Society seen through the prism of space

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Society seen through the prism of space: outline of a theoryof society and space

Bill Hillier* and Vinicius Netto

Space Syntax Laboratory, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, 1-19 Torrington Place, University CollegeLondon, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Two questions challenge the student of space and society above all others: will new technologies change thespatial basis of society? And if so, will this have an impact on society itself? For the urbanist, these twoquestions crystallise into one: what will the future of cities have to do with their past? Too often thesequestions are dealt with as though they were only matters of technology. However, they are much more thanthat. They are deep and difficult questions about the interdependence of technology, space and society thatwe do not yet have the theoretical apparatus to answer. We know that previous, revolutions in technologysuch as agriculture, urbanism and industrialisation associated radical changes in space with no less radicalchanges in social institutions. However, we do not know how far these linkages were contingent ornecessary. We do not, in short, have a theory of society and space adequate to account for where we are now,and therefore we have no reasonable theoretical base for speculating about the future. In this paper, Isuggest that a major reason for this theoretical deficit is that most previous attempts to build a theory ofsociety and space have looked at society and tried to find space in its output. The result has been that theconstructive role of space in creating and sustaining society has not been brought to the fore, or if it has,only in a way that is too general to permit the detailed specification of mechanisms. In this paper, I try toreverse the normal order of things by looking first at space and trying to discern society through space: bylooking at society through the prism of space. Through this I try to define key mechanisms linking space tosociety and then use these to suggest how the questions about the future of cities and societies might bebetter defined.

URBAN DESIGN International (2002) 00, 000000. doi:10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000077

Keywords: society; technology; theory of space; spatialisation

The modern city is losing its external andformal structure. Internally it is in a state ofdecay while the new community represented

by the nation everywhere grows at its expense.The age of the city seems to be at an end DonMartindale 1958 in his Prefatory Remarks tothe translation of Max Webers, The City.

At the turning point between the twentiethcentury and the twenty-first, a new kind ofeconomy is coming into being, and a new kindof society, and a new kind of city: some mightsay no city at all, the end of the city as we haveknown it, but they will doubtless be proved

wrong Peter Hall in the last Chapter of Citiesand Civilisation: The city of the coming goldenage, 1999.

Introduction and review

In my first paper to this symposium (Hillier,2001), it was proposed that the social constructionof space in human settlements was mediated byspatial laws. The laws were of two kinds: those

by which different ways of placing buildings gaverise to different spatial configurations; and thosethrough which different spatial configurationscreated different patterns of co-presence among

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*Correspondence: Tel. +44 20 7391 1739; Fax: +44 20 78134363; E-mail: [email protected]

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people through their effect on movement. Whatwere loosely referred to as different, social forcesthen expressed themselves in space through thedifferent requirements that each placed on co-presence. For example, residence tends to restrain

and structure co-presence, and therefore toarrange buildings to achieve relatively localisedand restrictive spatial configurations, while mi-croeconomic activity tends to maximise co-pre-sence and thus to arrange buildings to integratespace locally and globally.

This shapes a city into two broadly differentspatial elements: on the one hand, a residential

background of spatial areas whose spatial pat-terning varies with culture, depending on the wayin which that culture seeks to restrain andstructure co-presence between, say, inhabitants

and strangers or men and women; and on theother, an interlinking global system of publicspace, usually expressed in the axial map as somevariant on the, deformed wheel, generatedmainly by spatially invariant (in the sense ofalways seeking to maximise co-presence) micro-economic processes. Thus in settlements spaceoperates in at least two distinct modes: one,conservative and the other, generative. Theconservative mode restricts co-presence in orderto conserve or reproduce cultural patterns; andthe other generates the maximum copresence inorder to optimise the material conditions for

everyday life. (Hillier, 1996). Through this theory,we were able to suggest why large settlements, inspite of their manifest differences, tend to havecertain generic similarities. They are a conse-quence of spatial laws mediating the relation

between configurations of social activity andconfigurations of space.

Some theoretical implications

There is of course nothing new in either of the twosocio-spatial propositions on which this argumentdepends: that economic processes tend to operateuniformly and culture idiosyn-cratically. All wehave done is to suggest how the same laws givespatial expression to both, and through thisgenerate the basic features of the spatial layoutsof settlements. However, this does raise interest-ing theoretical questions about the current debateon the nature of cities and their possible future, orlack of a future. First, it implies that the relationof social activities to space is generic, rather than

specific. It is not this or that pattern of activity thatgives rise to the durable spatial patterns that wefind in cities, but the demands that different kindsof activity make on co-presence, which articulatethe spatial laws to make one kind of space rather

than another. In fact, because two sets of lawsintervene between social activity and space lawsgoverning the emergence of spatial patterns fromaccumulated local actions, and laws governingthe impact of those spatial patterns on co-presence it means that the relation of societyand space is two-way generic: generic aspects ofsocial action relate to generic patterns of space.

This is why in general and with importantexceptions during the life of a city space changesonly slowly while activity changes rapidly. We donot find that new phenotypical patterns of activity

per se generate new patterns of space, but that newpatterns of activity have a certain distribution ofdemands on co-presence, and that to the degreethat the new distribution approximates the old,the new pattern will be absorbed into the existingurban framework with comparatively littlechange. The appendix to this paper outlines acase study of the City of London, drawn largelyfrom the work of Julienne Hanson, showing howradical this adaptation can be. When assessing theimpact of new activities on space, then, what weneed to compare is not so much the contents ofnew activities but the range of demands they are

likely to make on co-presence. The question wemust ask about the future is then: have wereached a radical discontinuity in this process ofslow and fast change? Are technological andsocial changes now generating patterns of activitythat will be incompatible with the distribution ofspaces that we currently have through currentpatterns of urbanisation. And will this lead to aradical change in the demands that society placeson space, perhaps leading to a radical transforma-tion of cities or even as some have suggested tothe end of cities as we have known them.

A second implication of the theory is that socialforces have inherent spatiality within them, sostrong and systematic that it is capable of beingarticulated by spatial laws, and so clear that it can

be detected by the careful examination of realpatterns of space. What is particularly interestingfrom the point of view of a theory of society andspace is that the spatialities we have seenoperating in cities cannot just be in the nature ofthings, since the city is only one spatial state of

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The prism of spaceB. Hillier and V. Netto

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society among many others. A further questionthen arises: might there be other social forces withother spatialities, for example, those that give riseto nonurban patterns? And how might these berelevant to the possibility of a post-urban society?

The third implication is that space plays aconstructive as well as a receptive role in shapingthe forms of social action that we see in cities. Thequestion is, is it also constructive of the under-lying generic patterns of urban societies, of thegenotypes of urban society, we might say, asopposed to the phenotypes? This is a legitimatequestion because wherever human activity hasgenerated cities, for whatever reason, it seemsalso to have changed a great deal else: socialinstitutions, lifestyles, habits of thought, and eventhe nature of human social and individual

identity. A city is both a transformation of spaceand a transformation of society. We do not reallyhave a coherent theory for this, in spite of thenumber of social as well as urban theorists whohave been concerned with it. It is not logicallyplausible that all of these changed and that citieswere built as a consequence. In the rise of cities,space and society seem at the very least to havechanged together.

The question we are now facing then is: if space isnow changing, will society also change. If we areentering post-urban space, then what does this

imply for post-urban society? It is clear that wecannot hope to answer such questions simply bystudying cities. We need to know what it is aboutsocieties that interacts with space and underliesthe changes that historically seem to haveoccurred in one when they occurred in the other.We need to understand what an urban society isin the space of possible societies?

Aim of the paper

The aim of this paper is to sketch a way ofapproaching these questions initially at space,and trying to detect society through space, incontrast with most commentaries on society andspace, which typically look at society and try todetect its output in space. Here we will take afrankly spatial point of view of the same question:to look at society through the prism of space, andtrying to outline a theory of society and space seen

from the point of view of space. The text will as aconsequence be rather thin on discussions about

society in the usual sense, because the aim will beto isolate what it is about society that turns itselfinto space, and what it is about space that turnsitself into society. Having seen the signs ofinherent spatiality in social forces, we are now

looking for it in society itself.

The theory of society and space sketched here and we must emphasise that it is only a sketch implies two main critiques of much existingtheorisation. The first is that because mostattempts to build a theory of society and spacelook at society first, the constructive role of spacein creating the generic forms of society has not

been brought to the fore, or if it has, only in a waythat is too general to permit the detailed specifica-tion of mechanisms. The second is that muchexplicit theorising about space has succumbed in

one way or another to what might with hindsightbe called the myth of historical spatiality theidea that in the past we were much more spatialand localised than we are now, and therefore findthe present strange and alienating. This myth hasafflicted the spatial disciplines, academic andapplied, throughout the 20th century, and ob-scured the implications of a growing body ofresearch results that have accumulated over thepast few decades in fields as far apart as the studyof hunter-gatherer societies (Lee and Devore,1968), tribal societies (Turner, 1957), social net-works (Granovetter, 1982; Fischer et al., 197x;

Poole and Kochen, 1978; reviewed in Albrechtet al., 2000), organisational dynamics (Allen, 1977)and many others, which have in common thatthey suggest that the fundamental mechanismsthat operate in society are not only those thatsolidify local groups, but also those that createnonlocal networks, including those which favourthe nonlocal at the expense of the local.

These results raise or ought to raise afundamental question about how we see societyin general in a spatial context. What would be theimplications for a theory of society and space ofthe proposition that the core mechanisms inhuman societies historically were not only localand spatial, but also nonlocal and virtual? Thispaper will explore this question and will suggestthat if we continue to contrast our presentsituation with the historic past on the groundsthat they were local and we are global, or thatthey were spatial and we are virtual, then wecannot understand what is happening how. Allthe evidence is that human societies were always

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at their appropriate scale of course global aswell as local entities, and virtual as well as spatialentities in some face-to-face sense. In fact, it isonly by studying the mechanisms by whichsocieties become virtual and nonlocal that we

can be guided towards a theory of society andspace, because the very fact that a society existsmeans that the interstitial spaces distancingdiscrete individuals and co-habiting groups fromeach other have been overcome. It is how space isovercome that is the essential linkage betweensociety and space, and, because society can only

be created by the overcoming of space, it alsoprovides clues to the morphological dynamics ofa society. It is for this reason that we find that thekey items of social software that is, the rules,

beliefs, values and practices that guide our spacetime situated practices are those that on the

one hand lead to the overcoming of distance tocreate relations across space, and on the otherhand control the effects of lack of distance amonglocally proximate groups. These are the rawmaterials of a theory of society and space.

Difficulties of the project

How then should we seek to construct a theory ofsociety and space? We must begin by acknowl-edging certain basic difficulties in the project.Whichever way we look at it, the very possibility

of a theory of society and space presupposes thatthe relation between the two is in some sensesystematic. If it were not, then there would benothing for theory to latch on to. However, thevery idea that this might be the case raises severedifficulties. Logically, there cannot be a systematicrelation between society and space unless twoconditions are fulfilled. The first is that spacemust have, or at least be capable of having, socialpotentials of some kind since if it does not, itcannot embody whatever it is that society sends toit. The second is that society should have, or becapable of having, spatial necessity of some kind,since if it does not, then it cannot impose itself onspace in a way in which space can receive it. Forexample, if society is an entirely immaterial entity say, a consensus among individuals then itcannot matter how it is deployed in space, sinceall deployments will be equal and leave the socialconsensus as it is.

The first of these two problems has been thepreoccupation of space syntax research: to show

that space through its very form and configura-tion can express social potentials, carry socialcontents, and through this take part in theproduction and reproduction of society. But howcan the concept of a society contain spatial

necessity. The idea seems paradoxical. If weexamine less inchoate and less general socialconcepts such as a family or an organisation, wefind that each is a structure of roles and relations,which can be drawn up in a diagram that will bethe same however it is realised in space. Thespacetime realisation does not affect the essentialdescription of what the social entity is. Spatialform may affect the dynamics of a family ororganisation, but it will not change its basicdefining diagram. How then can society differfrom these lesser social entities in having spatialnecessity as part of the definition of what it is?

Let us look a little more closely at what we meanby society. It turns out that there is a spatialproblem at the very heart of the concept of society,that must be solved by any social theory includesa definition of what a society is. It is obviousenough. The individuals who make up a societyare clearly well-defined spacetime things in thesense of being bounded and occupying a well-defined and continuous region of spacetime.However, it is not clear in what sense any higherlevel pattern of relations among these individualsis, or even can be, in any comparable sense an

acceptable thing. It lacks the very combination ofspacetime boundedness and continuity thatallows us to identify it as a thing in anything likethe normal sense. Of course, a society is likely tooccupy a territory of some kind, but this doesnot solve the problem. To occupy a continuousterritory is not the same as to constitute acontinuous spacetime entity. A society seems to

be composed only of freely mobile discreteindividuals. If it exists at all, then whatever it is,the large-scale entity, society, is not a spacetime,thing in any familiar sense. (Hillier, 1996).

This is the core problem of social theory and it is aproblem of space. For society to exist the spaces

between individuals and between spatially prox-imate groups must somehow be filled up orovercome, and a superordinate system of somekind imposed. But what kind of a system can thatpossibly be? We have no conception of such asystem. Social theories can be seen as a rangeof solutions to this problem. At one extreme,methodological individualism asserts that no

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such superordinate entity exists, and that societycan be reduced to its individuals. (Weber, 1947).At the other, organicism the idea that society issome kind of organism tries to redefine what ismanifestly a spatially disconnected system as one

that is after all spatially connected (Spenser, 1876).

From abstract relations to empiricalconfigurations

What kind of a system could a society thenpossibly be? One line of enquiry begins byacknowledging that we are up against the ancientand deep philosophical problem: that of definingwhat relations are, as opposed to the things thatare related. Are relations real in the sense thatspacetime things are real. This is most suc-

cinctly expressed by Russell. The relation thatEdinburgh is to the north of London does notseem to be a material thing in the same sense thatEdinburgh and London are material things, so weare tempted to see it as a mental construct ratherthan as a property of the real world. Yet within thescheme of things defined by this universe,Edinburgh really does seem to be to the northof London and the relation to exist out there,written into things themselves (Russell, 1912). Sowe are tempted to assign relations to a world thatis neither mental nor physical, but accessible to usthrough our intelligence rather than our senses.

However, this means that if society is essentially arelational scheme linking individuals, and rela-tions do not belong in this world, the consequenceis that society is taken out of the world of spaceand time and placed in another one free fromspacetime from which it can surely exercise nodirect influence on this one. If there can be notheory of society and space unless we can showspatial necessity in society, then it seems that wecannot solve the problem of society and spaceunless we first solve the problem of the spacetime status of relations.

Now from the point of view of space syntax, thisis an interesting formulation of the question,

because whatever space syntax does it seems toshow how a complex system of relations can be ameasurable empirical fact, and as such constitutes

both an independent and dependent variablein the structure and functioning of a materialsystem. This was brought to light by taking thehighly improbable step of removing space fromits embedding in the social and physical nexus of

the real world and treating it as a thing in itself, asa pure set of relations. This idea would strikemany as a clearly mistaken strategy, since every-thing that is interesting about space surelyconnects it both to society and to the material

world. How can a theory of space be constructedby removing from space all that seems to make itrelevant. However, it was only by extracting spacefrom its embedding and treating it as a thing initself that we are able to bring to light itsconfigurational properties, and it turns out to bethese that link space back to society, both as areceptor of social forces and also an an activeconstructive agent in society.

The pathway from abstraction to measurable factin the study of relations in space syntax is takenin two steps. First, the concept of relation is

rewritten as the more complex concept of con-figuration. Configurations are relations that takeinto account other relations. One immediateconsequence of this is that a relation betweentwo things that appears to stay the same canactually be configurationally different when em-

bedded in a different relational context. Forexample, a pair of linked rooms off a corridorform a different configuration with the corridordepending on whether one or both are linked tothe corridor, even though the relation between thetwo rooms appears to stay the same. (Hillier et al.,1987; Hillier, 1996). The difference between the

two configurations then seems as hard-edged aswe expect things to be, in that each delimitpossible human movement in a different way. Inone case we must pass through one room to get tothe other from the corridor; in the other we maygo either way. Just as a thing blocks our way, soa configuration of openings constructs possibleways and forbids others in a no less coercive,

but essentially relational, sense. Configurations,which are constructions from relations, seemquite hard-edged things, even if relations are not.

The second step is that by correlating configura-tional analysis with, say, patterns of real move-ment, we can show that configuration hasindependent effects on the material world whichcannot be mistaken for the effects of anything else(Hillier et al., 1993). In fact, if the theory of themovement economy is even partly the case, thenit means that a complex relational entity theconfiguration of the urban grid drives theevolutionary dynamics of the urban system underthe impact of social and economic forces. This

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argument does not depend on a cognitiveconnection by which we might argue thatintelligent beings with immaterial minds haveto decide where to move. If we move mindlessagents in a computer randomly one step at a time

in a configuration, then the agents will bedistributed according to the connectivity of eachelement. Configurations, it seems, as compositesmade out relations, are empirical facts withpredictable empirical effects things in the realworld even if simple relations are not.

Strongly relational systems: society andspace compared

The power of spatial configuration over what canbe seen to happen in a city is so powerful that weare compelled to the conclusion that cities, seenspatially, are strongly relational systems (perhapswe should say strongly configurational systems);that is, systems in which the relations of eachelement to all other are more important for thestructure and functioning of the system thanintrinsic or virtual properties of the elementsthemselves (Hillier, 1999). It is because they arestrongly relational that spatial systems can beusefully conceptualised and analysed as verylarge graphs using configurational measures,which relate elements of the graph togetherhowever remote from each other they may be

within the graph. The concept of a stronglyrelational system allows us to show that a set ofrelated spacetime events (such as the occurrenceof particular spaces), which cannot be seen all atonce, can nevertheless be shown to be real spacetime systems with configurational structuresthat are intrinsic to them, and that mediate theirrelations to other domains.

From the point of view of either a theory ofsociety or a theory of society and space, this isan interesting formulation, since whatever elsesocieties are, at one level they seem to be

relational and perhaps configurational con-structs out of individuals. Is is conceivable,perhaps, that the concept of a strongly relationalsystem might be useful in understanding thesuperordinate relational systems that appear to bea key part of what societies are. Let us firstconsider some striking parallells between spatialand social systems:

First, both are dual systems in the importantsense that each seems to be made up ofmaterial

events which take place in spacetime, such asinteractions and encounters, and informationalentities such as the codes and conventionswhich seem to govern these material eventslocally (although not globally at the level of the

emergent large-scale system). We might saythat society has both hardware (interactions)and software (rules governing interaction).

Second, both seem to be for the most part (inspite of utopias and ideal cities) emergentsystems arising from distributed processesrather than designed systems. What needs to

be explained in both cases is how an overallpattern of some kind is created over time by theindependent activity of large numbers of agentsin different locations.

Third, both types of system seem to be partiallyordered, in that each permits a great deal of

randomness to coexist alongside reproduciblepatterns.

Fourth, both appear or be partly or even largelynondiscursive in that human beings operate atleast their local patterns competently, without

being able to say what it is that they are doing,so that while each is the outcome of humanactivity, and is utilised by human beings ineveryday life, analytically speaking we have at

best an unclear idea as to what it is that weunderstand.

Fifth, both types of system seem, in spite oftheir bottom-up construction, to exhibit some

degree of top-down as well as bottom-upfunctionality, in that just as, say, movement andland-use patterns are functions of the overallstructure of the urban grid, so individual social

behaviours seem to be although to a varyingdegree functions of the overall pattern we callsociety

These are striking analogies, on the surface atleast. Is is possible, then, that the concept of thestrongly relational system might be useful inconceptualising what a society actually is. Afterall, we seem to be hard put to find no other wayto conceptualise what it is that might exist abovethe level of individuals and constitute the realcounterpart of what we call society. On reflection,what space syntax has actually done, if it hasdone anything, is to bring to light space as ahidden variable in the city by showing itsessentially configurational nature. Space washidden not because space cannot be seen(although this is also a problem) but because

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space is configurational, and configurations, likerelations generally, are nondiscursive. We dealwith them as ideas to think with rather than ideasto think of. Is it possible, then, that there arehidden configurational variables in society? And

if there are, since they will show that space hasbeen overcome and a large-scale entity calledsociety created, can this also lead to ways tosolving the problem of spatial necessity in society,and so pave the way to a theory of society andspace?

Finding space in society

Where then should we look for a spacetimestrongly relational system in society? Thereappears to be only one possibility. What appears

of society in spacetime as its hardware isinteraction and co-presence, so we must look atthese. However, if we look carefully at interactionand co-presence, then at first it seems to lead usaway from the idea that society has significantspacetime contents, and it does so for tworeasons. First, although interactions occur inspacetime they do not accumulate in spacetimeas spaces do to form a larger and larger connectedsystem. They vanish, like blips on a computerscreen flashing on and off, and leaving no trace inspace. Second, as soon as we observe interaction,we see that it is governed by conventions and

rules that reflect who is interacting, how theirstatuses relate, what is going on, and so on. Thus,the same individual walking down the TottenhamCourt Road will interact in one way with an oldfriend met in the street, when ordering profit-eroles, another having narrowly escaped a park-ing ticket and another having just acquired one. Ininteraction, the social software rather than theempirical hardware seems to be the importantthing.

This invites an often made comparison withlanguage. The spacetime events we experienceare shaped by abstraction that we do notexperience in the same way, yet it is the presenceof these abstract rules and conventions in thespace of interaction that render interactionsintelligible as social events. As with language,although the rules are manifested only in indivi-dual behaviour, they must in some sense beindependent of individuals if they are to carry the

burden of making interaction socially intelligible.Since we cannot find these rules and conventions

in spacetime, we conclude that what is socialabout interaction are the abstractions that governit. We reasonably conclude, then, that society, likelanguage, is essentially an abstraction oneimposed on and constructing spacetime reality,

but in itself an abstraction nonetheless.

However, if we pursue the analogy with languagea little more closely, we can begin to reconcile theidea of social rules as abstractions with a role forspacetime in constructing society. As withsociety, we find it difficult to say where languageis. We might say in the heads of individuals, butthis raises problems. It is unlikely that any oneindividual has the whole of a language in his orher head, and in any case what would happenafter the demise of that individual? Also, lan-guage is preeminently a social thing, the property

of a language community and constantly chan-ging in some respects, reflecting its social nature,while remaining relatively fixed in others. How-ever, being in individual heads cannot accountfor all aspects of its existence, where then inlanguage? One answer is of course is that it is inspacetime, in the dispersed language practicesof the individuals who make up the languagecommunity. We may then say that language isreproduced through time by being realised inspace. The language DNA is out there in the realworld of linguistic practices, not simply in ourheads. The role of spacetime in language is thus

to be the medium through which languagestructure is reproduced by being produced.

This is not a bad role for space time, and if it canbe applied to the abstractions that govern lan-guage, then it can certainly be applied to society.A similar argument was used in, The Social Logic ofSpace (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) to describe howcultural patterns of space were created andreproduced. It was proposed that space actedan inverted genotype in that the informationneeded to reproduce cultural patterns of spacewas to be found in the spatial configurationsthemselves (and it is this of course that we seek toretrieve through syntactic analysis) as well as inour heads. We then proposed that we interactwith configurational information in the real world

by our ability to retrieve abstract descriptionsfrom concrete realities. For example, if one person

builds a house and a second person places theirhouse next to it, then a third person may get theidea of a contiguous neighbour relation and placehis or her house next to one of the existing two,

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and if this process continues a line of houses willbe created. Thus rules guiding what happens inspacetime, and leading to emergent patterns, donot have to exist in our heads as preprogrammedrules: they can be retrieved as logical properties

from spacetime reality, and used as templates forfurther action in it. Through this we sought tomake our escape from the constrictions of thebrain structure theory of rule governed activityas put forward being leading proponents ofstructuralism.

A very similar idea of course underlies Giddensconcept of the duality of structure in humansocieties: that while being virtual, structure insociety is both the medium and the outcome ofsituated practices in spacetime and these there-fore link the production of social realities in

spacetime to the reproduction of their structures.(Giddens, 1984). Structure in society is thuscomparable to that in language and can beconceptualised in the same way: it is both realisedand reproduced in spacetime. This is a compel-ling argument, although it does not deal theore-tically with what may be a major difficulty thatthe inverted genotype concept did attempt toengage: that societies are not simply embodi-ments of rules but emergent large-scale patternsthat cannot be described fully through an accountof the local rules that construct them. Most ofwhat society is going on is out there and our

knowledge of rules can generate emergent pat-terns through recursive activity it does notinclude a description of the emergent structure.This seems to be a difficulty in principle with theGiddens scheme. However, it seems to be a keyfact of human societies that its members at bestonly poorly grasp the large-scale structure, andindeed that may be why all societies seem to havespecialists in retrieving descriptions of it. How-ever, societies, like spatial systems, seem to createand reproduce their emergent structures largely

by localised activity and, as we suggest below,this may turn out to be theoretically one of itscritical properties.

At best, however, all these formulations identifyspacetime mechanisms by which structure isreproduced. They do not deal with structureitself, let alone the emergent structures thatappear to come into being as much in society asin space. Yet it is exactly these emergent structuresthat we need to understand if we are to makesense of the large-scale changes in the spatial and

institutional forms of society, such as thosebrought about historically by urbanisation andindustrialisation, which must be accounted for bya theory of society and space. We need thereforea theory that is more than a mechanism for the

reproduction of structure: we need to know howspace is intrinsic not only to how societyreproduces its structures, but also to how societyconstitutes itself as a structure from local rulegoverned activity. We must ask then: is there anyuseful sense in which society is a spacetimestructure at the level of the emergent whole.

Systems of pure relatedness

Now from the space syntax point of view this isan interesting formulation, because space syntax,

whatever else it is, has proved to be an effectivemethod for retrieving descriptions of configura-tional structure from complex emergent realities.Every proposition that has been formulated aboutcities, for example, from natural movement(Hillier et al., 1993) to the duality of processesgenerating the grid (Hillier, 2001), is rooted in thisextraction of structure from complexity. Sincethen cities and societies have so much in commontheoretically, is it possible that there are also insociety structures underlying complexity whichmight be discussed in the same way? This wouldseem to depend on how far it is useful to see

society as being, or at least containing, in someuseful sense a strongly relational system.

What might we then be looking for? We canexplore this by following Giddens reasoning alittle further. Giddens sees structure in socialsystems as virtual because we find evidence forits existence only in dispersed practices, in thesame way that we find evidence of languagestructure in discrete linguistic acts. This makesstructure look rather weak, little more than rulefollowing. In fact, the cautious view of spacetimethat leads Giddens to this view seems unneces-sary. The very idea of a society implies that, atsome level, situated practices are likely to beconnected. Although they appear as discreteevents, none can exist in spacetime isolationand no collection is likely to form a discretesystem, not least because memberships of allsituated practices are multiple and every indivi-dual passes continuously from one to another in aconstant sequence. Each individual is therefore alink between a particular set of for the most part

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recursive situated practices, and all situatedpractices connect to each other through thesechanging memberships. Through the interconnec-tion of situated practices, then, the individualswho take part in them construct a large graph of

interaction, in which most individuals are remotefrom most others, but nevertheless have a finitedepth from all others in the graph. Seen in a timeperspective, then, individuals are linked throughparticipation in situated practices into a contin-uous system of timespace relatedness. Onreflection, it seems likely that the existence ofsuch a system is one of the preconditions for whatwe name as a society.

This system of pure relatedness can of course berepresented as a very large graph, in much thesame way as a city is represented as a graph of its

spaces. The problem is of course that although wecannot reasonably doubt the existence of the largegraph, it is, to all intents and purposes, incon-structible. Even the most ambitious social net-work theorists, who use such graphs as a primaryresearch instrument, only attempt to constructgraphs for relatively finite and bounded social-ities. What purpose can then be served bypositing the existence of the graph of a wholesociety, when it is clearly an inconstructibleentity? One possible justification is that in spiteof its inconstructibility, it is hard to doubt itstheoretical importance. It is after all the global

emergent product of the very situated practicesthat Giddens describes as the primary acts ofsocial reproduction. If situated practices are themeans of social reproduction, then the graph issurely its product, perhaps its only product. Itsexistence is a sign, and perhaps the only sure sign,that society exists as a system of interdependentsituated practices linked by individuals, or inter-dependent individuals linked by situated prac-tices. Once the large graph is admitted, it meansthat individuals are linked not only by abstractionor symbols but by practical spacetime activity.On the basis of the large graph, we can reasonablyclaim that society is after all or at least contains a spacetime system.

In any case, the fact that the graph is notconstructible does not mean that we cannot knowcertain things about it. For example, we know thatalthough the graph is very sparse, in that only avanishingly small proportion of the potentialconnections between individuals are actuallymade, from the point of view of indirect connec-

tions through intervening individuals, the graphis remarkably shallow. As Poole and Kochen(1978) show in their studies of finding graphpaths from randomly selected individuals toothers, six steps is probably all you need within

national boundaries and only one or two moreacross national boundaries. This is theoretically tobe expected. If we think of those we know, andthose that they know, a beneficial combinatorialexplosion from each step out to the next ensuresthat the graph from each individual to all others isremarkably shallow and therefore highly inte-grated, in space syntax terms in spite of beingsparse.

Even this limited knowledge allows us to pose aninteresting and highly general question (whyshould human societies be shallow graphs?) andfind a simple evolutionary answer. For societies to

be evolutionarily advantageous, all that has tohappen is that those who are members of societieshave to leave more surviving progeny than thosewho are not. How do societies do this? Byspreading risk through the setting up of networksof interdependence. If my food supply runs out,someone else can help me. If something happensto me, someone else will care for my children. Inevolutionary terms, a society is, at root, a networkof interdependent relations that act as an insur-

ance policy.

It is not too far-fetched then to suggest that thegraph, or rather the network of relations that thegraph represents, is what constitutes society inthe first place as an evolutionary entity. If we thenask what social interaction is for, it is hard to avoidthe answer: to construct the global graph, sinceevolution provides the rationale for its existence.Now on purely theoretical grounds we can assertthat a highly integrated graph with, inevitably, alarge number of cycles will be more robust than atree-like graph, since in any tree every time a linkis broken the graph falls into two disconnectedsub-graphs. Ergo, a graph is likely to serve itsevolutionary purpose to the extent that it isintegrated. We note, as a corollary, that a largeintegrated graph will be better in evolutionaryterms than a small one. It follows than we do notneed to provide further reasons as to whysocieties should seek to grow. It is taken care of

by evolution.

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Theoretical consequences of thelarge graph

Let us then admit the large graph as a legitimatetheoretical, if inconstructible, entity. What else do

we gain by positing its existence? The answer, wesuggest, is that we completely change our view ofwhat a society is by changing our view of it from alocal to a global one. If society does after all havea global entity at its core that is critical to itsevolution, then it follows that critical situatedpractices through which the graph is created will

be selected for their ability to construct the largegraph.

This is a serious cure for localism. It suggests thatour fundamental theoretical perspective on so-

ciety should be at the global rather than the locallevel. One immediate benefit of this is that itallows us to make sense of social phenomena thathad previously seemed puzzling. For example, ifwe look at the simplest and least developedsocieties known to anthropology, small-scalehunter-gatherer societies, we tend to find thattheir local groups, which many expected toexemplify elementary structures, are not onlyhighly variable in size but extremely fluid in theircomposition. Individuals and small groups fre-quently take an excuse to leave one group and

join another, usually where there is a relation of

some kind to an apical woman. How can theextreme fluidity of local groups be reconciled tothe sustained existence of a continuous andapparently strong society over a long period?Why is not the weakness in the local groupsreflected in weakness in the society? The answeris as simple as it is formal. Such societies bydefinition exist in environments where movementis required in order for individuals to survive,usually with severe limits on how many indivi-duals can survive within a certain area. In suchconditions, the large graph is much harder toconstruct than it would be, for example, in agroup of dense villages quite close to each other.However, we can see that the social practices thatlead individuals and groups to leave one groupand join another will continually increase thedensity of connections in the large graph, ifnecessary at the cost of lower densities in thelocal graphs. The global graph of the society as awhole thus gains in strength, in spite of theweakening of the local groups (Lee and Devore,1968).

Similar mechanisms can even be found in lessmobile although not permanently settled in oneplace societies. For example, Turner in hisremarkable study of the Ndembu, a villagesociety that moves villages every few years, in

which matrinliny is combined with patrilocality,postulates a mechanism which similarly benefitsthe global society at the expense of local groups.Although the dominant ideology in the society or at least among its males is one of strong andlarge local groups under a local headman, inpractice the majority of women (77%), havinglived with their husbands for long enough to havechildren, pick a quarrel and go back to live withtheir uterine sibling group, then after a period ofritual hostility form joint hunting parties withthe husbands village. Turner argues that the highdivorce rate is one of the fundamental mechan-

isms for strengthening the society as a whole,since the large-scale networks continually gain atthe cost of weakening the local networks. As withthe hunter-gatherer societies, other institutionalaspects of the society can be seen as supportingthis prioritising the global over the local.

This is not of course the only way in whichsocieties globalise. If we look at the Tallensi(Fortes, 1959), the society with which Turnercontrasts with the Ndembu so vividly, we find

they live in scattered but hierarchically structuredcompounds in which women are spatially deepand men shallow (whereas in the Ndembu case,the buildings that form the circular village aresimple huts). The Tallensi kinship groups remainin the same location through generations, andhave deep attachments to their specific locations.In Tallensi society, the large-scale network of thesociety is created not by movement betweengroups (women in particular are relatively im-mobilised) but by a complex system of ritualerected on the basis of an elaborate and hierarch-ical system of kinship, supported by an ancestorcult, and dominated by men. This forms anoverarching structure that links relatively immo-

bilised and localised groups of women, and it islargely realised through ritual interaction patternsthat are confined to men. In this case, in contrastto the Ndembu, the integration of the large graphwill be primarily through men, and largelythrough the realisation in spacetime of highlyritualised and exclusive practices rather thanthrough movement.

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In each of these cases we see that both the localand the institutional nature of the society is boundup with the social practices that create the globalnetwork, and is unintelligible without it. We alsosee that the effect of the institutionalised practices

in each society is to create the global network,although in one case strengthening (and render-ing asymmetrical) the local networks and kin andthe other of weakening them. In evolutionaryterms, in both cases the institutional practices thathave become selected seem to be exactly thosethat create the global network. We can say littleabout why one society takes one pathway andanother takes an entirely different one, and it may

be that we do not always have to do this tounderstand the morphology of a society. Theremay be specific historic causes, but it couldequally be a matter of different responses to

similar ecological conditions with some elementof change. However, in evolutionary terms, ageneral mechanism may be suggested. If the largegraph is created in the first instance by certainspecific local practices, perhaps through a re-stricted random process of some kind (Hillier,1984), then to the extent that the structure of thelarge graph is to be reproduced the local practiceswhich created it will need to be reproduced. Tothe extent then that the system reproduces itself,the local practices will become normative in thesystem, if for no other reason than that they arethe means by which the large graph is repro-

duced. This process would depend on themechanism of description retrieval discussedearlier, that is the ability of the human being toretrieve an abstract description of spatiotemporalevents and use it as a template for further action.Retrieved descriptions from practices which hadthe effect of reproducing the emergent systemwould in effect become normative to the degree towhich the system was reproduced. There wouldseem to be no reason in principle to insist that thesocial practices that support the graph are ante-cedent to the graph. They may equally arise fromthe process of graph construction itself.

Suppose then that we tentatively define society asthe large graph of pure relatedness plus all that ittakes to produce and reproduce it, that is, all thatit takes in terms of hardware of situatedpractices and the social software that supportsthem. From the point of view of the societyspacerelation, this is interesting, because it means notonly that a spacetime entity exists at the heart ofsociety but also that the existence of the graph

means that space has been overcome to constructan entity at the level of the society itself, above thelevel of individuals and proximate groups. Wehave seen, in the few illustrative cases givenabove, that how society overcomes space to create

the large graph may well be a useful clue to themorphological distinctiveness of that society.

We also see that the technology of productionmay relate to the ways in which societies over-come space by creating the initial spatial condi-tions for example of aggregation or dispersion in which space has to be overcome. Thus, ahunter-gatherer society has to overcome a degreeof dispersion based on so many people per squarekilometre, the Tallensi have to overcome placefixity of a rather dispersed kind, and so on. Thissuggests the possible form for the fundamental

relation between technology, social institutionsand space which have all been intertwined inthe series of historic transformations of humansociety, in that the initial spatial conditionsdetermined largely by the technology of produc-tion place constraints on the kinds of society thatcan develop through the interaction of space andinstitutions. Might there, indeed, be somethinglike lawful pathways for the overcoming of space,linking the situated practices and social softwareto space? To this, paradoxically, we must firstthink of the graph in its relation to time.

Time and the large graph

Let us look a little more closely at possiblemechanisms. Overcoming space means that acertain set of global relations in the network haveto be created and realised in space, over andabove those that arise from everyday productiveactivity. This implies movement. In some cases, aswe have seen, this movement is created by somerather minimal social software permitting mobi-lity between groups, in the form of rules that were

both permissive, in that it did not require butallowed things to happen, and probabilistic, inthat it was taken up opportunistically by a given,although substantial, number of people. In others,we find much more elaborate software that is

both more constructive, in that it requires certainthings to happen, and more restrictive, in that (aswith the Tallensi) it specifies that men move butwomen do not. The global movement patternsthat realise the large graph in spacetime thus arefar more rule governed in some cases than in

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others. How do such differences relate to theore-tical possibility?

Let us first consider the issue in principle. If wethink of individuals scattered in a landscape, and

of the movement required to create and reproducegraph relations, then we immediately see thatthere will be a simple law by which theprobability of encounter is inversely proportionalto distance. Other things being equal, I am muchmore likely to encounter those near me or ratherthose near my daily path of effective spatiality than those farther away. This is interesting, sinceit suggests that for the global graph to beconstructed, something like a natural law has to

be overcome. Without some kind of social soft-ware, it seems likely that graphs would degen-erate into localism. What kind of social software

then can in principle operate to create a largegraph?

We can explore this taking advantage of one of thefundamental concepts of space syntax: the justi-fied graph, or j-graph. A core idea in space syntaxis the concept of the graph whose elements areits j-graphs, that its, its positions from which thewhole graph can be seen and be found to bedifferent. The fact that there are such differencesis not only the foundation of the idea of structurein space but also the basis of quantifying thatstructure: integration measures quantify what the

graph looks like from each of its j-graphs;representations of structure are colourings of thepattern of differences in j-graphs, and so on.

In societies, since the large graph links allindividuals into a network that is eventuallyconnected, it follows that each individual can beconceptualised as a j-graph of the large graph,that is, as the root of the justification of the graphfrom the point of view of that individual. Oneuseful implication of this extrinsic characterisa-tion of individuals is that the individual andsociety are defined by exactly the same structure:an individual is a particular position from whichthe whole of the graph can be seen. Individualand society are then no longer polar concepts, butdifferent ways of looking at the same thing. Thisalso means that we can, to a useful extent, reasonabout the graph as a whole by reasoning about its

j-graphs. Once again, it turns out that we canknow useful things about j-graphs even if wecannot construct them, and find out how spacegets out of the graph and into the social software.

Let us now return to Giddens. A society, heargues, reproduces itself by producing itself inspacetime through rule-governed situated prac-tices which thus, language-like, reproduce thoserules. There is a corollary to this: that what is not

produced and reproduced in spacetime is no longer aneffective part of society. There is between theabstractions and the spatio-temporal events thatmake up society a kind of law of sufficientembodiment: in the long run, no co-presence, norelation. This can be simply illustrated from ourown experience of the way in which kinshiprelations decay, and no longer form part ofeffective networks, usually as a function of bothreal and logical space, in that, say, remote cousinswho live in another part of the country are nolonger an effective part of networks and becomeforgotten. If we do not retrieve a description of

these relations and re-embody them in spacetimeencounters, then these relations are no longer areproducible part of the social graph, althoughthey may remain latent for a long while. On theother hand, an encounter that occurs unintention-ally, that is without prior description retrieval (asis more likely in conditions of spatial proximity),will itself constitute a description retrieval event.The pair description-retrieval/interaction canoccur in either order.

The relations that constitute a j-graph (and ofcourse the whole graph) are then not only

continually changing and being replaced, andalso being foregrounded by interaction andgradually fading into the background throughinactivity. The periodicity of recursivity is critical.Every j-graph relation varies on a dimension ofrecursive realisation from frequent to never. Thefarther along to the never level, the more virtualthe relation is, that is, a conceptual or potentialrelation rather than a real one (although ofcourse it may suddenly be realised again). Every

j-graph then contains relations that go from real tovirtual and each time frame will have a sub-graph ofreal relations, and the real plus virtual j-graph is thetotal j-graph.

As soon as we distinguish periodicity in time, afundamental distinction that is found in allsocieties comes into view, which we can see byexamining individual j-graphs. Each individual

j-graph will reflect relations generated recursivelythrough the effective spatiality of everyday exis-tence, whether the individual is a hunter-gathereror an office worker commuting from Chalfont

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St Giles to High Holborn. These relations in thegraph, weak and strong, will be generated as a by-product of co-presence generated by how indivi-duals produce their everyday survival throughproductive activity and its associated technology.

Second, the graph will reflect relations that aregenerated by the need to reproduce the graph itself.This may sound odd at first, but is a keydistinction. In all societies a distinction can bedrawn between activities whose object is the

biological survival of its members, and activitieswhose object is the production and reproductionof society, for example, the special activitiesassociated with major life events such as birth,coming of age, marriage and death. In the first case,the graph is the by-product of the activity, in the secondthe graph is the object of the activity and so is, in asense, its product. This distinction corresponds to

what economic anthropologists have called thereplacement and ceremonial funds (Wolf, 1966),the first being the proportion of human resourcesand effort devoted to reproducing the ability forindividuals to survive biologically, and the secondthe proportion of resources devoted to biologi-cally useless activities whose object is to produceand reproduce society.

For a theory of space and society this distinctioncannot be too highly emphasised, since it isinvolved in every phase of how societies createand recreate themselves in space, and thus over-

come space. In the first kind of activity, whichcovers the necessarily spatial conditions of every-day life in which individuals engage in work,relations in the graph are generated through anactivity has another purpose. The graph arises

because work happens and creates interactionsthat may or may not be reproduced within thework process. Everyday activity aimed at every-day purposes can then be said to be generative ofthe graph. In the second kind of activity, whichcovers the special activities in which individualsengage which do not have biological survival asthe direct aim, and in which the graph itself is theobject of attention, relations in the graph areconserved through realisations that are designedto achieve just that. Such activities are thusconservative of the graph. This is what we mean

by ceremonial activity, whether simply invitingpeople to dinner or engaging in some large-scalesocial ritual: its aim is to reinforce and reproducethe graph through activities in which the contentof description retrieval of relations in the graph ismanifest and dominant. This is what we mean by,

say, a marriage ceremony or a coming of ageritual.

Ceremonial graph-conserving activities are thusdistinguishable from everyday graph-generating

activities by their degree of deliberate descriptivecontent. The content of a ceremonial or ritualactivity is subject to a greater multiplicity of rulesgoverning what happens, including who doeswhat and in what sequence than will be found ineveryday life. This is in its nature, since its objectis to describe with great emphasis and re-embodyin spacetime key relationships in the graph. Wecan formalise this by working out the number ofrules that are required to make the event happenagainst the number of activities that actuallyhappen, a kind of rules-over-events ratio. Thehigher the ratio of rules to events, the more we

would say that the activity is ritualised. We cantherefore say that the description required for aritual is a long one, in extreme cases as long as thenumber of events taking place, since nothing canhappen unless it is specified by a rule. We canconveniently call such activities long model inthat they depend on a long description to ensurethat they happen in the proper way. In contrast,we can immediately see that everyday activitytends to be short model, in that insofar as itsobjectives are practical rather than ritualistic, itwill only be effective to the degree that the actoris free to carry out the necessary activities in an

unencumbered way as possible (Hillier, 1996). Wethus find a fundamental relation between timeand social software. In normal circumstances,short model graph-generating events have a shortperiodicity, and long model graph-conservingevents have a long periodicity. A fundamentaldimension of difference in what we might withsome licence call universal social software istherefore bound up with time.

How space gets into the social software

However, it is even more powerfully linked tospace through the fact that time is linked to spacethrough movement. All movement occupies time,and all encounters depend on some degree ofmovement. The question is: what degree? Interms of the relation between movement andencounter, there is a profound difference betweenlocal (in terms of the effective spatial pathwaysof individuals) and global space. In local space,encounters happen through the agency of space

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itself, and such encounters can either producenew relations in the graph or reproduce existingones. In local space, encounters happen with littleeffort, and there is no reason for anything morethan the minimum of rule structures to bring it

about. If we find complex rule structures, or longmodels, in local space then, as in the case of theTallensi compound, then they are likely to beabout restricting encounter rather than generatingit. In its natural state, local encounter is a shortmodel.

Encounter over distances is quite different. At thevery least, a distant encounter will normally need

be aimed at a specific object, a destination thatmust be specified in advance. Precisely becausethe probability of encounter is inversely propor-tional to distance, a distance encounter needs a

greater degree of conceptual organisation than alocal encounter. As usual, we find that these ideasstill pervade our unconscious assumptions abouteveryday life. For example, we assume that animpromptu invitation is much more easily issuedto someone who is local than someone who musttravel a distance, and that more formality isrequired if a greater distance is to be overcome tomake the encounter happen. We thus find thatanother invariant aspect of social software is that,complementing the inverse laws linking encoun-ter to distance, we find another that links distancedirectly to the length of model. Events that are rarer

in time are also normally more distant in space.We therefore need the greater conceptual organi-sation of the longer model to bring aboutencounter over greater distances, and this in-creases with distance.

However, there are two kinds of distance: realdistance and social distance. Longer models arefound where either is to be overcome. Forexample, a person in the local domain whosestatus is asymmetrical to others, will have longmodels associated with interaction, since the needis for social software that restricts and structuresencounter in a domain where it may otherwisehappen by chance and in an unstructured way.This is fundamental to the ways that certain kindsof buildings work: space is structure to conserveformal relations by preventing spatial proximityturning them into informal ones. We can now seea natural morphological logic in the comparison

between the Tallensi and the Ndembu. Amongthe Ndembu, we find greater equality betweenmen and women and a less asymmetrically

structured society, because the large graph isprioritised over the local graph and is created bythe short model movement of women away fromthe husbands and back to their uterine siblinggroup. This solution to the large graph problem

by movement means that the local short model ispushed outwards to form the larger network.Among the Tallensi, the contrary is the case. Thelarge graph is created not by short model move-ment but by long model movement based (theshrines are remote form compounds) ritualactivity of men based on the lengthening of themodel of the kinship system (descriptions oflineages are retrieved much farther back amongthe Tallensi than the Ndembu) which excludeswomen, who have more localised and also muchmore structured spatial lives. The Tallensi there-fore can be seen as extending the long model

downwards from the global to the local level. TheTalenseNdembu contrast thus becomes a pair ofmorphological opposites, extreme cases of twoways of creating the larger graph.

This is how space gets into the social software.The key items of social software are about spaceas well as time: on the one hand, longer modelsare needed to overcome space to create the globalgraph; on the other, they are needed to control theeffects on graphs of spatial proximity. In otherwords, we need long models to overcomedistance and to controlling proximity in the

reproduction of graphs, and and we need shortmodels to generate and sustain graphs in the firstplace.

Urban societies

What then happens when these initial spatialconditions that create the kinds of societies wehave so far considered no longer prevail, forexample, when societies aggregate to form thelarge continuous and dense settlements thateventually become cities. Why do spatial andsocial changes seem to happen together? Howdo both relate to changes in the technology ofproduction: to quote Wirth The central problemof the sociologist of the city is to discover theforms of social action and organisation thattypically emerge in relatively permanent compactsettlements of large number of heterogeneousindividuals (Wirth, 1938). Let us first add aproblem. There is something approaching aparadox in our historic idea of the city. It seems

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to be at once the locus of domination, socialclasses, bureaucracies and enforceable law. On theother, throughout history it has seemed to be theplace of freedom. Is it possible that both of theseeffects are once a product of what the city is? As

previously, we will not try to explain either thechanges in the technology of production that areassociated with cities or why and how it createsspecific spatial conditions. We will take the spatialcondition of dense aggregation for granted andtry to understand its implications for the con-struction of large graphs.

First, from the previous paper (and its predeces-sors) we already know a good deal about theimpact of space in large dense aggregates: avaried but sometimes intense pattern of

copresence is generated through the effect ofspatial configuration on movement. How is thelarge graph likely to be affected by these verydifferent initial spatial conditions? We saw thatunder dispersed conditions, the problem ofcreating the large graph was a problem of over-coming the distances between relatively smalllocal groups, that is, it was largely a problem ofcreating co-presence through movement in spiteof dispersal. What then is the effect of thereplacement of those initial conditions by theconditions in which co-presence is much morefreely available?

First, let us consider the institutional changescommonly associated with the rise of citiesagainst this change in the background conditions.A vast literature suggests, with reasonable con-sensus in spite of exceptional cases, at least threemain changes. First, a substantial division oflabour among individuals appears to replacesmall-group self-sufficiency. Secondly, space-

based supra-local organisations with a predomi-nantly political character and the ability to settledisputes according to agreed law take the place ofsupra-local organisations based on the elaborationof kinship structures that lack significant disputesettlement functions and are articulated largelythrough ceremony. Third, and this is much harderto define, the notion of the psychologically freeindividual takes the place of the highly con-strained social member whose group identity is ofgreater social importance than individuality. Whyshould these be the outcomes of the transforma-tion of space?

The first, the emergence of an individual divisionof labour, is not difficult to relate to the spatialtransformation. An extended division of labouramong individuals, and the intricate pattern ofday-to-day interdependencies that this creates,

is inconceivable without the integration of spaceand the high levels of natural co-presence itmakes possible. We cannot say that the divisionof labour is caused by spatial integration, but wecan say that if there are economic or evolutionaryreasons in which this division of labour isadvantageous, configurational integration createsthe necessary spatial conditions in which it

becomes viable. A division of labour amongindividuals becomes ineffective to the degree thatdistances between specialists become greater.

The rise of space-based political institutions is

also closely connected to the transformation of thespatial basis of society, although the relation isless obvious. In pre-urban societies the task ofsupra-local organisations was to overcome thedistances between the groups and create thelarger-scale society out of spatially dispersedgroups. The raw material for this was the kinshipsystem that already creates relations across space,usually supported by the exchange of people

between groups through marriage and otheralliance-creating acts. Supra-local organisationsin these spatial circumstances tend to raise thekinship system to a higher level and embed this

back in the society through ceremonial organisa-tion. This is why dispersed tribal societies oftenhave higher levels of ceremonial organisationthan urban societies, with a greater presence ofsupra-local ceremony into everyday life.

Under the spatially integrated conditions arisingin an urban society, the problem for supra-localorganisations is different. We have already seenthat space gets into the social software by creatingrules on the one hand to overcome distance andon the other to control the effects of spatialproximity. In pre-urban societies, the first of theseis much more important than the second, sincewithout it the global graph would not exist, andthe second arises as a reflection of the modalityof the first. In densely aggregated societies, thesecond takes priority over the first, not only

because the compression of space has made largergraph resources available much closer, but also

because the problem of controlling the effects ofproximity has become more important than theproblem of overcoming distance. In dispersed

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societies, when disputes occur, the commonsolution is either fission (Sahlins, 1972) or theformation of kin-based alliances to redress thesituation. Under urban compression, the potentialfor disputes is statistically much greater, and by

definition the fission solution is no longer avail-able if the dense society is to evolve.

In practical terms, it means that the ability tosettle disputes within the spatial realm andprevent the graph from breaking up has becomemore important than the need to construct thegraph across distances. In terms of the languageof description retrieval (which, as will be seen inanother paper, is the fundamental language of thegraph), we can say that the need to control andnegotiate descriptions in the continuous spatialmilieu has become more important than the need

to embed descriptions in ritual in order to createthe large graph. A political organisation is onethat specialises in the negotiation of descriptions,and a legal organisation is one that specialises inthe control of descriptions. It is such organisationsthat are then selected in the new spatial condi-tions created by dense aggregation. The problemof distant relations has not however disappeared,

but reappeared in the form of the need to relate amuch larger aggregate to the wider systemincluding the urban hinterland and the othersettlements in the wider system of which the cityis part.

These factors impart to supra-local organisationsa character that is not only political and legal butalso space-based, both in the sense that it mustoperate within a spatially continuous local sys-tem, and also in the sense that it must relate thissystem to other spatially based systems in itsvicinity. We can say then that whereas underdispersed conditions supra-local organisationscreate society in spite of the lack of spatialintegration, and therefore use primarily ceremo-nial means, under urban conditions they createsociety in spite of the presence of spatial integra-tion by dealing with the problems it creates, usingprimarily politicallegal and space-based means.

It is the change in the institutional structure ofsociety in response to spatial changes that thencreates the third phenomenon: the emergence ofthe psychologically free individual. This is nor-mally assigned to the dramatically increasedco-presence resulting from spatial integrationchanging the everyday experience of others from

social recognition to anonymity, and discussed interms of the flawed discourse of the myth ofhistoric spatiality as some form of alienationor desocialisation. We propose a deeper cause,arising from changes in the interpenetration of the

spatial and supra-local aspects of society. In apreurban society social institutions work on theraising of a kinship network into a larger-scaleconceptual system, so that these become the mostimportant aspects of the global organisation ofsociety. This means that the burden of reprodu-cing the large graph is carried largely throughwhat people do, how they think and how they

behave. The load of reproducing institutionalstructures is carried through individual mindsand individual behaviours (although formingcollective patterns), and in this sense the indivi-dual in a preurban society is much more a mental

prisoner of that society.

In the spatial conditions created by the city, wefind not only that institutional structures have

become transformed, but also that they havebecome spatialised in two senses: first they arelocated as built forms in real space, usually insignificant locations in the urban fabric, and alsoin the sense that their sphere of influence is nowthe ambient space itself, not simply the abstractrealm of social software that served to create themomentary spacetime events that reproduce thelarge-scale structures of the graph in preurban

societies. Social institutions are in both sensestaken out of the fabric of individual life and madeextrasomatic. Institutional structures, in effect, areexternalised from people and become an outwardpressure bearing down on them, rather than aninternal force that structures their thought and

behaviour. Although they act as external forms ofcontrol operating on the individual through thecontrol of ambient space, they also liberate theconsciousness of the individual, and turn him orher more fully into a social individual more thansimply a social member.

It is not that individuals do not occur in preurbansocieties. One remembers the remarkable, andhighly spatial, commentary of Lienhardt (quoted

by Mary Douglas, 1970) on the Dinka-Nuer andthe Anuak: The frequent dispersion of the Dinka-Nueras compared with the concentration of the Anuak, maybe associated with the much greater interest shown bythe Anuak in individuals and personalities. They havean extensive psychological vocabulary, and theirvillage politicsyare conducted through an interplay

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of character as well as of faction. Anuak are interestedin people, Dinka-Nuer more interested in cattle.However, in the city, the creation of extrasomaticinstitutions frees the mind from the need to use itsnetwork simply to reproduce the existing struc-

tures of the graph, and sets the scene for nonlocalnetworks based on a choice of the kind thatFischer (see below) describes as characteristic ofpresent-day cities, but which have probablyalways been one of their prime assets. Theextrasomatisation and extramentalisation of in-stitutional structure within a context of intensivespatialisation is the prime sourse of the indivi-duality that seems to be associated with cities,and we can note that it arises from the samespatialisation of social forces through which classasymmetries and bureaucracies also arise. Thecity itself becomes the extrasomatic mind, and

this frees the internal mind and makes it creative.

What then happens to the large graph and itsconstituent set of j-graphs in the context of thecity? Let us look more closely at the studies ofFischer (197x) on social networks in contemporarycities. As a result of his investigation of networks,Fischer is highly critical of the tendency ofprevious investigators to focus on the localproperties of networks, that is, such propertiesas density (if a knows b and a knows c then bknows c) and multiplexity (if a knows b becausehe is his brother-in-law, does he also know his

butcher). He sees this as part of what we havecalled the myth of historic spatiality, in whichthe present is believed to be alienating, becauseindividuals lack embedding in dense and multi-plex local networks. Fischers view is that ifpeople had predominantly local networks in thepast, then it was because they could not escapefrom them. Compared with this enforced local-ism, networks in the modern metropolis were ofhigher quality, more dependable and perhaps alsomore extensive, because they were formed bychoice and affection rather than dependence onlocality. Fischers work is one example of agrowing group of studies that suggest that themore global or perhaps globalising aspects ofnetworks may be more critical than the local.

We cannot of course get social network informa-tion on historic cities, but we can reasonablyconjecture certain likely properties of j-graphsfrom a knowledge of living patterns and institu-tional structures. For example, if we take a latemediaeval mercantile city like London, a typical

individual would be a member of numerousdifferent networks which do not correspond toeach other and may barely overlap. For example,during the working day the citizen wouldthrough his or her part in the division of labour

be part of the network of making, distributing andtrading, that is, what Durkheim called an organicsolidarity. Also through the division of labour heor she would be a member of a guild, whichwould make links into a quite different network,one more like a Durkheimian mechanical soli-darity. In all likelihood he or she would also be amember of a religious grouping, and of a familynetwork, which again would make links todifferent groups. Far from being multiplex anddense, the citizen j-graph seems to be based onmultiple overlapping memberships that have theopposite properties. Such graphs may surely be

seen as globalising rather than localising. At thesame time, we would expect that the mechanismsfor regulating locally co-present relations would

be reinforced, giving rise to the familiar urbantheme that socially successful people rarely net-work with their neighbours.

The typical urbanite is then one who globalisesnetworks. Dependence on purely local networksis surely correctly taken to be a sign of under-privilege and lack of social power, while at theother extreme, those with the most global net-

works are also likely to be those with most socialpower. We can see how cities will tend to createthe full range of local and global networks.However, in general we can see that cities aremachines for globalising networks through multiplememberships, and regulating local networks tocope with the strains of copresence. The urbaniteis successful to the degree that he or she succeedsin the globalising game. In the last analysis, thisall seems to be the morphological consequence ofthe integration of space, and again we arereminded that it is the globalising rather thanthe localising aspects of social software that are

critical to understanding the societyspace relation.

In many senses, then, the social nature of citiesseems to arise in quite a natural way not onlyfrom the fact of aggregation but also from theform of aggregation. The social city would beinconceivable without the fundamental networkof linear spaces that link all parts of the city into aunified and structured network of movement andco-presence.

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So what is happening now?

So what can be learned from all this about whatis happening now? Because what is happeningnow is, we believe, unintelligible without an

understanding of what happened in the lastmajor transformation of cities, that associatedwith industrialisation, that we must give some

background one this before looking at the present.

First, we must review our theoretical lessonsabout cities:

although cities as systems of built forms andspaces are driven by economic and socialprocesses, they are not infinitely plastic in theforms they take, but evolve under the constraintof spatial laws governing both the emergenceof spatial forms and the effect of these onco-presence;

the relation between urban life and the city asobject is as a result generic not specific,reflecting the generic nature of the relation

between space and society rather than theidiosyncrasies of history;

space, and most notably city space, does notjust take its shape from the society, but answersback and affects society, even changing itsdeepest structures.

and then about societies

all societies are global (although obviously noton the same scale) in that the global graph is thespatio-temporal sign that a society exists, andvirtual in that they operate on social software ofdifferent kinds to create their graphs in differ-ent spatial circumstances;

a society is how it overcomes space to create itslarge graph, and the tendency of individual j-graphs is toward the global graph, at least asmuch if not more than to the consolidation ofthe local graph;

the effect of the technology of production,

including the patterns of effective spatialitythat it requires, is to create the initial spatialconditions in which society, the large graph,and the software and hardware through whichit is realised can be created.

What then do we learn about the here and now,unencumbered by the myth of historic spatiality.First we can define certain questions that thetheory suggests might be critical:

What are the new spatial preconditions onsociety imposed by new forms of production?

How will they impact on the two-way gener-icity of the city?

Will the distinctively urban dynamics that we

have described continue to prevail, or bereplaced by others?

First, let us review the effect of industrialisationon cities. It clearly created, through a newtechnology of production, new spatial conditionsin which a society had to be created, at least forsome people. In practical terms, the factorysystem meant that the rapid agglomeration ofa large number of factory workers in new andrapidly growing urban agglomerations (somenew, some extensions of existing ones) brought alarge number of people into the city who were cutoff from their previous social embedding, and didnot obviously fit into the social and spatialpatterns of the preindustrial city, not least becauseunder the factory system the artisan was sepa-rated from the tools of production, and no longerhad the material basis for the urban membershipswe have described.

One outcome of this was an excellent example ofour model in action: social thinkers saw that anew society had to be created for the people

brought together under these new spatial condi-

tions, and a series of fantasies and experimentswere proposed (and many carried out) forspatially redesigning society in order to achievea pacified social system. (Hillier and Hanson,1984). These fantasies, which all involved thedisaggregation and dispersal of the city intosmaller self-contained components, were deeplyinfluential in the intellectual origins of moderntown planning (Benevolo, 1967) and were a keyfactor in creating the overlocalised thinking thathas prevailed since then in the spatial disciplines.

Other outcomes were equally well known. Wesaw the autogeneration of space-based urbancommunities of the kind reported for the EastEnd of London (Willmott and Young, 1962) andthe West End of Boston (Michelson, 1976) andnow duplicated in informal settlements in citiesaround the world (Hillier et al., 2000). Largenumbers of middle-class people who had pre-viously inhabited the more central or innersuburban areas of the city moved to the outersuburbs and the countryside, and a programme of

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spatially controlling the poor urban populationwas initiated first by building closed urbanenclaves in city centres in place of streets (Hillierand Hanson, 1984) and then seeking to thin outthe urban population (ie get rid of the poor) by

decanting them into new dormitory towns(including, eventually, the English new townsprogramme). In less-advanced industrial coun-tries, this was complemented by a programme ofre-engineering the grids of city areas to makethem fit for largely middle-class populations(Haussmanisation, Cerdaisation, and so on).These issues are dealt with in the postscript toHillier and Hanson (1984).

It is of theoretical interest that this programme ofdeliberate urban disaggregation and ameliorationwas perhaps the first time that a programme of

creating a society under new spatial conditionsimposed by technological development was aconscious, discursive process. No such fantasiesare proposed for whatever change in spatialconditions is currently under

Society seen through the prism of space

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