Is a neighbourhood something we can define with physical boundaries?

One of the first gift I received from Alessandro before moving to London it was the tote bag “I love Hackney”. He already knew I would fall in love with this neighbourhood, and he was right. Our first place in London was a share flat in Dalston, a refurbished warehouse in the heart of the quiet Wilton Way, two steps away from Violet, one of the best bakeries in town. Everything I needed was within walking distance, 5 min to work, 10 minutes to Dalston Junction station and Ridley Market for my weekly grocery shopping. A walk through London Fields and I was right in Broadway Market to buy fresh bread and fish. Dalston Curve Garden was my favourite spot for lunch breaks and London Fields was my local park for walks and pic-nic with friends. What I considered my neighbourhood was included in a radius of 15-20 min by walk.

The very first idea of neighbourhood I have experienced in London reflects Perec’s idea. In his words: What is a neighbourhood? […] the portion of the town you can get around easily on foot or...that part of the town you don’t need to go, precisely because you are already there. […]

Back at that time, I was leaving in a metropolis, experiencing everything the urban life could offer me and yet I was part of a walkable and vibrant piece of town. Whenever I think about my first flat in London, I can recall the feeling of belonging to a place and the richness of experiences I could access on my day-to-day life. That same sense of belonging made us decide on settling our routes in east London.

After a few years spent in my beloved Wilton Way, we moved in a one bed flat on Regent’s Canal, on the junction between Broadway Market and Pritchard’s Road. The flat was within the same borough and not far away from our previous apartment, but the way we experienced the area and moved around the neighbourhood changed. The centre of our walking radius shifted slightly and coincided with our new home. Likewise, what we considered our neighbourhood started to expand its temporary boundaries beyond the 15-20 min radius and blend its boundaries.

It is worth noticing that the new walkable radius didn’t replace the previous one, instead it overlayed, creating a network of known and new destinations: it was an additional layer of experiences to the already established local life. In the weekend, Broadway Market became our main destination for grocery shopping; London Fields became a home for us, an outdoor space, an extension of our living room. Sunday mornings were spent at flower market in Columbia Road; pleasant walks along the canal would lead us east to Victoria Park and west to Angel.

As architect and resident, I observed a change in the perception of proximity: after moving flat, previous destinations, favourite shops, restaurant and pubs were still included in the map of places we were willing to reach by walk.

The logic behind this phenomenon is the geographical knowledge and spatial awareness we build while experiencing the city. When we move from one place to another we rely on the mental map of our environment which is stored in our brain. Every map is dotted with familiar places, grey areas we don’t want to go trough and paths and routes to move around. 

At the neighbourhood scale, the more places you add to your map the more intricated the network of paths become and suddenly, places that looked apart from each other are tied together. We can then state that the perception of proximity is strongly related with the familiarity of a place: when you know an area, the perceived distance shortens, and you are willing to walk longer distance.

How can we then (re)define the boundary of our neighbourhood? Is the 15 minutes walking distance still a factor? Is a neighbourhood something we can really measure in time or miles? Is a neighbourhood something we can define with physical boundaries?

In planning terms, the 15 min neighbourhood - which you can find in all the agenda today, especially after the isolation that many people experienced during the pandemic- is a valid concept to express the vision of a mixed-use and complete piece of town, where residents could get access to all their needs. The proximity of services, like convenient shops, nursery, post office and GP, are fundamental to guarantee a good quality of life and the success of a place.

For architects and planners, the idea of a mixed-use neighbourhood it’s embedded in the design approach, but it hasn’t always been the case. Many are the pieces of city that have been designed as satellites of the city centre: suburban areas with no services within walking distance.

Broadway Market

Just a few months before the pandemic I moved farther east in my current flat in Fish Island Village, Hackney Wick. That was the time I had to readapt my habits and reshape my daily life in a historical moment when avoiding public transport was strongly recommended and offices encouraged us to work from home. Neighbourhood life - with social distancing rules - was the only thing we had been left with.

My new way of living influenced once again my thoughts about space, neighbourhoods and their relationship to the city. Living in a strategic location, on the Hertford canal, between Victoria Park and Olympic Park, made me firmly consider the importance of access to public realm and open spaces and the benefit these could have on mental health and well-being.

Walking along the canal at lunch breaks, gathering on the public realm for a chat with neighbours after work, meandering through streets, bridges and paths represent a firs layer of complexity in a network of pedestrian routes and experiences of the place. I validated the importance to live in a walkable neighbourhood where you can not just access all your needs but also find a sense of stay.

The pandemic was also the time when I realised that I couldn’t defined my neighbourhood with a temporal boundary. My neighbourhood has a stratification of meanings and proximities. It’s at my doorstep: the convenience shop, the deli and the brewery downstairs; it’s within walking distance: everything I can reach in 15 minutes; it’s local: every familiar places that I go to, my favourite bakery, deli and market.

Neighborhood is the place you live

Neighborhood is the place you can work

Neighborhood is the place you make encounters

Neighborhood is a place you identify with

Neighborhood is a place you are proud of

Neighborhood is a place where you build a community

Neighborhood is the place you belong