HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 355Inquiry processes: How to look? The primary research mode for accessing spatial data is to walk in
front of, around, and through the built spaces that are the settings for one’s study. This statement
may appear so self-evident as to go without saying. From a phenomenological point of view, that
would be the case; and yet this can be a novel idea for researchers who have not given much
thought to the fact that spaces and other physical artifacts may play a role in their subject of
study.^12 In his discussion of Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, Casey establishes the
solid grounding in their work for the view that “the lived body is the origin of ‘spatializing’ as
well as ‘spatialized’ space” (1997, 230). For both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, kinesthesia—bodily
movement through space—produces that space (Casey 1997, 229; see also Weisman 1992, 11–
15).^13 The precise meanings that spaces have, however, vary across cultures, as discussed below.
Researchers often access space data, then, initially, through observing and engaging or using
the spaces and their props themselves and observing others’ uses, with follow-up conversational
interviewing and/or reading to check the researcher’s provisional inferences. Although moving
through space is the primary mode of study, it is not necessarily always the first mode, chrono-
logically. In some cases a point made in an interview or a comment written in an organizational
memo can draw the researcher’s attention to the significance of a built-space element to a re-
search question. An extended example from my own field research in the Israel Corporation of
Community Centers (ICCC) (Yanow 1996) illustrates this process. That research drew on all
three modes of accessing data (observing, conversational interviewing, and the close reading of
documents); data generated through one process suggested inquiry to pursue through the others.
A second phase of research followed five years after the initial, extended participant-observer
stage. During that phase, at the same time that I was reading memos, correspondence, annual
reports, and other written materials in ICCC archives to see how founders and others talked about
organizational purposes, I was engaged in extensive conversational interviewing with founders
and staff and observation of local center (matnas) programs. During the first phase, I had, among
other research activities, used the matnas building where I was located in various ways: walking
through and past it between the town center and the marketplace; entering, ordering a coffee, and
sitting in the lounge area to drink it; visiting the library, offices, classrooms, and other areas;
talking to or folk dancing with or partying with other staff and visitors (client-customers, profes-
sional counterparts from other agencies, volunteers, etc.) in these spaces, and so forth. All the
while I was watching and listening to others—staff, residents, and visitors of all ages, occupa-
tions, “race-ethnicities,” and other “classes”—who entered and engaged the space, talking with
them about what they were doing there and what they thought and felt about that—in short, “in-
dwelling” with them in everyday sorts of ways following the dictates of my participant role as
community organizer. “Engaging” with the built spaces also entailed engaging with other physi-
cal artifacts in them, such as the furnishings, paintings, books, matnas programs, and so on (as
well as with two other categories of data, acts and language; Yanow 1992a, 1996).
As I embarked on the second phase of the research, then, I felt I was intimately familiar with
the building in terms of the purposes (activities, classes, programs, meetings, and other activities)
its design was intended to accommodate, but I had not thought much about it as an artifact com-
municating meaning. Reading in the archives one day, I came upon copies of a few letters written
by the then chairman of the board, which referred to the design of the matnas buildings overall.
These letters made reference to the buildings’ central location, scale, building materials, specific
design elements (kinds of rooms, for example), and the fact that useful models for community
center construction—they were a relatively new concept in Israel—existed in the United States.
Not long after that, I set out to interview the director of a community center in a city I’d never
been to. As I entered the city, I thought to head toward the area of the city hall and the open-air