HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 351tivism embeds in scientific laws or principle scatches researchers in its sway, rendering them
conceptually interchangeable: This is what makes it possible for them, by definition, to generate
valid data. That universality is likely to turn a blind eye as well toward place as a contextualizing
element, including what David Livingstone (2003, 1) has called the “geographies of science.” He
describes the invention of the scientific laboratory as “a conscious effort to create a ‘placeless’
place” for the conduct of science (Livingstone 2003, 3).^3 Furthermore, Fyfe and Law (1988, 6)
link the mind-body distinction to “visual marginalisation” in social science: “[W]hen the body
was deleted from social theory, so, too, was the eye,” leading most social scientists to be “blinded
to the visual” and, hence, to the “social character of perception and reproduction” (i.e., represen-
tation). The absence of reflective methodological attention to space, too (outside of place-oriented
sciences), is understandable in this light.
In this chapter, I explore how an analysis of built space might proceed, focusing on some of
the conceptual aspects of such analysis. I speak of built space, rather than buildings or space, in
order to emphasize both the human role in shaping the spaces we traverse and the diversity of the
kinds of spaces that communicate social-political-cultural meanings. “Built” space encompasses
landscapes, including those that surround and “contain” governmental, educational, corporate,
domestic, and other types of buildings. It also includes wildernesses or “ordinary landscapes”
(Meinig 1979), which are neither empty nor “virgin” (H.N. Smith 1957; see also Nash 1967). In
analyzing built space I assume a hermeneutic relationship (as described in chapter 1) between
elements of spatial design and the meaning making of their designers and users. In detailing a
method for the analysis of spatial meanings, I am seeking to articulate that semiotic relationship
and explore its attributes.^4
My appreciation for and analysis of built space is also informed by a critical phenomenology.
Phenomenology’s orientation toward the “lifeworld” (as discussed in chapter 1) is hospitable
toward the idea that “place grounds our subjective, embodied experience” (R. Malone 2003,
2318; see also Casey 1993, 1997). The critical dimension adds the understanding that in shaping
behavior and acts, spaces may enact power relationships existing between some users and others
(e.g., designers, policy makers, organizational executives). As R. Malone notes, “All human rela-
tionships have spatial aspects.. ., [both] because we are material beings with bodies that move
and have volume, [and] because our proximity to or distance from others and from places [has]
meaning for us” (2003, 2317). Studying space makes clear that it does more than just “contain”
bodies and their activities. Space is not neutral. As Churchill so well understood, their physical
setting also “orders and manages human activities; it distributes bodies in a certain space”
(Kornberger and Clegg 2004), and so perforce entails power relations.^5 In this vein, Hajer notes,
for example, with respect to difficulties in participatory politics, “[I]t is not so much participation
itself that is the problem, but the very [physical] conditions under which the exchange of ideas
has to take place” (2005, 625, emphasis added). At the same time, humans moving through and
using built spaces are not without agency. A phenomenological orientation adds an iterative
cyclicality missing from Churchill’s couplet: We, the actors in his statement, are not only subject
to our spatial designs once we have created them; we maintain agency, and we can, and do, act on
our spaces. “Afterward” has no finality.
The study of space in social, political, organizational, and cultural contexts is, then, a unique
research site from a methodological perspective in that it combines both phenomenological and
hermeneutic elements. I shall not argue further for the importance of space in shaping and under-
standing human action. For those in need of additional persuasion, the works cited in note 1
provide ample evidence. In what follows, I discuss the centrality of the researcher’s body to the
study of built spaces, both in the way that spatial meaning making entails the kinesthetic move-