Boundaries of the built environment: defining the significance of the material presence of spatial morphology in social life

Abstract

Settled societies inhabit environments shaped by building activity. Geographic data in social scientific and geographical research are generally composed of architectural and social categories derived from commonplace lived experience and societal knowledge, thus carrying socio-culturally specific meaning. The mundane pragmatism of such categories conflate spaces and buildings with their use and may obstruct effective comparison. Here I introduce a formal redescriptive ontology for built environments that operates on the basis of how differentiation and subdivision constitute distinct occupiable spaces through boundaries. The ontology consists of formally redescriptive socio-spatial and material concepts called ‘Boundary Line Types’ (BLT). I present and photographically illustrate the definitions of the BLTs, which are formulated on a critical realist basis and rooted in a multidisciplinary body of theory concerning the development and inhabitation of built space. Considering inhabited built environments through this ontology foregrounds the emergent logic by which spaces are divided and connected, creating configurations of boundaries as material frames that afford everyday social life. Since BLTs offer transferrable empirical principles from which these material frames emerge, they also enable diachronic and cross-cultural comparative social research. My proposition to approach social scientific built environment research through constitutive material boundaries offers a comparative complement to commonplace and socio-culturally specific spatial categories that compose most geographic data, enabling formal thick redescriptions and the potential for quantitative spatial analysis.