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