350 ANALYZING DATA
Whatever experiences or predilections predisposed me to be sensitive to spaces, at some point
it just became “self-evident” to me that built spaces convey policy and/or organizational mean-
ings. I just have to figure out how they do that.❖❖❖[T]he dimensions of place, such as above and below, right and left,
come to be in relation to our position,
according as we turn ourselves about.
—Aristotle (quoted in Casey 1993, 45; italics in original)We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
—Winston Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons (October 28, 1943)The typical Community Center was to be “a large building, spacious and comfortable,”
centrally located and easily accessible.... By virtue of [their] size, scale, materials, and
surrounding exterior space... Center [buildings were] also markedly different from the
town’s... other public and residential buildings.... The architecture, landscaping, inte-
rior design, and furnishings of the Community Center buildings represent[ed] concepts of
Western, middle-class Israeli life.... [In the words of their founders, they were intended
to provide local residents with] “a pleasant atmosphere of social and cultural well-being
which is often absent from their impoverished dwellings... .”
—Dvora Yanow (1996, chapter 6, passim)Solvitur ambulando!
[Solve it by walking!]
—Edward S. Casey, quoting unnamed ancient Romans (1997, 224)Political philosophers, policy makers, and politicians from Aristotle to Churchill have been at-
tuned to the role of built space and its uses in communicating and shaping meaning; but with rare
exception, this has not been the subject of contemporary empirical analysis or methods textbooks
outside of those place-oriented social sciences such as anthropology, human (social) geography,
environmental design, planning, and community organization.^1 The reasons for this omission are
speculative. Spaces are so much around us that they seem to recede into the taken-for-granted
backdrop of cognizance, except for those people, such as architects, designers, planners, and
dancers, who are, in some innate or educated way, attuned to moving in and through space and
who command space-oriented vocabularies. In addition, so much of our comprehension of and
response to built space and other artifacts is tacit knowledge (in M. Polanyi’s sense, 1966) that is
made explicit only with great difficulty. Finally, its omission from academic analyses also has to
do, at least in part, with the heritage of the mind-body distinction and separation and with ideas
about science and knowledge. The taboo placed in Western society on bodies (linked to the mind-
body separation) likely extends to studying spaces or making their role explicit^2 —if, indeed, built
spaces are spatialized, projected bodies whose study requires researchers’ attention to their own
bodies as they move through space, as argued here.
Conceptions of what constitutes science also likely contribute to the disinclination to engage
spatial issues. The universality with respect to person, time, and place that methodological posi-